It was populism that won the recent Presidential election

And those of us who cower in our proud ivory towers need to do some serious soul-searching

Who won?

Populism won!

But, as we all know from the election statistics and the self-indulgent mea culpas of the progressive neoliberal ruling class, what is most galling for them is that the new Trumpian coalition has now become the shining city on the hill for a multicultural and multiracial populism, a veritable contradictio in adiecta.

How did this happen?

Well, yes, of course it’s the economy, stupid.

As the Financial Times brutally warned two days before the election, the much vaunted “economic boom” touted by both the Biden administration and the Harris election campaign turns out to be a “mirage”.

The faux boom, according to the Times, is

…driven by rising wealth and discretionary spending among the richest consumers, and distorted by growing profits for the biggest corporations. Times look good but this growth is lopsided, brittle and heavily dependent on spending and borrowing by the government, which is typically the lender of last resort. Although the world marvels at “unsinkable” US consumers, a growing number are priced out of homes and falling behind on credit-card debt. The bottom 40 per cent by income now account for 20 per cent of all spending while the richest 20 per cent account for 40 per cent. That is the widest gap on record.

Perhaps Paul Krugman is not familiar with Mark Twain’s quip about “lies, damn lies, and statistics”.

The irrepressible talking heads love to talk in such scenarios about “winners and losers”, although it’s not clear that, at least economically speaking, the voters are yet the real winners. 

But there is one big crowd of losers, and I happen to be among them, even if I have the abjectly joyless Schadenfreude to be able to say “I told you so”.

The losers? We university professors, and I might also throw in university administrators, who are certainly complicit.

The “woke” virus that apparently sickened millions of voters was cultivated in American university “labs” (i.e., humanities and social science departments) and released intentionally into the cultural mainstream. 

What were for a long time obscure and marginal academic theories became the dominant syntax within the progressive neoliberal academic universe of discourse.

Regional accreditation bodies and the intellectual rainmakers that commandeer university curriculum committees browbeat or coerced faculty en bloc to parrot the lingo of “marginalization” and “oppression” through poorly contrived training programs and mandatory “diversity statements”.

Let’s say Trump voters, however, were the ones to make the kinds of diversity statements that matter.

The irony is that outside the halls of ivy those real-life specimens of the particular “excluded” constituencies which these top-down directives were designed to favor often rejected them as inconsequential and condescending. 

Take the well-known attempt of certain “progressive” scholars to make the Spanish language more “inclusive” for persons with non-binary gender identities by eliminating the conventional masculine and feminine endings of nouns and adjectives and substituting the letter “x” (as in “Latinx”).

Use of the term has been solidly rejected by 96 percent of the Spanish-speaking electorate, according to the Pew Research Center.

As U.S. Senator-elect Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz) tweeted several years ago:

To be clear my office is not allowed to use “Latinx” in official communications. When Latino politicos use the term it is largely to appease white rich progressives who think that is the term we use. It is a vicious circle of confirmation bias.

It is easy to think of populism as primarily the output of economic malaise. But cultural factors weigh heavily also.

In an influential book published in 2019 social theorists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart argued that populism is really a cultural “backlash”.   The authors maintain that populism is a mobilization of lower class cultural resentments against the broadening of personal freedoms and lifestyle choices that has continued apace with rising economic security in the developing nations since the end of World War II, what they refer to as the “silent revolution”.

Overstuffed with sociological jargon, the book essentially crystallizes the progressive neoliberal rationale for regarding Trump voters as “deplorables” or as “garbage”.   They are racist, sexist, xenophobic, and so forth and have dug in their heels against the progressive blessings of the “silent revolution”.

Norris and Inglehart were right in one sense, but terribly wrong at another level. 

Yes, much of Trump’s appeal has been due to a unease about the rapid changes in the cultural landscape. But  the “backlash”, so far as it has been expressed politically, has really been against the patronizing glare of the educated elites toward the working class.

Populism feeds on economic discontent, but it is largely the blatant disrespect of the new “knowledge class” for the values or priorities of the working class that has stemmed their anger. 

Not unexpectedly this anger spilled over into the non-white working class as well.   

Obama’s infamous remark during his initial 2008 run for the White House that people from the American heartland “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them” brought this trend to the public eye.

But it has snowballed in the last 16 years and become an article of faith among many Democrats.  So has the automatic identification in their minds of populism with “fascism”, a diagnosis that is dismissed by most serious scholars of global political movements.

By definition there is no such thing as rainbow fascism, and the new Trump demography evidenced in this election seems to have all the colors of the rainbow glowing brightly.

Populism historically can swing as much to the left as to the right, as Ernest Laclau in his celebrated and authoritative book On Populist Reason emphasizes.   

At any rate the deplorables seem to have had quite enough when it comes to being deplored.

But let’s return to the current state of academia.  From my vantage point, which is the “subject position” of lurking deep and dark within the very bowels splaying just below the belly of the beast, the problem has been precisely enunciated by Jonathan Martin in his article in Politico titled “Democrats Wonder: Are We Too Correct?”.

Martin leads off with the following thesis:

It sounds odd, but the scale of Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat may double as a silver lining. By losing all seven battleground states, suffering their first popular vote loss in two decades and, most importantly, watching President-elect Donald Trump prevail with a working-class coalition that was once their own, Democrats have an opportunity to turn despair into action.

His suggestion?  Maybe some profound soul-searching and self-criticism, which probably isn’t going to happen without some primal screaming as preamble.

Right.   But where’s the punch line?

Martin makes the bittersweet argument that Democrats talked the talk while Trump walked the walk insofar as he actually reached out to “vulnerable constituencies” rather than merely factoring them into the familiar academic and abstract algebra of “oppressors” and “oppressed”, as contemporaneous “social justice” theorists do with every single nervous tic.

Democrats “must recognize that they unwittingly seeded the ground for Trump’s revival”, Martin argues.

So the more Trump targeted vulnerable constituencies, the more Democrats sounded like campus faculty members attempting to placate radicalized students for whom identity is central. Yet that only further alienated those voters who don’t see the world through the same prism. Which was one thing when those voters were blue-collar white people.

The working class, regardless of its shade or hue, wants a dignity fest, not a pity party.  Their tacit cry: “regard us as real human beings with real needs and real challenges, not as ideological pucks in a game of national electoral ice hockey.”

The knowledge class in its newly minted cultural and political hauteur somehow became convinced along the way that the people who drive the Amazon trucks and leave the latest, most fashionable model of Cuisinart on their doorstep somehow don’t count any more.

That also goes for the African-American nurse who picks up bedpans during the nightshift in a local hospital, or the Latino construction worker who pour cement for the newbuild up the block that makes a tiny, but not inconsequential, difference when it comes to curing the housing shortage.

The concept of “immaterial labor,” as the Italian social theorist Maurizio Lazarrato designated it, has been all the rage in academia since the mid-1990s. 

But it is material labor that keeps our roofs from leaking and our children and congeners from starving to death. 

If the guy who comes to fix install gutters isn’t convinced that trans women aren’t real women, or that racism isn’t obviously systemic throughout American society, or that the founders of America are glorified white trash because they owned slaves, then allow him the dignity he deserves for the work he does while sharply and boldly disagreeing with him.

He’s not necessarily Dexter in a fascist brown shirt.  And don’t dismiss him as one.

If the belief that he is Dexter continues to fester among my fellow tribe of lexical “fascists” who also insist on describing Salvadorian brick layers as “Latinx”, then the “ivory towers” that they probably helped build are in greater danger of toppling than we immaterial laborers dare to imagine.

And the ivy that threads its way through the rubble won’t taste nearly as good as the arugula we once slathered on our sandwiches during those brown bag lunches we enjoyed while discussing What’s the Matter with Kansas?