The phoney populism of Harris and Trump

In the coming US presidential election, the key battleground lies with the working and middle classes. The professional elites and the dependent poor are all but guaranteed to back Kamala Harris and her sidekick, Tim Walz, while rural voters are certain to jump on the ever wilder Trump train.

In this awful contest, the decisive key lies with the populist masses, particularly in the swing states, suburbs and among minorities. This notably includes Latinos and even African Americans, especially young males. Yet despite repeated assertions of their concern for the hoi polloi, neither party, nor any of the candidates, offers anything like a truly populist programme.

There’s nothing in the proposals made by Donald Trump or Harris that addresses the fundamental problems of the concentration of wealth, the oligarchy’s control over the means of communication, poor standards in education and decaying industrial infrastructure. We are confronted, amid the insults and paranoid projections, with half-baked giveaways to specific constituencies. Promises are made to retirees, students, small businesses and aspiring homeowners. But there is little that could provide long-term prosperity for most Americans.

Trump was always an odd avatar for populism. He’s an inheritor of great wealth, who made his money – and also lost it – building luxury housing, gilded casinos and golf courses. Yet he has made an appeal to the working class, as well as to many suburbanites. This was achieved largely on the basis of resentment against the progressives, who many Americans see as threatening their jobs, their neighbourhoods and their basic values.

Trump’s success was not, as progressives meow, primarily based on racial animus or religious fanaticism. Rather, it came from his appeal to working-class voters, including many who voted for Barack Obama. In the first three years of Trump’s administration, before the pandemic, middle- and working-class people did better economically than under Joe Biden – even despite the billions of dollars of public spending by the current administration. The economy has slowed and manufacturing employment, despite Democratic claims, is now declining.

Yet the notion that Trump would be a keen champion of working- and middle-class interests seems a bit far-fetched. His funders tend to be oligarchic billionaires like Elon Musk and various other well-endowed oddballs, from wrestling entrepreneurs and inheritors such as Timothy Mellon. Much of his strongest backing comes from groups on the far right, which are more concerned with peripheral issues like transgenderism, opposing affirmative action and the war in Ukraine. Even if voters agree with these stances, culture warring alone can’t meet the economic aspirations of the masses.

Overall, Trump’s ideas could cause more distress for the average person. His embrace of cryptocurrencies offers nothing to most Americans, as this is clearly something aimed at speculators. His plan to increase tariffs on foreign imports would lead to distressingly higher prices for middle-income and poorer consumers. Nor does he have a clear policy on how to revive manufacturing, with such things as improved training or massive investment in key infrastructure. Some of the privatisation he is advocating, particularly in terms of housing finance, could lead to even greater speculator control of the home market.

The Harris-Walz campaign’s lurch towards populism is, if anything, more chimerical. Harris is full of ideas about how to steer more money to selected constituencies, for everything from college loans and home down payments to small businesses. The Democrats have also targeted their proposals for federal largesse on hard-pressed young voters and Latinos, groups that have shown signs of drifting away from the party.

Meanwhile, Biden, despite the media portrayals of him as the next FDR, has been an anti-populist, in every sense of the word. His administration has mostly benefited the stock-holding wealthy and the corporate elite, now enjoying record compensation, just as more Americans are working second jobs to make up for rising prices.

Rather than a redistribution-minded socialist, as the right and Trump maniacally insist, Harris has always been a loyal vassal of the San Francisco and Silicon Valley oligarchy. Although raised by a Marxist academic, she actually embraces a Keynesianism on steroids that imposes government on the everyday life of the masses. As for social issues, she holds every woke view on race, gender and the environment.

Harris’s policy agenda remains vague and clearly performative. It’s fairly clear that, as Bernie Sanders and other observers have noted, her lurch to the centre on issues like fracking or the border wall conceals an all-too-obvious feint for undecided voters. To understand Harris, we should look to what has happened in California. Here, the policy agenda – especially climate policy – has devastated California’s diverse working and middle classes.

Overall, as the California case makes all too clear, Harris’s relentless pursuit of carbon-emission targets will cost poor and working families, while shifting billions of dollars to the wealthy. Shockingly, California’s non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office confirmed in February that most of the state’s signature green-energy and electric-vehicle (EV) programmes benefit the state’s wealthiest residents. At the same time, they impose the highest cost burdens on the state’s poor and middle-class residents.

As has become increasingly the case nationally, California’s economy does not work for those outside the elite tech, finance and entertainment industries. It suffers America’s highest cost-adjusted poverty rate. It ranks 49th out of the 50 states in home ownership. It’s not exactly a renter’s paradise, either – about 58 per cent of Los Angelinos and 50 per cent of San Franciscans pay more than 30 per cent of their income on rent.

A Kamalafornian future awaits – which most voters have already realised will mean higher taxes. Since 2022, California has lost private-sector jobs and relies almost entirely on public employment.

The big winners of a Trump campaign will be the large investors and those industries in the ‘carbon economy’ – that is, oil and gas interests, construction firms, aerospace and manufacturing companies. In contrast, Harris, even as she dangles goodies to the masses, will primarily service powerful tech and finance interests. These will notably be from Silicon Valley and Wall Street, which aim to get rich on the drive to Net Zero. Harris likely will serve her tech and Wall Street allies first and foremost.

This is her milieu and who has driven her career. Indeed, Harris’s debate coaching came from Google’s top lawyer, Karen Dunn. With Harris in office, you can expect oligarchic firms like Google, whose search engine seems to be ever more tilted to the progressive worldview, to enhance their already massive political influence. Harris is already being lobbied by her biggest backers, like LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, to reign in the zealous ‘antitrust’ activities of Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan.

Of course, Harris’s more populist tax proposals, like a raise on capital-gains tax, are unlikely to get through Congress due to Republican opposition and lobbying within the Democratic Party. Indeed, given the orientations of the candidates and their backers, there’s little effort to challenge the current concentration of wealth and power. Nor is there the impetus to boost the country’s productive power, reform a declining education system or strengthen national defence. There is certainly no great will to help achieve a greater expansion of property ownership in a country where the proportion of land owned by the hundred-largest private landowners grew by nearly 50 per cent between 2007 and 2017.

In the case of a Democratic win, Kamalafornian regulations will bring an end to upward social mobility across the US. The tax break of $25,000 Harris proposes for first-time homeowners means very little in a state like California, where even a modest house garners seven figures. Indeed, the policy would itself likely raise prices. Opening up the outskirts of towns and cities to development, on the other hand, would lead to both greater housebuilding and less extreme prices, as we have seen in many red states.

Perhaps the biggest economic hit will come from EV mandates. The Biden-Harris electric car mandates seem certain to obliterate carmakers, the largest industrial sector, and essentially hand the market over to Chinese firms. The fact that the Teamsters union, historically tied to the Democrats, has declined to back Harris is in part due to fear that climate regulations may threaten their livelihoods. Most drivers, not surprisingly, support Trump. Cheap energy, not draconian climate laws, is vastly preferred by most Americans, particularly the working class.

As we go past the election, the country still needs to confront the current dearth of opportunities, from business startups to buying homes, particularly for the younger generation. All too soon voters of all ages will find that neither Trump nor Harris has a practical programme to address the primary issue of our time – the rise of neo-feudalism and the decline of the middle orders. No matter who wins, this regressive trend will continue and accelerate. That is, until voters wake up and start demanding something better.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.