With everyday turmoil between Democrats and Trumpists, we are reminded that American politics has finally come of age: The political power contest is now as bloody as it is in the money contest and America’s “economic society” has become a “political society.” Politics, previously a second banana to money power, is now prominent once again. In this transformed state, politics is about as ruthless, dirty and shameless as economics has always been and the next GOP president would be more like Russia’s Putin or China’s Xi, quite different even from Trump I.
Politics and economics, the two main arenas of contest in America, conventionally considered separate, one for the vote and the other for the dollar, are finally merging as one, thanks to Trump and his GOP followers. Most dramatically and shockingly, in the Biden-Trump contest, America’s presidential political process, historically seen as a gentlemen’s game, finally caught up with its economic process, an arena undoubtedly considered the most brutal of peacetime human contests. Politics in America generally associated with peaceful “democracy” and economics with the brutal “state of nature” came together in one great public spectacle in 2020 and has been thriving ever since. With Donald Trump and his GOP followers, America’s political contest is now as real and brutal as its economic counterpart. In this new battlefield, the gladiators have no more honor or shame than the street drug dealers. Pursuing power is now as dirty as making money. Today, Washington resembles Wall Street. The mostly Republican senators and representatives bare their primeval teeth, as in the dog-eat-dog maxim, that only the Wall Street wolves and battle-axes were thought to possess.
Prior to 2020, it was primarily the economic contestants who were known to fight each other, taking no prisoners in the outcome of their struggle for survival and conquest. There was no honor among economic animals. Every economic contest between corporations, mostly behind the scenes, was, and still is, a life-and-death duel in which every battle is a war, until one man or one corporation alone stands at the end. In money matters, all smiling oligarchs are ultimate enemies. Unlike a political organization, an economic institution faces survival and extinction every moment of its life, enduring a winner-take-all test every day. Where the dollar is contested, there is no honor among the dollar contestants; all is ruthless and merciless.
But, in American politics where public power, not private dollars, was contested, the game was played differently. Unlike the economic arena, the political sector was seen to live with the code of honor as a uniquely American legacy, in which the losing contestant would declare (calling it “concession”) that he is the loser and then ride into the sunset. This “peaceful transfer of power” has always been touted as America’s pride and joy and the symbol of its contribution to humanity from an otherwise rough frontier nation. After all, both Democrats and Republicans support the only ideology that has ruled America, that is market-based capitalism and its Wall Street mechanism. The business of government — the subject of electoral contests — was understood to be a backup to the economic matrix in America. In essentially an all-in-the-family contest, the loser did not face the guillotine or exile, just a quiet, dignified ride into the sunset and Wall Street prospered under either regime. The political sunset could be a cushy job in the private sector, or a comfortably financed retirement, good enough to soothe his wounded ego and disappointment. Such had been America’s presidential politics — a gentlemen’s game — until the emergence of Trump and his GOP.
Trump, who is no gentleman in person or in battle, has changed everything about such conventional rules of the political arena. Most dramatically revealed in his post-2020 electoral behavior, Trump refused to ride into the sunset, and his defiance shocked the conventional political world. The old political world in America — quite accustomed to the easy gentlemen’s manners of political contests — remains in utter shock, witnessing the reason-numbing savagery in Trump’s effort to keep or return to power. What political observers forgot is that, with Trump (whose genesis goes back to Reagan that evolved through Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution”), politics was finally becoming like the mirror image of economics in America. It’s a very natural evolution of a society — that had to happen sooner or later — that justifies the concept of life as an everyday fight-to-the-death competition. Politics is finally catching up with economics, and it is Donald Trump who brought the twin aspects of America together into one mode of operation. Trump the business man is now Trump the political man. He is operating his politics exactly the way he used to operate his business, with neither honor nor shame, now algorithmically strengthened and psychologically concentrated by consumer capitalism in America.
We have been lucky in America — thanks to the generosity of resources and climate — where the loser did not always end up in prison or on the gallows, as in many other nations. But liberal America, dazed in shock and unable to adapt, is still trying to play the gentlemen’s game in politics, hoping that Trump followers come back to their senses.
In 1798, John Adams wrote to the militia of Massachusetts that “our Constitution was made only for a moral People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other … (especially vulnerable to) Avarice, Ambition, Revenge.” In our time, Adams’ worst fears have come true. It’s a new America and new politics, and we’d better be braced for the coming bloodbaths in politics, as it has routinely been in the economic arena. No other nation on earth relies solely on a sheer rational (and constitutional) calculus for its collective management without feudal tradition, religion or folk-based moral codes.
Has America’s experimental “pure democracy” tried and failed?
Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield.