The Phenomenon. President-elect
Trump has introduced a new element into the Republican party: white, working
class people, many of them male, but all lacking higher education. They find
themselves alongside two other already disparate elements: social
conservatives, whose religious or moral scruples drove them into the party’s
embrace; and fiscal conservatives, the Republican Establishment, who have long
steered the party’s ideology and legislative agenda in favor of the monied
interests.
The new
Republicans may share some attitudes and beliefs with the social conservatives.
But if they share the ideology of Establishment Republicans, it’s by accident
and not in their class interest.
The Theory.
Dialectical materialism holds that, when an entity contains two elements with
antithetical class interests, movement towards a new synthesis, in which the
antitheses are dissolved, begins. Internal contradictions tend to resolve
themselves by any means possible. To the extent that these new Republicans are really
working class, that is, proletarian, and the Establishment is bourgeois, which
no-one denies, here is an antithesis as old as capitalism itself.
The
Contradiction. Maybe a story can show how this is a contradiction.
Let’s say you are
a small-time contractor, in roofing or siding or any number of things. How do
you make a living? You can’t mark up the materials much, otherwise your
customers will get their own roofing or siding at retail. So you mark up your
labor instead. If your proposal has a line item for hours of work, the hourly
rate is more than what you pay your workers. Or the markup on labor is just
included in the bottom line.
What do you do
with the money you don’t have to pay your workers? You buy another ladder, a
compression nailer, a truck; you build a website, rent a storefront – whatever
will increase your ability to put more labor to work. That is, you increase
your capital. So now the contractor, who may have started working for himself
or alongside his employees, has become a capitalist, more precisely petit bourgeois. And the labor of his
workers is being exploited in an amount roughly equal to the difference between
what they are willing to accept as a wage and what the contractor is able to
charge his customers.
Even so the
contractor and his employees may share many of the same beliefs and attitudes.
They may agree that government takes too much of their money in taxes, that borrowing
to spend is even worse, that climate change is a hoax – even that unions are
dangerous to free labor. But when the question is whether the boss should
provide and fund a health care plan, or whether employees should have an ownership
interest in the profits of the enterprise, class interests obtrude.
Multiply this by
a hundred- or a thousand-fold in employees, by a thousand- or a million-fold in
revenue. Instead of a small business enterprise, think of the United States
auto industry. The capitalist is now a big bourgeois responsible only to
stockholders, while the worker is that much more likely to take proletarian
class interests to heart.
There’s
contradiction: a clash of class interests leading to historical movement – the
bigger the entity, the more dialectically necessary the movement.
The Bomb. Now
transfer the contradiction to the midst of the Republication party – a rather
big entity in history. The new Republicans know they have to work for a living
or fall into the subclasses they despise, but they’re not sensible of class
conflicts with Establishment Republicans yet. Fortunately – and this is not
asserted dialectically but rather as a judgment – these contradictions will
come out through the person of the President-elect. His rhetoric drew them into
the party; he created them. His government will have to address them.
Just one example.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that in Northwoods Vilas County people
are signing up for Obamacare at a rate 2 ½ times that of the average for the
whole state. But Trump’s electoral margin there was 26%. Many other red
counties in Wisconsin have above average rates of Obamacare signups. Even nationally
signups are ahead of the expected pace. This puts the interests of health care
consumers who were Trump voters at odds with the interests of Establishment
Republicans in control of the health care industry and the capital it
generates.
Naturally, it
doesn’t end there. The reader will be able to conceive his or her own examples
of similar contradictions. And the time bomb will be ticking….
