Explaining Sanders, Trump in historic context

Many commentators have been trying to explain the Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders phenomena. There is a good explanation in the great economic disparities that have emerged in the U.S.

This has led to a concentration of wealth at the top of the class structure and a stagnation of income in the working class that has not been seen since the 1920s, when similar phenomena led to the Great Depression and eventually to World War II.

But how does this explain Trump and Sanders?

There is a concept in social science, cultural anthropology in particular, termed “culture lag.” This is generally taken to mean that sociopolitical behavior in a particular society tends to lag behind the technology and economics that get it started — for example, the changes in residence patterns and other lifestyles that followed the invention of the automobile.

There are often also lags in social and political behavior that occur in response to transformations in an economic system that remold the class structure. It seems to me that the great transformation that is now occurring in both the Democratic and the Republican parties is the result of earlier changes in the levels of inequality and income that have occurred in the U.S. since about 1980. This is the date which many social scientists identify as the beginning of stagnation of working-class incomes and the time at which the middle class stopped expanding.

One change in income that has not been emphasized enough in the media, despite a great deal of recent writing about the super-rich one percent, disparities in income and wealth, etc., is the fact that much of the working and lower classes have actually experienced a decline in income and status since the Reagan presidency.

This decline can explain the current rise of interest in both fascism and socialism on the U.S. political landscape. It has taken 20 years for these changes in the economy and class structure to percolate to the top of political expression, yet that is not so different from what happened in the 1930s and 1940s after the historic collapse of capitalism we call the Great Depression. That collapse triggered political turmoil and the great war known as World War II, when both fascism and communism came to the fore in much of the world —communism in Russia, and fascism in Italy, Germany and Japan.

Similar but less extreme movements occurred in the U.S. There were, for example, the Southern state despots (neo-fascists) Huey Long and Eugene Talmadge, among others, who behaved very much like little Hitlers complete with race bating concentration of power in the executive. Thanks to FDR, we in the U.S. found a middle ground of moderate socialism in the government’s intervention in banking, the labor unions, and jobs creation—the Glass-Steagall Act, Wagner Act, the WPA, etc.

Today we have a rather weak echo of these same phenomena in the fascism of Trump and the moderate socialism of Sanders. The Stock Market Crash of 1929 is comparable to the 2008 banking meltdown. The recent culture lag is from about 1980 and the first Reagan administration to 2015 with Sanders and Trump. Neither of these two is likely to be elected since Obama, like Roosevelt before him, has already brought us back from the brink of economic depression.

Pity the poor Middle East and North Africa, for they are comparable to 1920s Germany, undergoing economic and political dislocation on a dramatic scale. And moreover, they have to confront the great world superpower that is the United States.

This story was originally published May 6, 2016 at 10:00 AM with the headline "Explaining Sanders, Trump in historic context."