Vivek Chibber
It’s true that Trump has dominated political discourse the last ten years in a way that I don’t think any president has since Ronald Reagan. That is, I think, what makes it attractive to say that we’re in the age of Trump.
In that sense, it’s true, precisely because he has defined the issues and he’s defined the parameters of debate. He set the agenda in a way that very few people have in the last sixty, eighty years. But if the standard we’re using is the previous ages, like the age of Reagan or the age of Roosevelt, then this one doesn’t even begin to compare.
There’s an important point in highlighting this. We are in a sense in the age of Trump, in the way I said, which is that he’s been the central figure and he’s defined the issues in a way that nobody else has. But when Reagan dominated the scene and, before him, Franklin D. Roosevelt dominated the scene, they shifted the political economy in dramatic ways. What I mean by that is they shifted the distribution of power, and the distribution of income and wealth, in a way that the people before and after them did not.
Roosevelt marked the onset of the American welfare state and American social democracy, however weak it might be compared to other countries. It was real. It was a dramatic departure from the whole period from the 1890s to the 1920s, let’s say.
When Reagan comes to power, it inaugurates and accelerates the dismantling of the welfare state, the attack on labor, and a shift back toward the power of capital. That’s a dramatic change in the balance of power — then of course in the distribution of income, because this was when the gains by the poor stopped dead in their tracks for about forty years.
Trump is different, right? While rhetorically he’s managed to dominate the scene, what’s he done in the actual distribution of power and the…
Auteur: Vivek Chibber
