Quick — what’s the one thing that, funnily enough, Trump and his fiercest critics unwittingly agree on? “The economy’s booming!!” You hear it a dozen times a day. But is it? Why, then, do those very critics sometimes wonder, frowning and stroking their chins: “Wait, why aren’t wages rising? Why aren’t people’s savings and incomes and lives improving?” Now, a sensible person would at this point conclude that their theories were wrong. A reasonable one might even ask — “how can the economy really be ‘growing’ when life expectancy is falling? Isn’t that, well…absurd?” But wise men are not usually sensible people — they usually conclude that reality, not their theories, is what must be wrong. Therefore: “the economy’s booming!! High-five me, Larry!!”

Here’s a secret.

The economy’s not booming. Capitalism’s eating itself. What happens when capitalism eats itself? Fascism does. With a heaping side order of authoritarianism, kleptocracy, theocracy, and all the other ills known to humankind. Do I exaggerate? Mom!! Umair was mean to me again!! Calm down, Tucker. You be the judge, and I’ll tell the story.

Let’s start at the beginning. The reason that crackpot American theories of economics are wrong is that they presume capitalism is the answer to everything. More jobs? Wages must rise! Hey presto! The economy fixes itself. Supply and demand, my dude — go capitalism!! But wait — what happens if those jobs are, well, not very good ones, because corporations don’t really have to compete, because its made of gigantic monopolies now, not mom-and-pop soda shoppes? If instead of being something more like stable middle class careers, with upward mobility, benefits, retirements, security, stability, meaning, belonging, and so forth, they are something more like jobs only in name — in reality, hollowed out? What happens if all that’s left in a “job” is the chance to work harder and harder every year, for shrinking income, opportunity, savings, a declining quality of life?

That’s exactly what’s happened in America. The “jobs” that are being created are not high quality ones. Like more or less everything else predatory capitalism creates, they are of astonishingly low quality. Not only are they concentrated in low-growth sectors, they’re composed of menial tasks, and they offer dead ends, not paths upwards, outwards, or forwards.

The result is the dismal litany of statistics that, by now, you should know all too well. It’s as alarming as it is astonishing. 80% of American live paycheck to paycheck. 70% have less than $1000 in savings. A third struggle to afford even healthcare, education, and shelter. As a result, America’s seeing what Angus Deaton calls “deaths of despair.” The suicide rate is skyrocketing, and longevity is falling, as people who can’t cope with the trauma appear to be simply giving up on life. It is no mistake to say that capitalism is killing Americans — and yet, Americans are tragically wedded to capitalism.

Yet at the same time, things have never been better for the ultra rich. They’ve captured more than 100% of gains over the last decade. The stock market is booming — but just 10% of Americans really own stocks, and maybe 1% earn a living from capital income. So, enjoying inequality that now puts classical Rome to shame, the mega rich quite literally have piled up fortunes so incredibly vast, there is literally nowhere left to put all the money — all the yachts, mansions, and lofts have been bought. That is why interest rates are permanently at zero: there is so much money piled up at the top of the economy, there is nowhere left to put it, except the one place it should go, which is right back to the people who need it: the middle class and poor, or if you like, the proletariat and the petite bourgeoisie in Marxist terms.

The result is an economy with an imploded middle class. That might sound trivial, but is crucial. A middle class is one of the defining creations of modernity — and what happens when a society loses its middle class is another defining creation of modernity — fascism. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

What’s really going on here? “Growth” has turned predatory. American economics supposes — because it assumes capitalism is the best solution to everything — that growth is always good. But growth is not always good. Not just because it eats the planet (though it does) — but in this case, for a more immediate reason. Capitalism isn’t just eating the planet. It’s eating democracy, civilization, truth, reality, the future, and you.

How so? Well, just think of all the above — but through a human lens. Take the example of a Valeant — it bought up lifesaving drugs, jacked the prices by thousands of percent, and its profits went through the roof. All perfectly legal. The only problem is that while maneuvers like this cause the economy to “grow”, it can only do so at the expense of people’s lives. I can pay Valeant through the nose for that lifesaving drug — but now I can’t educate my kids, quit my job, found that business, start that nonprofit, save for my retirement, pay off my house. The stress and pressure wears on me. My relationships suffer. My health gives out. Only the “profit” is counted — not all those human costs of predation. Voila — the illusion of growth in a capitalist economy. That is how you get to the absurd plight of an economy “growing” while life expectancy falls, suicide rates skyrocket, and young people can’t afford to start families. Have you ever heard a theory so ludicrous? I haven’t.

(And yet that story I’ve just told you is more or less how Americans live now. They’re preyed on by capitalism is nearly every arena of life. Education? It costs more than homes do in most other countries. Healthcare? It costs as much as a car — every year. Finance? The interest rates would put the moneylenders Jesus expelled to shame. And, of course, they are not paid what they produce — just as Marx predicted, capitalism takes all it can for itself, and so wages have come unstuck from “productivity”, and American economists call it a puzzle. But it’s only really a puzzle if you assume capitalism is the solution, not the problem.)

So the average American faces a terrible and weird dilemma: he must pay capitalism more and more each year for the very same basic goods that he is employed in making — to a point that the rest of the world is astonished by, $1000 for insulin? — but capitalism doesn’t pay him enough to afford them, having sucked every last penny of profit it can for itself, having even hollowed jobs out, leaving only low-wage, dead-end, go-nowhere employments. But how can those pay for much? Hence, the average American spends most of his life in debt — first for college, then for a home and car, and then, if he’s lucky, for his kids. See the point: he’s perpetually in debt to capitalism now just to maintain a shrinking quality of life. It’s as if a mouse in a cage is given just enough sustenance to keep spinning the wheel — but no more. He is impoverished, in a new way. He lives right at the razor’s edge of ruin, every single month. Bang! The middle class implodes, and the ranks of the poor swell.

What happens when middle classes implode? Capitalism is a kind of Faustian bargain — it promises people better lives in perpetuity, and always dangles a new carrot before them. It promises to make middle classes capitalists too — rich and respected and fortunate — but capitalism itself makes it impossible for most of the middle class to achieve this, because its goal is to enrich capitalists, not anyone else. The result is a kind of gap between people’s hopeful aspirations, and their grim realities, as capitalism eats through their incomes, savings, jobs, cities, towns, communities, values, norms, in order to enrich capitalists. Instead of being upwardly mobile, the middle classes — the truest believers in capitalism’s dream that they, too, one day, will become capitalists — are left downwardly mobile.

But when people who have expected to be upwardle mobile suddenly become downwardly mobile, they can’t usually believe it, process it, understand it. Their reality has been shattered. Where did the dream go? They grow enraged, desperate, and bitterly resentful. Many of them quite simply lose their minds, unable to think straight anymore — they begin to blame everyone in sight for their misfortunes, immigrants, women, Jews, Muslims, and so on. Along comes a demagogue, who turns just those people into frightening, threatening, outsized, imaginary monsters. The downwardly mobile prole’s head suddenly fills with nightmares — persecution complexes, angry grievances, victimhood fantasies. He must be great again!

The truth is that he is a victim. But not of the immigrant, Muslim, Jew, woman, of any other. He is the victim of capitalism. Capitalism itself has caused the crisis which has left him in the predicament of expecting a better life — but only ever getting a worse one. The prole was just a prole — he was never a capitalist. Capitalism was never going to make him rich. Capitalism therefore quite naturally never cared about him — it only pretended to. Bang! That moment is the precise birth of fascism. Now he has found someone who really cares. Who will hold him close, and tell him what capitalism did, too — only better: that he is the center of the world, that it belongs to him and him alone, that through egotism, cruelty, greed, and power, he can triumph over the weak, who deserve less than nothing, who are liabilities and parasites.

Fascism is an exaggerated, grotesque, cartoon version of predatory capitalism — containing all its selfishness, neediness, narcissism, and cruelty — and the demagogue is really the nursemaid who sings its soothing lullabies to the one whom capitalism has disappointed, but still longs bitterly and desperately for the dominion and abundance it has promised. Wham! Capitalism eats the downwardly mobile prole alive. In the place where a person used to be is now a zombie. Yet his mission, having been consumed, is still to consume. The fascist, if you think about it, is really just the ultimate consumer. The disappointed capitalist’s mission is to eat what is left now: democracy, civilization, decency, and humanity itself. As much and as fast as he can. And in that way, maybe he can have the glorious kingdom he was always promised by capitalism — but was just a little too foolish to understand it was never going to give him. Fascism ends not just with his disappointment — but with his ruin. Because now the disappointed capitalist is eating all that truly matters. But that is precisely what capitalism taught him. Fascism? It’s just finishing the job.

The economy isn’t booming. Predatory capitalism is eating itself. The result is fascism — by way of authoritarianism, kleptocracy, theocracy, all the ills known to humankind.

Will America survive it?

Umair

August 2017