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Rahm Emanuel is best known in the UK as President Obama’s chief of staff – very much the ‘tough cop’ of the administration.
At the end of 2010, he quit Washington to run for mayor of Chicago. In 2019, having won and completed two terms, he has some characteristically blunt words for his fellow Democrats. In an op-ed for The Atlantic, he explains what put Trump in the White House:
“…a full-on middle-class revolt against the elites and the privileges they hoard. For all the focus on inequality and social justice, this middle-class revolt is the most important barrier standing between Democrats and the White House. They can’t afford to ignore it.”
He says that the debate over whether Trump supporters are driven by “economic or cultural grievances” is missing the point. Rather, his argument is that the extraordinary surge in anti-establishment politics has been driven by the extraordinary sequence of mistakes made by the establishment – and its failure to accept responsibility for them:
“Think of what’s happened over the past decade and a half. America endured a war sold on false premises, a bailout of bankers issuing entirely toxic debt, and a massive public effort to prop up auto executives who were building cars that weren’t selling. Is it any wonder so many middle-class taxpayers resent the elites? The middle class has been forced to bail them out from their own mistakes time and time again…”
If voters were motivated mainly by their own insecurities, then what they’d mostly want from government is help. They might be angry about a lack of action, but they’d still be looking to the elites for solutions.
What Rahm Emanuel gets is that the voters see the establishment as the problem:
“Democrats have become increasingly cognizant of the anger, but too often they’ve drawn the wrong conclusions. The answer certainly isn’t socialism. Middle-class voters currently presume that elites already control the government—so why would they want to give the bureaucracy any more power?”
The establishment failures that he focuses on – Iraq, the banking meltdown and the near-collapse of the American auto industry can, to varying extents, be laid at the door of Bush administration and therefore the Republicans. Unlike in the UK, where the centre-Left was thoroughly implicated in the disasters of military intervention, the financial crisis and the precipitous decline of manufacturing employment, in the US the Democrats were the ones who stepped in to sort out the mess.
Yet while the Obama administration stabilised the situation, they allowed the elites to escape responsibility for their recklessness. Emanuel reveals that as White House chief of staff, he’d argued that the bankers should receive some “Old Testament Justice” and that government should deliver it. He lost the argument, but in the process the Democrats lost the trust of millions of voters – who instead turned to Donald Trump as an imperfect, but available, means of punishing a guilty establishment for its many sins.
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