Early this year, the French economist Thomas Piketty posted a paper, “Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right: Rising Inequality & the Changing Structure of Political Conflict” (PDF), that pointed out recent macro-level political developments in three major capitalist democracies (UK, France, and US). These states are converging to a political order that has two political parties, which are run by two elite groups in their societies: the highly educated and the rich. The former group is on the left, the latter on the right. More significantly, the left half of this new system is a coalition of educated voters (who tend to be white) and minorities (who tend to be people of color), while the right is a coalition of rich voters (white) and uneducated voters (also white). However, Piketty failed to mention that this new political formation is much more advanced in the US than it is in France and the UK, simply because the US has a huge non-white population. And so, the coalition between educated whites and minorities in the US is actually the mainstream party. The coalition between rich whites and uneducated whites might be relatively new but it is already in decline, and as it declines, it is becoming more extreme.
With this background in mind, let’s turn to this interesting op-ed in the New York Times‘s “The Supreme Court’s Legitimacy Crisis: It’s not about Kavanaugh’s alleged behavior. It’s about justices who do not represent the will of the majority.”
First, the current crisis of the SCOTUS’s legitimacy and the increasing radicalization of the GOP cannot separated from “Kavanaugh’s alleged behavior.” All of these parts represent a coherent historical sequence. The US’s left is the mainstream party, as its spectrum spans from socialists to cosmopolitan neoliberals to “moderate Republicans.” The GOP has simply become the party for a particular kind of white man: usually sexist, usually racist, usually angry, usually experiencing an existential crisis. Kavanaugh fits this bill. But the GOP is not, in essence, about improving the economic and existential lot of the ordinary white man. Its essence concerns the distribution not so much of material wealth but of the value the society generates.
The society already produces more than is actually needed (material wealth). What drives the economy instead is wealth in the form of value, which is entirely immaterial and, as such, is cultural (nothing natural about it). A reduction of the power of culturally constructed (rather socially mediated) value (we must always separate the social from the cultural—the temporality of the former is biological or Darwinian), would require a major political transformation. The concentration of value in a few hands is the essence of the GOP. The rest is for it so much useful noise.
But the GOP’s base is in decline. It’s now the party of a minority of voters. This is the point made in the New York Times article. The GOP is vastly over-represented in the US political system. Its leader did not win the majority vote. The votes that Democrats represent are far larger in number than those represented by the GOP. And yet the party of the minority (the angry white man) is still in power and able to block and pick Supreme Court judges.
From the New York Times:
Donald Trump won just under 46 percent of the popular vote and 2.8 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. And Mr. Gorsuch was confirmed by a vote of 54-45. According to Kevin McMahon of Trinity College, who wrote all this up this year in his paper “Will the Supreme Court Still ‘Seldom Stray Very Far’?: Regime Politics in a Polarized America,” the 54 senators who voted to elevate Mr. Gorsuch had received around 54 million votes, and the 45 senators who opposed him got more than 73 million. That’s 58 percent to 42 percent.
The confirmation of Kavanaugh means that the Supreme Court has two justices “who deserve to be called ‘minority-majority’.” Put in another way, the Supreme Court is being filled with men who represent a declining number of white Americans.
It is said that life makes no sense without Darwinian evolution. We can also say that the United States’s political system makes no sense without racism.
