IT'S THE MORAL ECONOMY, STUPID!

 

There is now a cottage industry of analyses of the election of 2024. Harris’s defeat to a real life felon, Donald Trump, seems on some level, for the neoliberal liberal and centrist, an impossibility. All the more so as the defeat of Clinton, in 2016, was an electoral college defeat – she handily won the popular vote.

I am a cottager of the social media like any other. I’ve taken my crack at explaining Trump’s victory. But I am no campaign industry dude, nor op ed columnist. So I have the luxury of leaning back and asking a more general question, which is this: why did the liberal cohort during the election pour such scorn on the possibility that people were supporting Trump because of the economy?

Some part of that scorn was due to a number of economists saying that the economy, by the numbers, was just great. Part of that scorn was due to the fact that the most outspoken scorners were, by every measure, comfortable – professionals, administrators, rentiers and the cadre in the higher reaches of education, by which I mean: not kindergarten teachers.

So, let’s release a phrase, here, as a way of measuring a social distance evidenced by this scorn. The phrase is: “the moral economy.”

My thesis is simple. The heterogenous groups that is the strongest supporter of technocratic “solutions” to economic problems have almost entirely lost contact with the notion of a moral economy. Even as, by any ordinary standard, the moral economy of the post-World War II period, that compromise between capitalism and the guarantor state, was shredded, the beneficiaries of that shredding did not see this as a bad thing. In fact, it seemed like a great thing, to be tactically tweeked when it encountered resistance.

And when the resistance continued, this was unambiguously attributed to racism. The weirdness of this explanation is that racism, as a structural phenomenon, seems to have benefitted the technocratic class the most. It was that class that promoted the great imprisonments, heavily impacting minority communities, in the 1990s. It was that community that saved itself in the great Bank loan solution in the 10s. It was that community that overlooked, as a statistical blip, the critical state of black household wealth in the 00s through the 10s. And, on a community level, it was that community that used its opportunity to “opt out” to send its kids to charter or private schools, thus putting in play a structural racism for the next generation.

This, to anyone out of that community, was obvious. But one of the peculiarities of that community is that it only imperfectly understands that it can be seen.

One of the great essays in studying the moral economy was written by E.P. Thompson, in 1971: “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.” In this essay, whose elements were used later by James Scott to analyse the peasant-driven political economy of Vietnam, Thompson sees the compound between legitimacy and order not only in politics, but in everyday economic life.

“It is possible to detect in almost every eighteenth-century crowd action some legitimizing notion. By the notion of legitimation I mean that the men and women in the crowd were informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rights or customs; and, in general, that they were supported by the wider consensus of the community. On occasion this popular consensus was endorsed by some measure of licence afforded by the authorities. More commonly, the consensus was so strong that it overrode motives of fear or deference.”

Thompson does not connect voting to riot. In fact, an election is supposed to take care of the need to riot by changing the ruling order. But this primitive democratic motive, which had support in the eighteenth century, was complicated as elections turned out to be not at all total in reorganizing the structure of governance. Thus, riots persisted, and sometimes, the motive to riot was subsumed into voting itself.

This is my justification for thinking of the election of 2024 as in some way structurally like the food riots in England in the 18th century:

“The food riot in eighteenth-century England was a highly-complex form of direct popular action, disciplined and with clear objectives. How far these objectives were achieved - that is, how far the food riot was a "successful" form of action - is too intricate a question to tackle within the limits of an article; but the question can at least be posed (rather than, as is customary, being dismissed unexamined with a negative), and this cannot be done until the crowd's own objectives are identified. It is of course true that riots were triggered off by soaring prices, by malpractices among dealers, or by hunger. But these grievances operated within a popular consensus as to what were legitimate and what were illegitimate practices in marketing, milling, baking, etc. This in its turn was grounded upon a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community, which, taken together, can be said to constitute the moral economy of the poor. An outrage to these moral assumptions, quite as much as actual deprivation, was the usual occasion for direct action.”

Sometimes, side events, faits divers, can help to clarify a larger social phenomenon. After Trump was elected, the first side event that seemed to rivet people’s attention was the killing of Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare CEO. When it turned out that the assassin was a young man who found Peter Thiel an intellectual stimulant, the politics of the moment seemed confounded. And I think this is confounding to those in the technocratic class who feel that racism and bigotry motivates the “yahoos”. But what if what motivates the technocratic class – for instance, the ever improving margins of profit for rentseeking companies producing cryptocurrency, AI, or social media platforms, and the “efficiencies” brought to the market by allowing, with no regulatory intervention, private equity firms gobble up real estate, hospitals, senior residential facilities and so on – and the yahoos up to and including scions of some of the wealthy were all connected to the suspension of even a semblance of a moral economy?

2.

I am not going to explain or monday quarterback KH's defeat. I think that even if she had generated her own team, the short amount of time given her doomed her to probable failure. However, from the moral economic viewpoint, I think there is theme that is sounded too often purely in terms of numbers: the theme of cheap. When the architects of globalisation - on both sides of the aisle in the U.S. -opened up the country to competition by cheap labor in other countries, and notably China, the inevitable de-industrialization and lack of an industrial policy was covered by the ideology of cheap. A good reference for the popular propagandizing of cheap is the collected columns of Dubner and Levitt, Freakonomics, carried in the NYT and made into a book. This was a hit with the social science rational choice set as well - there was a whole "festshrift" on it during the OOs hosted by Crooked Timber. Even during the great meltdown, from 2009 to 2014, the gospel of cheap was sold as the legitimizing feature of Neoliberalism - perhaps your wages were pretty frozen, perhaps your debts were monstrous, perhaps your education wasn't giving you the benefits it gave your parents, perhaps the insurance cancelled your policy when your doctor discovered the cancer - but your food was cheap and your interest was low. The aftermath of Covid thoroughly destroyed this legitimating feature. When technocrats all shook hands in 2023 that inflation was down, what they ignored was that the level of prices facing the ordinary person had been astonishingly and speedily elevated, wiping out a decade’s worth of cheap. The last shred of the neoliberal image of a moral economy was in ruins, and nobody in the technocratic group - which I'll define as roughly those people who nodded over every Paul Krugman column - noticed. It was.... something.

Defining moments are usually moments of recognition – the defining work had been going on in the background, under the buzz of media and social media, under the slogans and outside of the applause or boo cues for selected audiences, for a long, long time. All the defining moments that defined nothing in this lousy century are finally accumulating a definite something. Some beast slouching down the dusty road. Yeats, that mad fascist, was also a poet prophet.

And here we are in the beast’s arms.