Opinion | Jan. 6 Looks Different Through the Lens of American Carnage – The New York Times

The American carnage Donald Trump railed against in his 2017 Inaugural Address was the product of specific policies and a specific mode of economic governance. The symptoms of the carnage: stagnant real wages; pervasive health and job insecurity; the disappearance into thin air of Americas industrial base; ruthless labor, tax and regulatory arbitrage by corporations, in the form of offshoring and open borders; the corollary decline in union power in the private economy; the ravages of fentanyl; and, at the level of cultural and ideological production, the rise of Big Tech, with its power to discipline not just what workers do and earn but also what they can say and think.

To reverse the carnage would have required reform and a sturdy willingness to govern. On those counts, the Trumpians came up short, beholden as they were to American populisms irrepressible libertarian spirit.

The template should be familiar enough to students of history. Andrew Jacksons epic battle with the Second Bank of the United States provides an early example. President Jackson, the candidate of Western farmers and small business owners, was determined to throttle the Eastern money power that menaced his constituents. In the 1820s, that power was embodied by the national bank, an institution that had earned its reputation as a vehicle for the entrenched and well connected.

But the crises of engineers and shopkeepers went far beyond the national bank. They were the result of an economy promising equal opportunity and exchange among smallholders but gripped in reality by the brutal topsy-turvy of the market and by monopoly and privilege. In many cases, the bank actually helped mitigate the problems, for example, by disciplining the flow of credit and stabilizing national finances.

Nevertheless, Jackson smashed the bank by withdrawing U.S. government funds. A result: a depression followed by severe inflation, with privilege and market crises no less restrained than before. The Jacksonian impulse just get rid of government-linked privilege and leave me alone couldnt tame the complex crises, and private tyrannies, of the emerging market system.

What was needed was better governance of market forces. Needed and unfulfilled. Jackson, in this case, walloped where he needed to exert institutional control.

A similar story could be told about William Jennings Bryan and agrarian populism in the closing decades of the 19th century. The crises of the American farmer came about because he too often sought to make a quick buck off land values rather than his produce, leaving him vulnerable to the predatory creditor, and because the American agricultural system was increasingly vulnerable to global fluctuations.

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Opinion | Jan. 6 Looks Different Through the Lens of American Carnage - The New York Times