I need you to watch this short video from start to finish. (Don’t worry, when Putin speaks in Russian, there are English subtitles.)
Did you catch Putin’s first words?
“You ran around like cockroaches when I said I was coming.”
“You have taken these people hostage. With your ambition, incompetence — and pure greed. These are thousands of lives. It’s absolutely unacceptable.”
Despite being a billionaire, at least according to many people who study these things, Putin takes the factory owners to task for, apparently, incompetently managing their factories and impoverishing workers. He wastes no time in telling them how things will go down, if they refuse to comply with his wish.
“If you owners can’t come to an agreement then this factory will be restarted. One way or another...we’ll do it without you.”
He demanded the owners sign an agreement to restart the factories.
Look how Putin treats “Deripaska” when he says “I can’t see your signature,” demands he walks to the front of the room to sign the agreement, and then demands, “Give me back my pen.”
This is the essence of Putin’s appeal to authoritarian right-wing leaders in the West, Donald J. Trump included.
Putin and Trump tell workers that they will get things done — they will defend them one way or the other. In short, their message is, “I ain’t playing.”
So, how are Democrats to respond to the appeal of a Putin-esque Trump?
Rather than using the propagandistic tactics of a strong-man to provide the illusion of disciplining capital, Democrats need to learn how to use institutions and the rule-of-law to discipline capital and defend the interests of the poor, workers and middle-class.
Now, Hillary Clinton has proposed using the “carrot” of profit-sharing to fight inequality, but as many commentators have noted, such a policy would hardly be transformational.
Democrats can only beat Trump if they are able to get the public to feel that stunts like those orchestrated by Putin above are not actually intended to help workers, but instead acts of cynical political propaganda. And workers will only be willing to believe as such when they are rewarded for their decades of suffering with huge improvements to their standard-of-living: such as removing the insecurity of health care expenses with single-payer, mandating paid vacation leave, and making colleges and universities tuition free.
Democrats need to understand that authoritarians, like Putin and Trump, exploit the failures of the free market for cynical political reasons. But, regardless of intent, the theatrics of this is really freaking appealing. It feels good to non-rich people to watch Putin humiliate that factory owner on behalf of the State and public.
Of course, though, the one-off theatrics of demanding one’s pen back, or boycotting Oreo cookies, don’t actually fix economic insecurity and inequality.
What does fix economic insecurity and inequality?
Expanding universal social welfare institutions — like Social Security and Medicare — and tackling crony capitalism by transforming how campaigns are financed, and how politics is done in America.
At the end of this video, the British commentator makes my point in a single elegant sentence.
“But if a country as big as Russia needed a personal visit from the boss to get one factory back to work, then it was in serious trouble.”
The fact that so many Americans believe that Donald J. Trump — “the boss”— will single-handedly fix the failures of post-industrial late capitalism means that our public policies in core areas for which the State has dominant responsibility — from income redistribution (i.e. tax policy) to health care (i.e. $6,000 deductibles) to education (i.e. a trillion dollars of student debt) — are failing.
Until we can respond to the catharsis that “Russians” (errr...Americans) feel when a Big Boss aggressively demands a greedy capitalist give him back his pen with transformational pro-worker policies, the United States is doomed.
If Hillary Clinton is the nominee, her campaign needs to think deeper about the appeal of Trump and how they combat it — and “profit-sharing” ain’t gonna cut it.