Populism, Donald Trump, and Anti-Elite-Elitism

That is a question I have been grappling with as I think deeply about the way our economy and society is structured. What Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been shouting on the campaign train, many have known for years, that inequality has rapidly expanded since the great recession of 2007/2008.

Interestingly, a similar strain of economic populism has emerged on the right and can be traced through the different factions that have come and gone from the Trump White House.

Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s former press secretary fondly referred to as “the mooch,” has recently argued that currency manipulation (taking the dollar off the gold standard and devaluing currency) has been a net negative for middle and lower-class people.

“When you're devaluing money and your elites that hold capital inflation hedged assets, you could care less. If I have a building right here that's worth $1 million in 1901 and I own it and, they inflate the money [supply] and now it's worth $30 million, it's still representative value to me in terms of that transfer. But a person’s wages, their wages have actually declined steadily. So middle-class wages are down about 25% as a direct result of this, monetization, that the Fed and people like that are doing.”

Contrary to popular media narrative, Scaramucci is no dummy. The man is worth a few hundred million dollars of his own making, working his way up from Goldman Sachs to found his own hedge fund and lead a successful career in finance, before his foray into the public eye.

Speaking on Anthony Pompliano’s Off the Chain podcast, Scarammuci unloaded on current power dynamics as well as societal and economic structuring.

“These politicians suck. I mean, let me tell you something I have an 11-day PhD now in Washington scumbagery, I know what these people are really like. They could care less about these [ordinary] people. They just want to stay ruling. They don't want to serve the people. It's about how do I perpetuate the ruling class that I'm in and how I hang out with other clever people and virtue signal to them and make sure that my family is, is okay. [They] could care less about somebody in the middle of the country or some middle-class or lower middle-class family that's struggling. Me personally, I care because I came from that. And so, you know, one of the reasons why I wanted to go into the government is I thought, you know, we've got to change these policies and make things better.”

So Scaramucci, who summarizes his 11-days as the White House Director of Communications as “blown out of my seat, like an Austin Powers villain because I said Steve Bannon was sucking his own Dick,” is an elite who claims to be for the people.

Curiously enough, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former Chief Strategist, and a former partner at Goldman Sachs himself, also claims to be one of these men.

Bannon claims to be of the Frankfurt school, a school of economics that advocates for government intervention to check crony capitalism and thereby promote the interests of the common man. He preaches a compelling populist narrative. At the center of it is the villain, something he calls the “party of Davos,” after the World Economic Forum held there each winter in Switzerland. Their crime? Global capitalism, where jobs are shipped to the lowest wage labor pools in pursuit of more favorable margins for their hierarchical business models.

Speaking on the Candace Owens Show, Bannon followed in Scaramucci’s line of thinking that the increase in the money supply since the great recession has been especially harmful to low and middle-class people.

“The millennial generation, because of the financial crisis of 2008 is nothing more than Russian serfs. You don't own anything and you're not going to own anything.”

“Because of the bailouts of 2008 where we just flooded the zone with cash to bail out the hedge funds and bail out the banks, 4 trillion dollars, the reverse of that negative interest rates and zero interest rates means that your savings account does mean anything. You can't put anything away. What millennials today, people under 30 today, they're better fed, better clothed, better dress to have more access to information to any group of people in human history, but you're nothing more than 18th century Russian serfs. You don't own anything. You're not going to anything. You don't own any real estate. You don't own any stocks. You're working in a gig economy. There's no retirement plan.”

Listening to these men speak I’ve come to the conclusion that to be an impactful populist, meaning someone by the people who can actually make a difference for them, you must have a level of sophistication that only the elites have. It’s something I call anti-elite-elitism. Simply put, you have to be from, but not of the elites, knowing their ways, but choosing not to follow in them. Their sophistication is too great, their knowledge too strong. Just look at history argues Nobel Prize winning historian Will Durant in his excellent summation “Lessons of History.”

“Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917.”

“Since Nature (here meaning total reality and its processes) has not read very carefully the American Declaration of Independence or the French Revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man, we are all born unfree and unequal: subject to our physical and psychological heredity.. Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization… Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way.”