Grievance Capitalism
How I am making sense of Trump’s coalition of chaos
I have two stories to tell, one big and the other medium-sized.
The Big Story picks up with the Putnamesque point last week: Democratic societies cannot function without a substantial amount of social trust. We are living today somewhere near the bottom of what can suffice.
The medium-sized story is the strange coalition that has formed around President Trump in the last month.
Here I am going to try to explain how this medium-sized story is part of the Big Story.
Let me start with Trump’s coalition of chaos—that is, those who have rallied around the president’s actual and symbolic attacks on federal civil servants, international aid, the justice department, the rule of law, the judiciary, free trade, universities, public health research, undocumented and documented immigrants, and historic allies in Ukraine, Europe, Canada, and Mexico.
The coalition includes the barons of Silicon Valley and Steve Bannon, Mormon Senator Mike Lee and Joe Rogan, those who read the Federalist Papers and those who read the Unabomber Manifesto, nativist conservatives and conspiratorial Democrats, Wall Street executives and anarcho-capitalists, Crypto-utopianists and gold-standard advocates, the Heritage Foundation and the Proud Boys.
Mixed into all of this, although largely pushed out from any actual influence in the White House, are what the press has taken to calling “White Evangelicals,” a group that is in fact not quite as white or evangelical as it was in Trump 1.0. White evangelicals still strongly support Trump, but in Trump World itself they have been largely exiled to the exurbs. In their place, representatives of multi-ethnic Pentecostal churches, among some of the economically poorer churches in the country, have moved in—albeit only to the suburbs.
What do all of these characters have in common? The most obvious answer is the return of white patriarchy. There is clearly something to this. There’s no question that this administration is whiter and more male than the previous one, and that is on purpose. But to point out white patriarchy in the administration is to describe an important feature of the surface but not necessarily the underlying structure. The question is why whiteness tends to be identified with rightness in this regime? And the fact is that this coalition is not as white as is sometimes assumed.
We need, I think, a different Big Story, a Story about social and political trust.
Putnam argues that social trust, and by extension political trust, is generated through social ties. Some of these social ties are personal and some of them impersonal, even institutional. When they become institutional they inevitably involve “elites.”
The Big Story is that the United States has been in a long period of decline in social trust dating back to the late 1960s. A central indicator of this decline has been a drop in trust in “government” and “elites,” however they are defined.
Two epochal sets of events defined the 1960s in America, one catastrophic and the other a great achievement that was nevertheless met with a significant backlash. The catastrophic set of events was the Vietnam War. It was horribly managed, but worse it was horribly managed by “experts” using the latest advances in technology and management science, and even worse yet Americans were systematically lied to about what was going on. I think it is fair to say that the war and its effects traumatized a significant portion of the country.
But in the very same decade the United States achieved great legislative and political victories in sex and race relations. The Equal Pay Act of 1963, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were so significant that some have argued they reconstituted the American polity. But they also generated a vociferous backlash, particularly around race relations in the southern states. While the modern conservative movement of the second half of the 20th century was not always identical with this backlash, it drew energy from it, creating an additional source of suspicion of Washington’s “elites.” Suspicion of the government became racially tinged.
To Vietnam and Civil Rights backlash, we could add the assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, and Malcolm X, Watergate, campus unrest, and more. “Government” became the problem; “politics” a bad word; and “politicians” the most despicable of creatures. As Putnam’s data shows, in the 1970s social trust began a long, precipitous decline, along with growing economic inequality, growth in egoism, and a breakdown in political cohesion.
But I think that Big Story just might have begun to turn in 2008.
Counterfactuals are impossible to prove, but there are reasons to believe that the election of Barack Obama in 2007 represented a small window at which the downward trend might have been reversed. Obama was a figure of generational political talent. He was also the first president elected who was truly of the post-Vietnam era. He was so young as to still be an outsider with regard to the “elite” establishment, satisfying a public appetite for “Change.” Finally, he had a very Putnamesque message of civic empowerment: ”Yes We Can!”
That did not happen. Why? Because, historically speaking, the biggest event of 2007 turned out not to be the election of Obama but the global financial crash, the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression. With the Great Recession, the country took even a harder turn back toward distrust in elites, government, and each other. The Great Recession was the new Vietnam.
Unlike the Great Depression, where under the leadership of FDR the country developed a comprehensively new relationship to capitalism and government in response to a great capitalist failure, Bush’s, Obama’s, Congress’s, and the Fed’s joint handling of the Great Recession did not result in a new model of state capitalism. Congress bailed out the big banks while leaving ordinary Americans to suffer foreclosures, unemployment, and precarious uncertainty. Then they patted themselves on the back for keeping the Great Recession from becoming another Great Depression.
Here’s where the medium-size story comes in. The most significant consequence of the mishandling of the Great Recession was the birth of “grievance capitalism.”
Grievance capitalism is what seems like the best explanation for what binds together the crew circling around Trump right now.
As the phrase suggests, grievance capitalism is rooted in a sense of being wronged. But what’s more important is what it has to say about who or what did the wronging. Grievance capitalism says the wrongs came not from capitalism itself but rather from the state actors supervising the country’s capitalist order, i.e. “the government.”
In retrospect, the Tea Party was the harbinger of grievance capitalism. The Tea Party was anti-government but not anti-capitalism. It argued that the problem with capitalism was the governing regime managing it. Trump’s first election to the White House was directly tied to this Tea Party critique. And it brought some of the old post-1960s racial grievances to this new fight.
Trump was a uniquely appropriate figure to represent such grievances, not only because he is a pristine case-study in victimology, but because he had spent a lifetime in business where he was regularly excluded from establishment capitalism. He had a difficult time getting financing from mainstream banks; he had to work around rather than with government regulations; and his business model, premised on branding and inflated valuations, looked to many mainstream business people (as well as to government investigators) more like a ponzi scheme than a value investment.
But Joe Biden also ran on a form of grievance capitalism. He ran against the big corporations trying to rip off the American people. He promised, and delivered, more regulations; a bigger role for the government in creating jobs; and expressed a general skepticism of Wall Street.
My point here is that grievance capitalism is not ideologically stable. It does not belong exclusively to the Right or Left. The partisans of grievance capitalism can shift this way and that. Yet, I would argue that it has been the most powerful political force in the United States since 2008, and its reach has extended to many other parts of the world.
Steve Bannon is right now actively trying to mobilize MAGA against Elon Musk, yet the two men share something more than Trump. They are both partisans of grievance capitalism—Bannon dating back to the Tea Party days, and Musk as a global venture capitalist who has worked on the disruptive edges of establishment capitalism.
Why have so many of Silicon Valley’s barons moved into Trump World? I am sure there is some opportunism there, but there’s also several years of felt frustration with Biden’s regulatory regime. Between 2020 and 2024, they slipped into grievance capitalism.
How is it that some conservative think tanks are now entertaining on their margins the philosophy of the Unabomber? Those think tanks have for years been systematically kept out of the funding streams offered by establishment corporate and foundation worlds, funding streams that have gone instead to Democrats. There are some grievances there that resonate just enough with Ted Kaczyinsky’s anarchist screed.
What is Crypto but a kind of grievance capitalism?
What about those Pentecostals? As the poorest large Christian group in America, establishment capitalism has not been working for them.
This week we have seen grievance capitalism take policy form in Trump’s tariffs. There is nothing wrong with tariffs in themselves, but they are tricky. They are economic sledgehammers that need to be use like precision tools: right time, right place, right proportion. But Trump is using them like a wrecking ball. His purported aims are contradictory and change from week to week. His targets are seemingly indiscriminate. The conditions for their removal uncertain. None of this really makes sense . . . except as an expression of grievance capitalism. They really do make sense in that frame.
Again, grievance capitalism does not align with any particular political philosophy or ideology—or policy platform for that matter. That’s what makes it so powerful. It is a matter of orientation toward the “establishment,” which in the United States is inevitably the capitalist establishment. Its partisans can shift in and out, depending on circumstances.
The wrongs of the Great Recession—so many wrongs—will never be righted. This said, new economic woes are around the corner, if not because of Trump’s mishandling of the economy, then surely because of the massive disruptions to the labor market that AI is gearing up to bring. When that happens (depending on when that happens) Trump may become the “establishment” everyone attacks. That, in fact, would not be good for the country at all. We do not need any more cycles of grievance capitalism. It’s a no-win strategy.
Instead, when that happens, I hope for an appetite for constructive change that is big and bold, something more like the New Deal than the Tea Party. Feelings and appetites matter a great deal to collective life and political possibilities. They’ve been an important part of this country’s history. Part of the damage the MAGA brand has done to American civic life is to associate big desires for change, or desires for big change, with destruction. Historically, strong desires for change have also been constructive.
For this, of course, we are going to need different kinds of political leaders than we’ve got, ones that do not rush in to save the agents of capitalist destruction, ones that fix the things that break ordinary people. And this, too, is a matter of cultivating an appetite.