After its recent electoral victories, the Johnson government faces the choice of continuing with plutocratic populism or going beyond it. The British government was rumoured to be contemplating a similar capital gains tax hike in the last budget, but nothing happened. Hence his pathbreaking proposal that capital gains should be taxed at the same rate as income. That applies especially to the super-rich, who have done disproportionately well out of four decades of financialised globalisation: the share of private wealth held by the top 0.1% in the US tripled from 7% in the late 1970s to about 20% in 2019. If he can get enough of his current $6tn (£4.2tn) proposals for post-Covid recovery, infrastructure and welfare spending through Congress, there will be echoes of Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal.Īlthough Biden comes from a part of the Democratic party that itself became too close to financial interests, he has recognised that the rich must do more to pay for this transformation. President Biden now has four years to prove that actually giving people decent healthcare, education, social security and job prospects will prevail over the very real emotional power of nationalist, populist narratives. Trump was only denied a second term because of the unity of a single-party opposition behind Joe Biden, whose “hardscrabble from Scranton” life story and down-home style also appealed to a part of Trump’s electorate. He appealed to the 90% while in practice promoting the interests of the 1%. The emotional politics of identity trumped the rational politics of social and economic interest. He gave Americans who had felt ignored and disrespected the feeling that he was on their side, and even “one of them” – the blue-collar millionaire taking up the white man’s burden. Trump did deliver culturally and, so to speak, psychologically. Support for populism is a cultural as much as an economic phenomenon. Why? Because we use the word “delivery” too narrowly.
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