Good economy won't hurt Trump (or help Hillary)

The conventional wisdom that Donald Trump needs a bad economy to win the presidency - i.e. that a good US economy between now and November will hurt him - is likely to be the latest in a long line of common establishmentarian assumptions that will be rendered invalid in this election. And ultimately, probably the most important.

The fact of the matter is, just look at the messenger himself: Donald Trump, a flamboyantly wealthy business mogul, isn't exactly the kind of guy you'd think would be complaining about a rotten economy. That tells you something: this isn't about the absolute level of prosperity or poverty in America, but 1) the direction that things are going, 2) the structural obstacles that have become entrenched in preventing a much higher level of general well-being for the populace as a whole, and probably most importantly, 3) the distortions that even our prosperity is causing in society and culture.

Make no mistake: the American dream is still alive and arguably quite well. If you take a glass-half-full view of the Millennial generation, it's quite remarkable that half still believe in it - their actual experiences since the Great Recession would easily lend to a gloomier outlook. Tellingly, even those who don't believe in it appear as likely to be skeptical of its moral and spiritual value as opposed to just plain cynical that it's actually achievable. If you take a more holistic view, an unmistakable picture emerges: whilst older Americans are more confident about the economy and material well-being, they're the ones most upset about the country's social and cultural milieu; by contrast, younger Americans are less gung-ho about their temporal welfare but resoundingly more positive about how the country's faring and where it's heading overall (undeniable exceptions notwithstanding).

That means that 2016 already exhibits a different dynamic between economics and politics than previous elections. Not too long ago, it was still possible to consider politics as effectively a function of economics; today it's becoming just as valid to consider economics a function of politics.

That's because the mythic "capitalist free market" has long ceased to exist in any meaningful form, true to its ideologically pure pedigree. But even more to the point, it's become obvious that even if the material benefits of globalization have outweighed its material costs, this strictly materialistic criterion for assessment is no longer credible.

If you were to sum up in just one word not just America's but the general global backlash against the international financial-corporate cartel-elite, it's alienation.

Stunningly, this quintessentially Marxist term is hard to dismiss in a world that has been utterly dominated by the transnational capitalist ruling class for a generation; and to the extent that they and their spokesmen and apologists are now ignoring this reality, they are effectively digging their political graves.

By alienation, in today's postmodern, post-industrial context, we fundamentally refer to the distance and aloofness of the global economy's modes of wealth transfer and production from its actual rank and file of not just workers - whether blue-collar or white-collar - but especially consumers too; it's the effective reduction of Joe Sixpack to just one more class of economic commodity not even so much for his muscle and toil, but for his consumption of what the powers-that-be choose to feed him with ever more detached or remote processes which don't require his participation.

Remarkably, this is a very old concept (and reality) which in the age of internet-driven globalization has acquired a particularly virtualized and impersonal - to the point of being faceless or roboticized - character. It's the ultimate triumph of "capital" over "labor": the steady abolition of the latter by the former, whereby the latter is rendered so superfluous and expendable by the former that it's effectively transformed from worker to dependent. Or, as "capital" progresses towards its final irrevocable victory, "labor" becomes "torpor", if not "stupor."

Behind the subpar economic numbers in the latter phases of the Obama recovery, it's this deeper metamorphosis of the societal condition that's arousing the populist backlash of Mr. Trump. A "good" economy is no longer to be judged merely by its production and consumption stats, but also by its production and consumption ethic. It's the global financial-corporatist ethic of maximizing the black bottom line that's allowed the economy to look really "good" regardless of its consequent structural socioeconomic inequities and extreme concentrations of real power and influence in very few hands, which makes a complete mockery of the vaunted democratic process.

And that's what this whole rebellion against the Republican - and Democratic - establishment is all about.