There’s a new sheriff in town − [sounds of clapping and booing] − and despite my previous doubts I’m glad. And, to my astonishment, so are a lot of other people who I wouldn’t have suspected of harbouring such subversive thoughts. Why?
It’s an important question. The caricature implanted in everyone’s mind (aided and abetted by Trump himself, it must be admitted) goes something like this:
The Orange Man. The creepy real estate developer covering vast swathes of territory with golf courses and electric carts. Or cavernous palaces of neo-whatever architecture with lots of mirrors and gold trimmings. ‘Certifiably psychotic’ according to a bevy of certified psychiatrists. Hitler in the making! At the very least, a crass, narcissistic, transactional, linguistically challenged, racist, misogynistic populist without a single moral bone in his body.
That picture has been remorselessly drummed into the global public, day in and day out, for nearly a decade. It rose to a crescendo during Trump’s first term, buttressed by two impeachment attempts, accusations of conspiring with foreign leaders and multiple legal (and ultimately successful) attempts to nail him on some felony or other.
But let’s not forget the fact-checkers who specialised in sifting through the abundant Trumpian wreckage to find, you know… LIES, DAMNED LIES, FALSEHOODS AND EXAGGERATIONS!
These of course are the same individuals who cannot say ‘woman’ but insist on ‘birthing people’; who have invented more genders in 3 decades than evolution has managed in over 3 billion years – and don’t, for the life of them, understand why people may object to trans women competing against straight, cis-heteronormative, XX chromosomally endowed birthing people in such sports as boxing and athletics.
Enough frivolity, we have a problem: indeed a set of problems. My shortlist goes like this:
- How did a majority of Americans elect Trump in a landslide victory, and what may that say about the opposition and the political arena in the USA?
- How will Trump adjust to his change in role from Candidate to President? Will he fulfil the worst predictions of his enemies or will sanity prevail (in both camps), and will he be able to leverage his strengths and minimise his weaknesses?
- What does this moment say about the viability of democracy in the emerging world order? Can democracy be saved, and how?
- Indeed, what does it say about our future as a species?
Sanity dictates that I limit my own thoughts largely to the first question, but I will say a few words about the unanswerable questions 2-4 at the end of this essay.
How did Trump get elected?
Cultural Warfare: This is the most fundamental issue to address if Trump’s election is to be understood.
Some (surely a minority) of pro-Trumpians see what the dominant media and elite opinion consider irredeemable character faults in Trump as signs of authenticity, admirable chutzpah, defiance of authority and masculinity. His casual attitude to matters of law and his sexual escapades they dismiss as relatively minor blemishes, and certainly preferable to the hypocrisy and manipulation of his opponents.
In short, they like Trump as he is and don’t want to see him change into ‘bourgeois respectability’. Most of his core supporters (the alleged MAGA constituency, or “deplorables” to use Hillary Clinton’s disastrous phrase) are not racist but have a tough-minded attitude to the occasional ethnic stereotype. They believe in traditional gender roles but admire feistiness in both men and women, and deeply resent their stigmatisation.
It’s unlikely that this core constituency would have carried Trump across the finish line, were it not for the fact that there was an unrelenting culture war waged by the activist fringe of the Democratic Party against far more than the alleged MAGA core. The DEI (woke etc) movement had mutated from being the product of a few radical social activists and academic theorists, into a powerful ideological dogma with which to stigmatise, exclude, humiliate and dominate potential and actual opponents.
The two groups who experienced the full brunt of this cultural assault were the working and traditional middle class and independent-minded academics and professionals. The former found the proliferation of genders bizarre, hypocritical and offensive. They deeply resented extreme ideas being forced on their children by a radicalised educational establishment.
Likewise, the DEI doctrine, resting on a politically expedient spectrum of racial and intersectional victimhood , was perceived to target Whites, especially working and middle class males. The beneficiaries were the professional and academic elites, also mainly white, who were deeply into tabooed speech, virtue signaling and vicarious victimhood, while protected from the real-world consequences. These were termed ‘luxury beliefs’ by the social commentator and author Rob Henderson
The supposed racial recipients of White elite beneficence, notably Latinos, Asians and Blacks, also twigged to their role as sacred objects for purposes of virtue signaling and swung around to Trump. This is true mostly for Black, Asian and Latino men (see here) rather than women.
Broadly speaking, Trump was more popular amongst men than women, despite the majority of white woman who voted Trump. Latino and Black women, on the other hand, mainly voted Democrat. These complex trends upended Democratic Party simplistic assumptions that changing demographics (perhaps aided by runaway immigration) would ensure their long-term dominance.
Independently-minded and more conservative elites of whatever colour were also deeply antagonised by the attack on the democratic values of merit, freedom of speech and, above all, on the very concept of Western Civilisation and American exceptionalism. They found themselves targeted for exclusion, cancellation and legal and economic sanctions. Beyond personal interests, these trends also threatened both academic and professional standards for which American society would pay a heavy price.
There are two further ways of viewing the culture war. Firstly, DEI represents an ideological cover for domestic power politics waged by American elites against internal opponents, just as religious or secular narratives have been used historically (and still are) for purposes of conquest and domination.
In other words, the Islamist constitution of Iran and the social justice dogma of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, despite differences, can both serve to mobilise activist radical groups against designated enemies. It is thus not surprising that American radicals chant the same anti-Zionist slogans as do Middle East jihadist mobs.
A second conceptual framework is the elite overproduction framework of Goldstone, Turchin and colleagues. They postulate that recurrent cycles of elite overproduction and mass impoverishment precipitate crises in societies which may result in social violence, civil war or State failure. Turchin believes this dynamic is key to understanding recent events in the USA, including the election of Trump.
Other factors: I’ve stressed the role of cultural/ideological warfare in the USA in this analysis, but clearly it is also tied to other forces besides elite self-interest; for example, the expanded digital communication/media space, economic factors (notably wealth transfers to the rich, inflation and stagnation), the immigration crisis, social polarisation, institutional distrust and the waning geopolitical power of the USA and the Western democracies.
This entangled web of cause and effect has severely dented confidence in the viability of democracy itself and deepened fear for the future. Perhaps if the Democratic Party had shown competence and integrity, these fears would not have resulted in the election of Trump and his allies.
But the obvious mendacity of the Kamala-Harris campaign and the Biden campaign before that, the partisan alignment of the mainstream media with the Democratic Party, the student rampages and the wars raging on the European Eastern Front and the Middle East eventually ensured a comprehensive Trump victory. And that’s not even taking into account the obvious lawfare, two attempted assassinations and the Musk endorsement.
Brief Epilogue: Trump as President – what does it mean for democracy and the world?
Trump’s election is revolutionary: a total repudiation of the DEI-Democratic axis of soft tyranny, both at the symbolic level by the people he’s appointing to positions of power and in the substance of the worldview they represent.
Let’s unpack this further. Trump himself and his appointees are nothing like the Obama-Biden operatives leveraging power by controlling the Overton Window of acceptable ideas. They are largely immune to such pressures and take active delight in throwing taboos back in the face of their opponents. That’s maybe good when dealing with the wolves in Russia, China, North Korea and Tehran, but how is it going to play out in dealing with allies and domestic opponents?
Limiting our view to America itself, one can only hope that both sides step back from their worst instincts, take a measured response to inevitable provocations and consider the possibility that opponents may have something useful to say. This does NOT require Trump and Co to give up on their core beliefs, methods and objectives. That would be disastrous and would condemn the USA and the world to ever-increasing woke radicalism and its multiple dead ends.
But some restraint would show that even a robust democracy can generate the necessary common-sense, so as not to bring the entire edifice down upon people’s heads. It’s far too early to tell, but within the Democratic camp there is some useful navel-gazing set at different levels of insight (see here, here and here). And also within the Trump bench there have been some thoughtful and constructive articles here and here.
It’s foolish to speculate on the fate of democracy or, even more broadly, the global order in this forum. But one thing is certain: we’re at a critical junction in world history. It really is necessary to elevate politics above lethal, tribal soap opera, but it’s not clear how that is to be accomplished either at the domestic or the global level.
It must involve the active participation of citizens in determining their own fate. A challenging prospect indeed.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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