The election of a deeply reactionary representative of the American plutocracy – and political outsider – to the office of President seems to have caused a major intellectual crisis in American liberalism. Or perhaps not so much a crisis as a panic – a sudden desperation to deflect any and all political responsibility or criticism. This has led to these two narratives in particular:
- Trump won because of a sudden upsurge in racism and sexism among “white men.”
- Trump won because of a Russian conspiracy.
The second narrative is so ludicrous that it’s hard to argue against, as it bases itself on a purely propagandistic worldview. It’s shocking that this tangle of conspiracy theories, racism, and outright invention has survived the decades since the end of the Cold War intact to this degree, although its function as a distraction from internal political crises and systemic economic crises is sadly entirely predictable. That representatives of liberalism in the media and politics can seriously portray Russia – a regional power at best, with vanishingly little industrial or military power compared to the United States – as some sort of cartoonish nation of moustache-twirling spies, and Vladimir Putin (a deeply conservative ruler with strong autocratic tendencies, like so many others) as some sort of Machiavellian evil genius speaks to a profound desperation.
At this point, no meaningful evidence has been presented of any Russian interference in the election; but it’s worth noting that this anti-Russia hysteria is intentionally conflating a series of vague possibilities to create a sinister feeling of infiltration, much as was done in the McCarthy era. At no point has Russia actually been accused of interfering in the electoral process, that is in the casting of votes, although journalists and politicians will frequently use phrasings that imply this. Nor do the “Russian ties” Trump and his people (a genuine cabinet of horrors) are accused ever turn out to be anything unusual. It’s entirely possible Trump has ties, alliances, friendships, even certain obligations to other plutocrats; but it is entirely clear, even without the extensive confirmation provided by the leaks (and reports detailing the activities of the Clinton Foundation), that the same is true of Clinton. Yet one suspects few liberal pundits would argue that Clinton’s close friendship with, for example, the former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, or her financial ties with various non-American donors to her foundation, should be taken as a sign of treason.
Even if it turned out that many of these accusations were true, they amount to very little in terms of electoral interference, and certainly cannot be used as an excuse for the rise of Trump. The Russian narrative is ultimately more notable as a post-election phenomenon than anything to do with the actual process of how Donald Trump assumed power.
Which brings us back to the first narrative, the one that blames the nebulous category of “white men” (generally taken to refer to the non-coastal poor) for Trump’s victory. This narrative frequently imagines a sudden surge of racist, sexist rednecks sweeping the country – a reflection not of reality, but of a profound fear of the masses of humanity common to liberal elites in many time periods, with obvious parallels in propaganda going as far back as the Roman Republic.
This narrative already falls apart under basic statistical analysis. Trump was, if anything, remarkably unpopular. He got fewer votes than previous Republican candidates, not more. He did not enjoy widespread support in the white working class. He did not enjoy widespread support anywhere, in fact. The most remarkable thing about his campaign was that Clinton did not manage to beat him. The narrative of a sudden surge neatly explains away the fact that Clinton acted as if the presidency belonged to her by virtue of birth, not even attempting to campaign in significant regions of the United States. It also explains away a more significant fact: the collapse of the Democratic vote, beginning with the profound disappointment that Obama’s presidency represented to the masses of Americans who voted for him on the basis of his anti-war, pro-worker rhetoric.
Clinton campaigned specifically as someone who would continue the very policies that had caused support for the Democratic party to collapse over the eight years prior to the election. It does not require a conspiracy theory to see how this could lead to defeat, even against an extremely weak candidate like Trump.
The term normalize is frequently used in discussions of Trump’s far-right and outright fascist associates. We are frequently told not to normalize the sudden presence of fascists and neo-Nazis in the media and in government. That request is certainly legitimate in some senses, in that such people were not long ago rightfully banished to the fringes of society. That individuals with such political views could hold power is extremely telling about the current situation. However, there is also a significant danger of treating cases like Trump as exceptional, when in fact they are not.
It is worth looking back at the Republican presidential primaries. Here several narratives quickly fall apart. Trump’s major opponents included Ben Carson and Ted Cruz: one African-American, the other Hispanic-American. In a country that had previously twice elected Barack Hussein Obama, the argument that Trump’s victory is based on “whiteness” is extremely unconvincing. But Trump’s supposed uniqueness is also a sham: both Carson and Cruz (despite being members of historically oppressed groups) hold extremely reactionary views comparable to those of Trump, or even more extreme in some ways (Carson believes in a literal reading of the Bible, while Cruz notably wanted to carpet bomb ISIS to find out whether “sand can glow in the dark”).
Trump, then, is not an aberration. He is simply the face of one half of America’s political system. (Clinton, meanwhile, surpassed Cruz with her terrifyingly psychopathic reaction to the brutal murder of Muammar Gaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died.”) Another individual in the same spot would not be terribly different.
A list of US presidents in the post-WWII era provides some insight into how the two-party system works:
- Democrat
- Republican
- Democrat
- Democrat
- Republican
- Republican
- Democrat
- Republican
- Republican
- Democrat
- Republican
- Democrat
- Republican
This is not a system with a huge amount of variety. Power bounces back and forth; voter turnout tends to stay between 50 and 60 percent; landslide victories are extremely rare (even Kennedy, now the most popular President, beat Nixon only by 0.2%). When one group of voters is disappointed with their party, as happened with the Democrats in the Obama years, the other side wins. Neither party really has popular support.
So here is how Donald Trump became President of the United States.
The people who always vote Republican voted Republican, even though many of them didn’t even like Trump. Most of the people who always vote Democrat voted Democrat. Some of the people who voted for Obama because of the policies he promised didn’t vote for Clinton because she scoffed at those policies, instead supporting the actual policies Obama implemented, which had already lost the Democrats a huge amount of support. In the entirely normal ping-pong between parties that is characteristic of the two-party system, the ball went the other way.
It’s what has happened over and over for decades. It’s entirely ordinary.
What seems a lot less ordinary is the level to which the available candidates have sunk. Certainly when compared to the norms of the post-WWII political order, someone as crude and mad as Trump (or Cruz or Carson) appears unusual. On the Democratic side, too, the economic policies promoted by Clinton would have seemed very right-wing to a Democrat of fifty years ago, and the brag about Gaddafi’s murder would once have raised more than a few eyebrows. That time was longer ago than one might think (Madeleine Albright thought the deaths of 500.000 Iraqi children were “worth it” in 1996), and no ruling elite was ever innocent – but to a man like Dwight D. Eisenhower, it would be shocking to see both Republican and Democratic politicians openly boasting of their affiliation with and support for the military-industrial complex.
But this is still far from being a unique phenomenon. The moment you put the United States into a global context – something both American liberals and conservatives tend to very rarely do – the election of Donald Trump becomes part of an obvious pattern. Trump-like figures are on the rise everywhere, opposed by weak liberal entities that make vague noises about culturally progressive issues but steadfastly support brutal austerity and an imperialist foreign policy. In country after country, people are told they must support the centre-right candidate to prevent the far-right candidate from taking power; that “more of the same” is the only answer to what led us here in the first place. Unsurprisingly, this does not work very well.
This development itself is far from abnormal, however. It is, in fact, the entirely ordinary response of capitalism to a crisis it cannot overcome by other means: the creation of a pseudo-revolutionary movement aimed at the middle class, with support from the most backwards layers of the working class, bankrolled and run by capital, with the goal of removing all restrictions on itself and renewing capitalism through creative destruction, i.e. war. Liberal political entities are particularly bad at opposing this development because, while progressive at a social level, they support the same economic and therefore political logic. All they can offer, in the end, is the promise of a lesser evil.
It would be good, at this point, to remember that the German Social Democrats supported Hindenburg in 1932 with the purpose of preventing Hitler from coming to power; Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor in 1933. The lesser evil tends to lead straight to the greater evil.
If Trump and his ilk are to be effectively opposed, then, it must first be understood that they don’t represent an abnormality, a glitch in the system. They are the system, much like their liberal counterparts in the great ping-pong of doom. Picking sides is pointless when both sides are playing the same game. What must be opposed is the game itself, with its underlying rules that consistently produce such hateful entities.
