Why Trump?

There is a great deal more to be said about the election and it will be a very long time before the fallout is complete. There are going to be consequences on many levels but the most urgent one has to be the economy. The media on this side of the Atlantic said that HC’s campaign was slick and that Trump’s gallop through some of the “marginal constituencies” like Pennsylvania in the last few days before the election was a sign of desperation. The opposite seems to have been the case. HC’s campaign appears to have been driven by identity politics, by the type of people who believe the main subject for discussion on university campuses should be genderless bathrooms, whereas Trump seems to have had a well organized campaign that listened to what ordinary citizens were saying. If HC had had any sense at all she would have broadly endorsed Trump’s approach to trade and globalization (not that many people would have believed her). If the Democratic Party does not move immediately to do so now (along the lies of Bernie Sanders) it could well be toast. There is room for a genuine left of centre party to replace the Democrats and to focus on the issues of concern to tens of millions of ordinary Americans. 

Politics is all about the haves and the havenots. The haves are always well represented. The havenots don’t usually get much of a look in but when the party that is supposed to represent them goes farther to the right than the candidate of the haves what else are the voters to do? You could argue that the US empire will have to be brought to an end before US politics can be reformed but assuming that reform is possible within the imperial structure the Democrats have to rediscover what a left of centre political party is about: ensuring that ordinary citizens have a decent job, a decent standard of living, decent healthcare, decent unemployment benefit when out of work, decent housing and so on. Trump took that ground, and in my view honestly so. The same thing happened in 1860 when Lincoln stole the progressive ground of the anti-slavery movement admittedly because the Republican Party wanted strong tariffs in the North and the Southern States didn’t so there was a natural alliance between the various wings of the Republican party that brought about the end of slavery. Nevertheless, Lincoln’s abhorrence of slavery was genuine and the honour of destroying slavery and the rotten social and economic system that underpinned it and benefited from it fell to the Republican Party. The same might happen in relation to excessive globalization. If Bernie Sanders had been selected by the Democrats he would have beaten Trump. He might indeed have beaten Trump and Clinton if he had opted to run. 

I’m not too bothered about Trump’s boorish behaviour. My guess is that he calculated that the only way he could channel the anger into votes was by turning up the volume. This was no ordinary election and if the US elite does not take heed of what happened who knows what will happen in the future. Trump also realized that after fifty years of PC (much of it justified certainly but it had gone way off the rails with the gender stuff and the bathrooms and university students wanting safe rooms) it was necessary to challenge it and challenge it aggressively. He was clearly right on both counts although it was ugly. It will now be up to him to turn down the volume.

There was a good article on the election in the NYT The End of Identity Liberalism by Mark Lilla, who is essentially saying that gender stuff and bathroom stuff has its place but front and centre: no. Anyone with any cop-on has been saying this right through the campaign but not HC’s people. Apparently, Bill Clinton tried to get this across to them but was told to button it. Apparently, he also told them not to ignore the Catholic vote but the latent anti-Catholicism of HC, a good WASP, came through. In many ways it was the mirror image of Trump’s attack on PC. Clinton and her people felt that they had a licence for good old fashioned Catholic-bashing dressed up as something else. They forgot that good old-fashioned Catholics have votes. HC’s arrogance and sense of entitlement to the Presidency let her down and her friends in the media, who should have warned her, didn’t.

Trump’s election will have an impact on feminism. There is now a divide between those who argue for women’s rights and those who argued that HC had a right to power because she is a woman. That was quite a leap for the sisterhood to make and it was important that she lose on that ground alone. If the sisterhood splits big time over this I would expect “approved” opinions about abortion among right-on types to start diverging too.

It remains to be seen if the military industrial complex and the secret state prevent Trump from making significant changes to US war policy, which, again, I suspect he genuinely wants to make. I suspect that he is opposed to the elite’s policy of perpetual war for perpetual profits for the arms industry (with the morons in the State Department and the satellite think tanks going along with them). It would be a brave man who would predict success for Trump there.

I sent a tweet to the actor who lectured Pence after a theatre performance asking the actor, Dixon, if he had lectured HC in the same patronizing way about her destabilizing of Libya. No response needless to say but I see some tweets coming through about Dixon urging black guys to have sex with white women on Paddy’s Day. If you are going to lecture the Vice President Elect you would be well to have a clean sheet yourself as, if you don’t, someone will dig up the dirt. That is what has happened to Dixon. I don’t expect the New York Times to lecture Dixon about his attitude to white women or a file to be sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions (as we say) but Dixon, who is an eejit, might come to regret his fifteen minutes of fame.