Notes on the Election of Donald J. Trump
November 24, 2016
THE WORLD is coming to terms with the bewildering news that the airhead narcissist and serial groper Donald Trump has won the U.S. presidential election. Many of us watched the “battleground states” fall one by one, thinking of new ways to describe the calamity that had apparently befallen the human race. The United States needed an FDR: what it got was a Father Coughlin.
As Trump gave a surprisingly magnanimous acceptance speech in the wake of his victory, thanking his family, his Republican supporters and his security service detail, one could be forgiven for shouting, as I shouted: “He also thanks the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”
One could also be forgiven for voicing the puerile thought that he would be impeached within a year after sticking his hand up Angela Merkel’s skirt during a bilteral meeting.. But of course, nothing is going to stop him now. He has a Republican Congress on his side, and will be able to appoint Supreme Court justices unopposed, setting the tone for the country for decades.
After a day of astonishment and repugnance comes a period of reflection. In The Guardian, Simon Jenkins, as ever, is a voice of contrarian reason, suggesting that it isn’t certain that Trump will be everything he said he would be while on the campaigning stump, that to classify him as a reflexive right-winger is “stupid”, and that in any case, America “remains a federation” with a dispersed, even centrifugal power structure.
Liberals are tripping over one another to pile on the invective: The West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin describes Trump as a “thoroughly incompetent pig with dangerous ideas” in a letter to his daughters published by Vanity Fair.
But das Prinzip Hoffnung shows through, with defeated Democratic primary candidate and self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders saying that Trump owes his victory to “anti-establishment anger” - the same anti-establishment anger, one presumes, that almost saw Sanders himself topple the uninspiring Goldman Sachs shill Hillary Clinton. Naomi Klein, in a brilliant piece, writes that the Clinton campaign will try to blame the FBI, racism or misogyny, but in the end, it is neoliberalism, “fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine”, was no match for Trump.
A hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than there precarious present.
Clinton represents the Davos set, and the triangulation of social liberalism with laissez-faire economics, thereby hacking at the roots of struggling communities from two different directions. The people who voted for Trump are the people clinging on by their fingertips to a tree in the eye of a storm, and despite the clarion call from Sanders, Clinton chose to play it safe and offered nothing at all to reassure them. Trump’s victory opens up the cracks in which some new and more radical left-wing movement can be born. A Clinton victory would only have smothered it. The assumption that it is better to be betrayed by the left than be shafted by the right is well-known in British politics, and gave birth to Tony Blair.
So yes, there’s still hope.
IN HIS BOOK Against Democracy, Jason Brennan argues that political participation, far from an ennobling activity, is in fact a corrupting influence and “incentivizes most voters to make political decisions in an ignorant and irrational way and then imposes these ignorant and irrational decisions on innocent people”.
Brennan divides the electorate into three archetypes: the hobbit, who doesn’t much care; the hooligan, who cares too much; and the vulcan, who actually tries to make rational decisions. Unlike most political scientists, Brennan thinks declining voter turnouts is a good thing, or at least it would be if it didn’t give hooligans an even more decisive role in elections.
In any case, it is clear that the worst type of politician - the demagogue - seeks to find the hooligan at the heart of every hobbit by claiming that very local ways of life are being threatened by the Elite.
In an essay in the New Statesman, William Davies, a teacher at Goldsmiths, suggests that successful politicians are now learning to harness the power of narcissism. Citing research by French sociologist Luc Boltanski that demonstrates that the line separating “public politics” from “private distress” is a culturally constructed grey area, Davies says people do not engage with public figures for entirely public reasons: they want their own emotional buttons to be pressed.
“Public arenas potentially help to alleviate personal troubles,” he writes, noting that the areas where support for Trump was most concentrated were those “suffering growing levels of chronic physical and mental pain, as well as rising mortality rates”. This fits in with the hypothesis made by the authors of Worm At the Core. Fear of death, symbolic and actual, drives us into the embrace of demagogues. There are vulnerable communities left behind by the creative destruction of hypercapitalism, terrified that their values are being eroded by multiculturalism and permissiveness in all its forms. “Intimations of mortality amplify the allure of charismatic leaders,” they wrote. Unhappy the land that needs its heroes.
DAVID RUNCIMAN in the London Review of Books says astutely that the fascist interpretation of Trump’s victory - that a significant proportion of the population are looking for a saviour - is wrong. In fact, they are more than aware that Trump is a tantrum-prone buffoon and they are counting on the innate resilience of the system to keep him in check.
“Trump is a child, the most childish politician I have encountered in my lifetime,” writes Runciman. “The parent in this relationship is the American state itself, which allows the voters to throw a tantrum and join forces with the worst behaved kid in the class, safe in the knowledge that the grown-ups will always be there to pick up the pieces.”
Trump provides disruption but not destruction, and the United States’ institutions are expected to remain intact. And yet, Runciman expects four years of chaos, with an inexperienced and temperamentally unstable leader quite incapable of negotiating his way through the political system. Nothing will get done. Divisions will widen, and those institutions will suffer even more corrosion. “It is not possible to keep behaving like this without damaging the basic machinery of democratic government,” Runciman writes.
There is nowhere Trump won’t go and little he is unwiling to say, and so, he recruits the mouldy and crepuscular hinterland of “birthers” who seize upon every coincidence, every historical glitch, in order to construct unnecessarily elaborate plots that prove President Obama was born in Africa and had forged his birth certificate to qualify for the Oval Office. And they are utterly convinced.
Trump’s election has dredged something else from the dank and cluttered corners of my memory: Nixon’s Madman Theory. In a classic example of rationalisation, Nixon claimed that his mental instability was actually a strategy used to boost his negotiating position. “We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he is angry - and he has his hand on the nuclear button’ - and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.” He also tried it when raising alert levels for Mediterranean forces during the Jordan crisis in 1970 and going to DEFCOM 3 during the October war of 1973.
The confusion of temperament with strategy: it happened with Sir Alex Ferguson and his “mind games”, and it happens with Mourinho and his attempts to “take the pressure off his team” by putting himself at the mercy of his own monstrous Id. The spoilt Trump said in one of the presidential debates that he didn’t know whether he would accept the election result if he lost, and his cheerleaders also suggested that this was some kind of strategic masterstroke that helped him to victory.
Parts of the press are now beginning to wonder that Trump’s astonishing victory might not be quite so apocalyptic after all, as the president-elect reins in some of his earlier claims and says, well, he might not abolish Obamacare and doesn’t see the arrest and imprisonment of his opponent Clinton as one of his immediate priorities. Still, I am sure he will be quite bad enough. Despite winning fewer votes than Clinton, he still appears hellbent on pushing through his agenda. Humility is the last thing we should expect.
If Obama was Superego, Trump is the raging Id. Nixon used to say that Kennedy was the man the American public aspired to be, while Nixon himself was what they really were. Perhaps Trump is a toxic combination of the two: the ne plus ultra of America’s worst qualities, the quintessence of American hucksterism, the apotheosis of pathological American self-regard.
