WHY TRUMP RESEMBLES SALMOND ON STEROIDS

David Torrance on US presidential candidate’s brash and frightening brand of nationalism

ABOUT 20 years ago, the sociologist Michael Billig coined the term “banal nationalism” to describe a patriotic discourse so pervasive, so widely-accepted, that it never occurred to anyone to think of it as such.

His case study was the United States, which he felt represented this phenomenon well. The defining image of banal nationalism, wrote Billig, wasn’t the Stars and Stripes “being consciously waved with fervent passion” but the flag “hanging unnoticed on the public building”.

Last week, I spent four days at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Cleveland, Ohio, and one of many striking things was that the nationalism of Donald J Trump and the Grand Old Party (GOP) he now leads is far from banal. Rather it’s brash, unapologetic and more than a little frightening.

“Make America Great Again!” implored electronic banners in the Quicken Loans Arena, while the Republican nominee’s acceptance speech late on Thursday evening gave full expression to what the New York Times does not hesitate in calling “nationalism” (there’s also a parallel discussion among liberals as to whether Trump can accurately be described as a “fascist”).

“Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo,” declared Trump. “As long as we are led by politicians who will not put America First, then we can be assured that other nations will not treat America with respect, the respect that we deserve.” He also spoke of the “international humiliation” suffered by the US under Obama’s presidency, and promised to put it right.

Then there was the ostentatious exceptionalism. “We believe the United States of America is unlike any other nation on earth,” Trump also argued, due to its “historic role – first as refuge, then as defender, and now as exemplar of liberty for the world to see”. And while he planned to be “considerate and compassionate to everyone”, the “greatest compassion” would be reserved for “our own struggling citizens”.

Statements like this prompted chants of “USA! USA! USA!”, some so infectious that Trump himself joined in. Harmless patriotism, you might think, an understandable pride in a great nation, its past achievements and future potential, but to me it felt more significant than that, for the rise of Trump represents the onward march of identity politics.

This, as the writer Richard Spencer recently reflected, is a discussion that hitherto white Americans have been reluctant to engage in. Although the US is, of course, a huge melting pot of different races, religions and nationalities, its wealthiest and most influential citizens are still mostly white, but Trump’s appeal comes from having found a way to articulate the bewilderment and (often legitimate) anger of white Americans who don’t feel in the slightest powerful or privileged.

And while the presentation of the billionaire Donald Trump as an antiestablishment champion of the underdog is about as credible as Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson in a UK context, it’s nevertheless effective. For having identified how a section of the electorate “feels” and given expression to it in a speech watched by 30 million Americans, the Republican nominee had a golden opportunity to drive home his central message. Trump spoke directly to those who worked hard but no longer had a voice, assuring them: “I am your voice.”

But, of course, being that voice need not require the Republican candidate to have any inkling of what to do about the litany of woes set out in his relentlessly negative speech. Trump kept flagging up a “plan”, but details came there none, so in that sense he joins the ranks of many Scottish Nationalists, Brexiteers and Corbynistas in successfully convincing voters they have apparently easy solutions to deeply complex problems without ever actually going to the trouble of explaining what they are.

Nationalists like Trump don’t need to have a plan, for they are so busy othering “Washington” (the US political equivalent of “Westminster”), demonising their opponents as crooks and, of course, implying that those who don’t share their worldview are, at worst, anti-American or, at best, deeply misguided. Trump, like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush before him, is not stupid, as liberal Americans and snobbish Brits like to believe, but he knows his opponents’ weaknesses and is opportunistically flexible when it comes to policy and ideology.

Sound familiar? I realise this will outrage the usual suspects but at points last week Donald Trump resembled Alex Salmond on steroids. Not just his attacks on the “liberal media”, casual disregard for facts, (qualified) admiration for Vladimir Putin or obsession with locking up his political nemesis (Tony Blair in the former First Minister’s case), but just his whole demeanour: the swagger, the stream-ofconsciousness speaking style and the pretence of being an ordinary Joe while clearly enjoying the high life.

Of course it cuts both ways. Delegates I spoke to in Cleveland weren’t really conscious of Alex Salmond but they had heard of Boris Johnson, who was in Washington while the Republican Convention was in full swing. “He’s your own Donald Trump,” more than one joked, which acted as a sobering reminder that our superiority complex when it comes to American politics is rather harder to sustain in the wake of Brexit.

“Make America great again” could be seen as the US equivalent of “Take back control” (indeed Nigel Farage being feted at the RNC rather underlined that point), and we now know all too well that populist slogans can readily overwhelm rational arguments. As John Lanchester observed in the London Review of Books, the “mendacity” of the Leave campaign might represent a continuing recalibration of Scottish and UK politics along American lines, “where voters only listen to people whom they already believe, and there are in effect no penalties for falsehood”.

Even a cursory foray into the blackand-white world of Twitter since Nicola Sturgeon (perhaps over-hastily) fired the starting gun on another independence referendum, and the mutual incomprehension that clearly exists between many Nationalists and Unionists brings to mind the evergrowing gulf between Democrats and Republicans in the US. And the Democratic National Convention, which begins today in Philadelphia, will doubtless confirm all the GOP’s worst prejudices about the immoral world of “Crooked Hillary”.

So, the million-dollar question, can Trump win in November? Conventional wisdom has it that there simply aren’t enough Angry White Men to carry him into the Oval Office, but then conventional wisdom has recently gone the way of the oncevibrant American steel industry. Number-crunchers like Nate Silver are now warning that, against all the odds, a Republican win isn’t impossible, something the film-maker Michael Moore likens to a “Rust Belt Brexit”, the prospect of “broken, depressed, struggling” post-industrial communities sending a “message” to Washington via Donald Trump.

“What happened in the UK with Brexit”, predicts Moore, “is going to happen here.” And if it does, the explanation will lie not only in the usual places (it’s the economy, stupid) but also a hitherto banal nationalism that’s morphed into something altogether more muscular.

‘‘ Trump, like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush before him, is not stupid but he knows his opponents’ weaknesses