Rethinking The Donald

Imade a specific prediction that Donald Trump would lose last week’s presidential election, and that puts me in an interesting predicament: can I ever claim to have anything intelligible or worthwhile to say about American politics again? I suppose I could plead a good long-term record of forecasting specific American developments — if I really had one, which I’m not sure I do. I could retreat into nihilism: no one understands anything well enough to make electoral predictions!

Or I could say that newspaper columns are nine-tenths performance art, and you should read them to find out how someone else sees the world, rather than for specific information you can take to a betting parlour.

To me, Trump’s election indicates a fragmentation of intellectual tendencies in American life. The American political system, thought of as a system, imposes a strong structural requirement for voters to resolve themselves into two parties. During the Cold War, everyone was ordinarily defined, as a voter, by his position on the Cold War. Everything in electoral politics was dove vs. hawk in disguise.

The Cold War ended, and there was no crisis of similar size and urgency to take its place: it looked like the “culture war” would do, but the “clash of civilizations” took centre stage after 9/11, and now … what is the main axis, the statisticians’ “first principal component,” in American politics? What we are witnessing is probably the process of deciding on one. Trump haters and lovers must both admit he cuts across the traditional lines of politics, sometimes with elliptical or even contradictory policy statements.

Nobody is too sure what he is going to do as president. What his voters are sure of is that he stands for a positive attitude toward America, a determination to be explicit about acting on its interests in foreign and immigration policy, and a can-do, businesslike spirit toward practical social difficulties. There is an intellectual tendency on the left, an ultra-progressive tendency that has grown accustomed to a fast-moving wave of social victory, that is only capable of interpreting all this as the pretext for a return of endemic overt racism — the monster they see under every bed. Those progressives are behaving right now, for all the world, like a navel-gazing doomsday cult that has seen its projected Zero Day zoom by without the faithful being lifted into the air.

Actual American racists certainly do like the Trump victory, and progressives would argue that this is reason enough to hate and fear it — that there is a positive obligation to vote the other way from the few of the way the Hillary Clinton machine backed over the old fellow. They see class first when it comes to social questions, rather than race. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that they are paranoid and hysterical about class, rather than about anti-racism: they talk of “bosses” the way a long-dead Wobblie would.

These people despise free international trade, which is something the Clintons stood for, and did much for, while in power. They are dismayed by the election of Trump, but they knew Clinton was a terrible candidate, and tried their best to stop her, and they are relishing the pleasure of being able to say “I told you so.”

I am not really sure an old commie from Vermont could have beaten Trump, or that I, as a foreigner, would want him to, but I know that nationalism has broken loose in American politics. In the past few days, I keep thinking about Colin Kaepernick, the National Football League player who is engaged in an continuing protest against the U.S. anthem and flag because it’s “a country that oppresses black people.” The American civil religion, the collective faith of the dominant American culture, used to be that American principles of equality were the answer to, and a weapon against, oppression of this kind. For the law to make distinctions based on race is supposed to be un-American.

Kaepernick’s protest is not directly related to the election, but it seems illuminating. He is, in despair, challenging the premise that America and its flag stand for equality. It is obviously his right to behave in an explicitly anti-American way, or to make a deep critique of America. But the proposition he is asserting went largely unchallenged in the mass media — except, of course, by Trump. Trump, like almost everyone else who chose to challenge Kaepernick by criticizing or heckling him, was castigated for it. Is he the President-elect right now just because when someone effectively said “America stinks,” he said “wrong”?