A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER
The world is reeling from the shock US election result, with the establishment, the media and polling agencies very much in the dock for being out of touch. Former visiting American academic in SA gives his perspective
ISPENT the first half of 2016 as a Fellow at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. Everywhere I went I heard The Question.
Someone would hear my accent at the pub or in line at the bookstore. My colleagues would ask me in the hallways. Or it would come up in a question and answer session after one of my talks (on South African topics):
“What is up with Donald Trump?”
It was always asked in the same general tones — mocking disbelief, bemusement and, ultimately, concern.
They were asking to reassure themselves. They were POLES APART: President Barack Obama speaks while meeting his successor, Donald Trump asking as an accusation:
It can’t happen, right? (Apparently it can);
American politics are weird, but they are not that crazy, are they? (Apparently they are); and
Aren’t you the ones who like to lecture the rest of the world on democracy and freedom? (Yes, sadly we do.)
Now keep in mind, I, like everyone else who has written and spoken about politics in the past two years, was completely and utterly wrong about the rise of Donald Trump.
I wrote in the Mail & Guardian in September last year, for example, that “despite the lead that Donald Trump enjoys in all national polls, there is just about no chance that he will win the Republican Party nomination”.
I was wrong every time I answered the question in South Africa. And I have been wrong every time I have been asked or NOT THEIR POSTER BOY: Protesters gather during a demonstration against president-elect Donald Trump in Pennsylvania written about it since.
Let’s be clear: Trump is exactly what he appears to be, a know-nothing ignoramus, a racist flim-flam artist, a misogynist and a bigot.
What makes him truly dangerous, though, is not necessarily what he believes, though much of what he believes is dangerous. Most of his ideology and rhetoric is firmly within the camp of the modern Republican Party, which is defined by a deep commitment to furthering the interests of the 1% that is committed to a quasitheological state, and which embraces right-wing dogma steeped in mythologies about halcyon golden ages when white Christian men were ascendant.
But what is truly dangerous about Trump, and will be dangerous even if he shifts gear and tries to govern from the centre or even from the left, is that he has a deep and frightening authoritarian streak. He believes that only he ought to control the mechanisms of power, that only he should have the final word.
His is a problem of temperament, not ideology.
Furthermore, be aware that many of us are frightened and concerned about our country and what Trump represents.
Although some of the postelection protests have been inchoate, they do indicate the frustration and unease that millions of us have with the prospect of President Trump.
And if there is any solace to be found, it is that even with a Republican majority in the House of Representatives and Senate (and, more worryingly, even with Trump being able to shift the Supreme Court decisively to the right) there will be checks on his ability to impose his will.
Men with far greater understanding of and access to the levers of power in Washington have found it nearly impossible to bend its politics to their will.
In the days and weeks before the shocking election result, Trump had claimed that the election was going to be manipulated against him.
One of the targets of his ire was the allegedly biased media. This claim is especially absurd — Trump was essentially a product of the media. He cruised through the Republican primaries without spending a lot of his own money because his every bombastic, absurd, unsubstantiated statement received outsized coverage in a media landscape that benefited from his showmanship even as it abandoned its journalistic responsibility.
Trump sold papers and magazines, Trump drew viewers, and Trump got clicks. The media benefited from bolstering Trump.
Then, by the time of the election when both major party candidates were going to get plenty of coverage, the media chose to engage in the worst forms of false equivalence, mistaking accepting “both sides do it” nonsense for journalistic objectivity.
Thus, every mention of Trump’s increasingly unhinged rants and blatant mistruths had to be countered with assertions, however ginned up, against Hillary Clinton.
The media dropped the ball in this election in ways that, far from harming Trump, instead legitimised him.
The US system has the byzantine electoral college, which the world is learning about for the second time in a generation, the first having come when Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the electoral college in 2000 against George W Bush. The electoral college is an undemocratic relic from an era when only white property-holding men over the age of 21 were given a say in the political process.
Had Trump lost the electoral college vote but won the popular vote, one can safely assume that the post-election landscape in the US would have been ugly, as Trump was more than conversant with hinting at violent solutions to his political problems.
It is in this context that the ineffectual but largely harmless protests in the US now can best be understood.
But it is also worth reflecting on the fact that more people voted for Clinton than for Trump. If nothing else, this fact gives the lie to claims that somehow Trump’s election repudiates Barack Obama’s legacy, which, while imperfect, certainly far surpasses what preceded it.
It also, of course, undermines the US’s legitimacy in preaching democratic values to the rest of the world.
Remember when you hated and distrusted the US during the Bush years? While many of Obama’s policies might not have thrilled the rest of the world, it is quite possible that his greatest international legacy might have been in restoring a respect and appreciation for the US, whatever our flaws.
Obama did not engage in tough-guy posturing. Obama tried to think through his foreign policy engagements. He did not always succeed, but one always felt that a grown-up was in charge.
In a Trump presidency we may well return to 2008 in every possible way.
Catsam is professor of history and the Kathlyn Cosper Dunagan Fellow at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin and was the 2016 Hugh le May Fellow in the Humanities at Rhodes University
What is truly dangerous is Trump’s deep authoritarian streak Every absurd, bombastic statement received coverage