US shows Trump the door
smashing remedy of pumping disinfectant into oneself? He knew better than the FBI, the CIA, the DoJ … there was no acronym that was his equal. And let’s not forget, he is one of a handful of presidents to be impeached, escaping the ignominy of an even earlier exit from office thanks to his Republican backers in the Senate.
It’s one thing trying to outwit some of the world’s wiliest presidents and prime ministers, it’s quite another going up against an army of suburban soccer moms. And that’s where he really came unstuck this time round.
You’d think a guy who prided himself on his people skills might have noticed the drift of mostly white suburban women from his side. That much was evident in the Democratic gains in the Blue Wave that saw the party take control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms. The reason for their defection? The gross, rude, overbearing, racist, bigoted utterings of a president who seemed to have cut loose from all moral anchors.
Not suitable for kids
Al Jazeera wrote about a white woman voter in suburban Atlanta, one Michele, who voted for Trump in 2016 but switched to Biden this time round: “Michele said that while she did not watch the news often during Trump’s first few years in office, she had a ‘growing unsettling feeling’ as she heard about some of his policies, including the travel ban on people from several Muslim-majority countries and the administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the US-Mexico border.
“The tipping point came when she realised her father believed the pandemic was a ‘hoax created by Democrats to remove Trump’. As someone who works at a hospital, Michele knew the coronavirus was not ‘a red or blue issue’, and that no matter who the Democrats nominated, that candidate would get her vote.”
In areas around the US the same pattern was repeated, in what was essentially a rejection of Trump and a vote for decency, Biden or whoever. The VOX Online news website quoted a teacher in Kansas City as saying she and her husband turn off the TV when the kids are around to avoid their seeing the president at all.
“I don’t want my children to speak the way the president speaks,” she said. “My kids know who Barack Obama is. We want them to see what strong, calm leadership looks like, and I can say the same thing if Mitt Romney had been elected. It’s been very difficult to navigate how we expose our children to national politics. It’s not something I think will enrich my children’s understanding of how people who make the rules behave.”
It was not only white women voters who dumped Trump. Older white men, too, decided they’d had enough of his bluster and bombast, and more educated white men also lost their 2016 enthusiasm.
Reading the vote
So a funny thing happened in this election. Like the war that was meant to end all wars, and didn’t, this was an election that was, as the pundits predicted, a referendum on Trump. And he flunked it spectacularly. But while it may have put Trump in his place, it has solved little in the broader political scheme of things. If anything, all it has done is draw the battle lines more clearly, setting up the Trumpian conservatives in rural areas and red states against the cities and their modernising influence. The election graphically demarcated the vast divide in the US that we know as the “culture wars”, which serve as a template for similar standoffs over race, identity, immigration and coexistence in societies around the world.
Trump aside, though, for the Republican Party it was a much better election. The Republicans held on to all the state legislatures in play and, crucially, they still control the Senate, though two elections in Georgia may change that if both
Republicans lose. Republican control of the Senate will effectively tie Biden’s hands, and
usher in a period of gridlock in US politics.
There was no Blue Wave, and though Biden seems to have won handily, he hardly received an unambiguous endorsement. The Democrats failed to make significant inroads into Trump strongholds, especially in rural and working-class America. Cities where industry once thrived, and where Democratic support was galvanised by trade union organisers, remain thoroughly Republican.
As the Democratic Party is widely perceived to be in the pockets of the urban elite, white rural voters especially remain estranged from a world and message that are increasingly foreign to them. National Democratic Party sympathy for the Black Lives Matter movement undermined local Democratic organisers and further alienated white voters who feel it only underlines the lack of attention to their particular issues.
Nor did Biden make significant impact among black voters, with black men and women supporting him disproportionately less enthusiastically than they did Clinton in 2016.
Where Biden did score was in the
emergence of new communities of interest in cities and metropolitan areas, with support across all races and gender groups, especially among young people, whites and African-Americans. This was offset in part by relative growth in support among Hispanic and African-American voters for the Republican Party.
A moral and aesthetic choice
So that’s the picture in the world’s most powerful country. A mostly white, maledominated society’s influence has retreated largely to the rural heartland, where good ole boys can live beyond the gaze of BLM and LGBTQ activists, and a sarcastic media. They stayed with Trump, happy that he’s giving China a good blast, and standing up for the US. At least that’s what they think. There’s no sign of the return of their coalfields and steel factories, but they’re happy to vote for a president whose major beneficiaries are the asset managers who score from record stock market prices.
For this constituency, the coronavirus is largely a non-issue, and they overwhelmingly cite the economy as their
primary issue of concern. And in an era of intense personalisation of politics, many are prepared to look beyond Trump’s obvious lack of common humanity to support what he purportedly stands for in a broader policy sense.
But where it increasingly matters, in the mixed-race suburbs populated by the younger people who drive the knowledge economy, the Republicans are anathema, with or without Trump. It’s a moral, ethical and aesthetic choice. Their numbers can only grow, and with that growth will come a corresponding alienation from those, mostly white males, who once ruled a country formed out of the conquest of the indigenous population, and the introduction of a slave economy in the South whose existence was ended only by the Civil War of 1861-65.
Among its legacies is a widening cultural divide: the countryside becoming the stronghold of glowering resentment at the new wave engulfing society, and threatening life as they’ve known it for generations; the educated and multicultural city dwellers sneering at rural quirks and concerns.
Barring a different outcome in the recount, Trump lost even in Georgia, a Southern state where Republican incumbency was a given. That loss, while not necessarily decisive in the presidential race, suggests a fundamental shift in demographics and its corresponding shift in voting patterns. It will raise the question of whether the Republicans, in their present incarnation, have any chance at all of mounting the across-the-board majorities needed to win a presidential election any time soon.
Perhaps, for them, the answer is not the strident redneck militancy prescribed by people like Trump’s former adviser, the right-wing pseudo-intellectual Steve Bannon. If anything, the election loss for the Republicans holds this lesson for the US, and for politics around the world: that the embrace of militancy and a nasty style of politics is certain to alienate an important
In the mixed-race suburbs populated by younger people, the Republicans are anathema
segment of people who expect a basic level of human decency from their leaders. They don’t want know-it-all, headline-hogging, confusion-sowing political louts giving their children antisocial ideas — and nightmares when they go to bed.
‘You’re fired!’
As I write this, we’re on the fourth night of US election coverage. CNN coverage is unrelenting, and it feels like Wolf Blitzer has moved in. The US election is the greatest democratic show on Earth, replete with peculiarities and eccentricities. Often the candidate with the most votes loses, and the power of local entities like states and counties is baffling to outsiders.
Trump’s denouement is a setback for the worldwide nostalgia movement that bases itself on reactionary politics and social conservatism. Even in defeat, though, he’s got 70-million votes behind him, potentially a movement if he should choose not to walk into the sunset with wife Melania, America’s most glamorous immigrant. Quite in character, then, that he’s threatening not to go quietly.
In the inimitable words of his hit TV show, enough fair-minded Americans have told Trump, in glorious democratic unison, “You’re fired!” But the words that best capture how the election unfolded, with postal votes eroding his election-day majorities, was Trump’s forlorn note, a white-flag tweet that said simply, and a bit pathetically, “STOP THE COUNT!”
But nobody was listening any more. The world, and plenty of US voters, had had enough already.