Trump desires more power and cares less for voters

The ‘rigged system’ that the GOP candidate has railed against has just worked its magic

The American political system remains a mystery to most outsiders and, well, most Americans too. It’s perhaps not quite the Soviet Union that Winston Churchill called “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”, but one question that’s still common, even in the midst of the Republican Party’s endorsement of Donald Trump, is how to explain where Trump’s popularity suddenly came from and, equally, where it might be headed. Wherever that may be, Trump appears to leave chaos, anger and division in his wake. That might be his legacy.

C.D. Jackson, President Dwight Eisenhower’s special assistant for psychological warfare and former publisher of Fortune magazine during the height of McCarthyism, noted that the American political system threw up characters like Joseph McCarthy, much to the bewilderment of America’s allies who feared for their alliance with an erratic superpower.

“We are bound to get this kind of supercharged emotional freak from time to time,” Jackson commented. When a senator goes on the rampage, he opined, there is no party discipline to stop him. “Whether McCarthy dies by an assassin’s bullet or is eliminated in the normal American way of getting rid of boils on the body politic… by our next meeting he will be gone from the American scene.” He was reassuring European political and business elites at a Bilderberg conference at McCarthyism’s height that American power was safe for the world and could manage such “supercharged emotional freaks”.

The key issue is whether Trump represents a tendency that will crash and burn or leave a longer term imprint on America’s political future. There is a deep anti-establishment strain in American history open to exploitation for personal ends at times of crisis. The political opportunism that harnesses that anti-elitist populism may be worked from the Left or Right but it should not be dismissed. There is something very deep at the root of the phenomenon that real leaders and politics must, ultimately, reckon with. What makes demagogues so effective is that they identify and work to crystallise and harness a widespread sense of something being wrong with the ‘system’ – a rigged system run by and for fat-cats and high ups at the expense of ordinary hardworking Americans. And at least some of those demagogue-led movements have left an indelible mark on American political life, for better or worse.

Trump’s rhetoric about enemies at the gates, or within the fortress itself – Mexicans, Muslims, echoes McCarthyite exaggerations of the influence of communists in all walks of American life, including among the pin-striped elite at the state department. Communists, like minorities, it was claimed, were eating away at America, ‘taking over the country’ and subverting its values. Yet, there was a lot more to McCarthyism than opposition to ‘communism’ per se. Communism was the rhetorical enemy; the effective political enemy was left-liberalism which, by the late 1940s, also embraced the civil rights agenda – racial equality.

Unlike McCarthy, who soared in the US Senate for a few years but plummeted once he attacked the integrity of the American military and brought anti-communism into disrepute, Trump is the Republican nominee for president. In that regard, perhaps a better comparison might be Barry Goldwater?

A right-wing conservative, Goldwater, who opposed civil rights legislation, went down in a spectacular defeat to Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964. He also divided opinion in the GOP establishment. Republican ‘moderate’ Nelson Rockefeller, like Ted Cruz with Trump, refused to endorse the nomination of Goldwater.

Trump employs a mixture of McCarthyite smears, Goldwater’s straighttalk, and pro-segregationist George Wallace-style xenophobia.

The danger for Trump is that he’s got to where he is by defying party leaders, and rejecting the conservative model associated with smaller government and lower taxes – something that his white working class base roundly rejected in the primaries. Pence is a tea partier, hardcore social conservative who’s religious freedom bill would have permitted bosses from refusing employment to gays. The ‘rigged system’ that Trump has railed against has just worked its magic and lured the maverick into the GOP’s embrace. Trump desires power more than he cares for the views of the voters who propelled him to presumptive nominee. He’s doing a deal. The betrayal of his political base has already begun.

It is not another boil that can be removed from the American body politic but the remnants of a racialised white identity politics driven by the deeply felt loss of “their” country. It may never be more than an angry and vociferous minority but it will remain a force in the political fabric of American politics and, possibly, the basis of a new political organisation of the white radical right. Even more dangerous is the prospect of this newly-empowered faction’s permanent installation in the upper echelons of the Republican Party. Inderjeet Parmar is professor of international politics at City University London

©The Wire

Global and domestic demographic factors may condemn Trump-ism to a slow death