Will angry politics and bitter voters floor the US?
Daniel T Rodgers charts the rise of the angry right and an anti-politics politician
Daniel T Rodgers is an American historian and author of ‘Age of Fracture’ (Harvard University Press)
In
a US election season filled with the bizarre and unexpected, a
particularly striking event was the appearance of Nigel Farage, the
former leader of the UK Independence Party, before a cheering Donald
Trump crowd in Jackson, Mississippi.
No
US presidential candidate since 1945 has been more dismissive of
foreign alliances than Donald Trump. None has insisted so strongly that
America must go it alone in a world of feckless friends and existential
terror threats. But here, in a city that had been an epicentre of the Ku
Klux Klan movement in the 1960s, Donald Trump looked on benignly as
Nigel Farage relished in the parallels between Trump’s candidacy and his
own Brexit campaign, all in language appropriated from the ‘Yes we can’
rhetoric of Barack Obama, a man they both profess to despise.
Borrowing
political support from abroad is not new in US politics. In the first
part of the 20th century, exchange of political endorsements across
national lines was common particularly on the left, where progressives
and socialists saw themselves as part of an international movement of
ideas and solidarities.
In
the 1970s and 1980s, neo-liberal conservatives heralded the forward
march of deregulated markets from Thatcher’s Britain and Reagan’s United
States to Pinochet’s Chile. Since the turn of the current century, a
new kind of conservatism − nationalist, anti-foreign, fearful, and
deeply aggrieved − has risen internationally.
Fuelled
by the economic displacements of financial globalization, this new
conservatism has channelled its resentments down three main paths of
least resistance: a generalized anger at the international bureaucrats
and corporations who are blamed for the destruction of jobs and the
restructuring of wealth; a pointed critique of open trade and border
agreements; and, most virulently, a resurgent xenophobia and
racist-tinged cultural nationalism with refugees and immigrant workers
as its most vulnerable targets.
None
of these phenomena is new to US political history. Protectionist
economic policies run as deep in United States economic history as do
free trade convictions. Anti-immigrant sentiments like those on display
at Donald Trump’s rallies flared even more intensely in the anti-Irish
and anti-Catholic politics of the 1850s, the vicious anti-Asian
vigilante movements and exclusion policies of the late 19th century, and
the massive anti-foreign hysteria triggered by the First World War. But
never has this kind of economic and cultural nationalism in the United
States coincided with as strong an international tide of right-wing
nationalist movements as now. From the Brexit forces in the UK, to
Nicolas Sarkozy’s resurgence on the French political scene, to the
Alternative for Germany voters and beyond, cultural nationalism is on
the rise.
‘Barack Obama’s speeches were saturated with the word we ... but in Donald Trump’s ego-driven rhetoric there is only I’
As
distinctive as Donald Trump’s idiosyncrasies may seem to the world
beyond the United States, he did not invent the cultural-political
movement on whose tides he now rides. They are a transnational undertow
of the past decades’ restructuring of the global economy.
Other
forces have shaped the current American political moment as well, some
of them more distinctive to the US. Throughout most of the 19th century,
politics in the United States was fiercely partisan, driven by
regionally, religiously and ethnically entrenched political loyalties.
It was the work of progressive reformers in the early 20th century to
begin to pry governance away from the political bosses through the open
primaries and legislative referendums they hoped would bring the forces
of society more closely to bear on the dynamics of politics.
A gift for self-promotion
With Donald Trump’s candidacy, however, a figure has emerged who would have been a nightmare to those whose reforms made his political candidacy possible: a serious candidate for the presidency without any experience at all in public affairs or public office. The consummate anti-politics politician, Trump has not even a term on a school board or zoning commission on his resumé. His corporations, answerable for the most part to no shareholders beyond his own partners and family members, are not arenas of collective deliberation either. He is a figure almost entirely made by his gifts for self-promotion and enabled by a culture in which the celebrity industry now far exceeds the place of government in popular consciousness.
Political
party loyalties are not dead in the US, of course, as the partisan
gridlock in the recent Congresses and American state houses so vividly
shows. The mystique that surrounded John F Kennedy foreshadowed some of
today’s blurring of celebrity appeal and governing experience; in its
own way, so did the Barack Obama campaign in 2008. But never before has
the line between experience in public affairs and forcefulness of
personality been so fully erased. What celebrity culture makes, a more
porous political system now increasingly absorbs.
The
current moment in American politics is also shaped by the fact that in
no presidential election in the 20th century has the electorate’s
sources of fact and information been as deeply divided as this one. As
the technologies of modern media culture have exploded in scale, fissure
has been the almost inevitable consequence. Centrist newspapers,
journals, and radio and television outlets no longer carry even a
fraction of the power to referee public debate that they held at the
beginning of the television age.
Fragmentation
is now the rule, abetted by the Fox network’s invention of openly
partisan television news, the centrifugal effects of the internet and
smartphone revolutions, and the paradoxical ways in which a
superabundance of media choices encourages media users to double down on
the conduits they already know and with which they already agree.
Fragmentation of the ‘social’ idea
As information in this new media configuration is increasingly siloed, debates over the ways in which the conditions of the day might be managed do not disappear, but they are increasingly overshadowed by disagreements over the very nature of those conditions. Have criminal arrests and undocumented border crossings radically increased in the past decade? Has unemployment risen to a new peak? Official statistics in the US say definitively no. The disbelievers, tuned to their own counter-authoritative conduits of information, say the official facts can’t be trusted. In this regard, too, the progressive architects of the early 20th-century American state would feel betrayed. Dismayed by the exaggerations and distortions that fuelled the rhetoric of 19th-century partisan politics, they dedicated themselves to expanding the state’s capacity for fact collecting. In the neutral agencies of expert-led government they saw a vital new resource for deliberative politics. The modern data age was largely their invention, too. But they did not anticipate that media technology and money might bring back an information system as resistant to dialogue and deliberation as the one they hoped they had dismantled.
Behind
all of these shifts in structure lies a fundamental shift in ideas
while the idea of the ‘social’ continues to fragment. The 20th century
began differently to our own. In the United States and Europe the first
half of the 20th century saw a blossoming of the concept of ‘society’.
Spurred in part by a sense of the economic and social interdependencies
that industrial economies were producing, sociologists, economists,
political reformers, social gospel preachers, civic action groups and
even fiction writers set out to map the world of the social, the terra
incognita just beyond the consciousness of any single individual. While
William Graham Sumner, the liberal social scientist, had told a
generation of Yale undergraduates in the 1880s that the drunkard they
would pass in a New Haven gutter was just where he should be, paying the
consequences of his inability to cope with modern society, to Sumner’s
successors the man in the gutter was a terrible social cost, an outcome
with roots deep in the structures of the economy, culture, and social
organization.
Not
all the uses of the idea of the ‘social’ were benign. Eugenicists
leaned on it as strongly as a fighter for racial justice like WEB
DuBois, the sociologist and civil rights activist. But what the
discovery of the social did at its best was to keep alive a sense of
collective interdependence among all those whom society threw together, a
sense that human problems had social dimensions that only collective
deliberation could fully address.
Since
the 1980s the field of social thought has thinned dramatically in
modern American intellectual life. Microeconomics, with the
cost-calculating individual actor at its core, has all but eclipsed
research and teaching in macroeconomics. Sociologists increasingly
eschew social field work for small group and laboratory experiments.
The
philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey’s community-based idea
of the school as a little democracy has been almost completely displaced
by a calculus in which schools are nothing more or less than the
averaged results of their individual pupils’ test scores. A sense of
collective labour and compromise does persist in areas of American
politics. Barack Obama’s speeches were saturated with the word ‘we’ from
the beginning, even as the term’s practical realization became more and
more deeply frustrated. It can be heard in some of Hillary Clinton’s
rhetoric, too. But in Donald Trump’s ego-driven rhetoric there is only
‘I’. The unapologetic self-referentiality that Trump displays is his own
personal creation, of course. But the fact that his indifference to
evidence-based social data, his detachment from any social movement
larger than his own polling and viewership figures, and his failure to
offer any policy gesture beyond his own insistence that, whatever the
problem may be, he will ‘take care of it’, did not drop him from
consideration at the very beginning of the primary process, speaks to an
erosion of ideas and language that runs deeper than Trump itself. When
all politics is personal and all facts relative to the information
preferences of the voter, there can be no politics at all.
How
close at hand is that event? How much should we read into the US
election of 2016? Donald Trump’s victory in the Republican primaries
was, by most counts, an accident. In a field of too many candidates in
which insult and brashness proved critically important in cutting
through the general noise, a figure like Trump had enormous advantages. A
coalescing of his rivals through the back-stage negotiations common in
more normal political times would almost certainly have stopped him
short of a majority in the primaries.
Impact on the Republican Party
But accident or not, Trump’s candidacy is sure to have a transformative impact on the Republican Party. If he were to win the election in November and were he to remain as deeply at odds with the party’s established leadership and as loyal to his own mercurial instincts as now, there is no telling what his presidency would be like.
Certainly
the Republican Party as it is now constituted would have a difficult
time surviving. He would carry with him the Tea Party groups and a part
of the conservative media establishment. Where the business elites who
have been the financial base of the party would go in the face of as
uncontrollable a presidency as Trump would oversee is hard to imagine.
Those who have worked so hard to open the global economy to free flows
of capital and labour would face a particularly acute dilemma.
Realignment with a more business and investment-friendly Democratic
Party ‘triangulated’ towards the centre, as Bill Clinton termed it,
though the shift would leave those energized by the Bernie Sanders
campaign adrift, is a real possibility.
But
if Trump loses, the impact on the Republican Party may be no less
large. In the US political system, losing candidates do not always lose
in the long run. Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee in
1964 whose candidacy proved a fiasco, helped give voice to a
libertarian turn that had been all but unthinkable within the Eisenhower
Republican Party. George McGovern helped complete the break-up of the
foreign policy consensus that had united Democratic presidential
administrations since the outset of the Cold War. Whatever other legacy
Donald Trump leaves behind, he has already opened the gates to a fury at
women, African Americans, Hispanics and religious minorities that had
been largely closeted since the civil rights victories of the 1960s and
1970s. He has made a new style of ‘America first’ isolationism
respectable for the first time since the 1930s.
But
the party that nominated him may not survive. Since the massive shift
of Southern white voters away from their historic Democratic Party base
in the wake of the civil rights movement, the Republican Party has been
an uneasy amalgam of three sharply disparate groups: business interests,
small and large, which still chafe at the taxation and regulation
regimes the New Deal set in motion (when they cannot turn them to their
advantage); religious conservatives for whom the moral decay of an
increasingly diverse and tolerant society is the overriding issue; and
the angry, anti-government, anti-establishment, blue-collar forces the
Tea Party helped to mobilize after the stock market crash and bank
bailouts of 2008-9, who feel the social contract no longer has a place
for them. A pledge to cut taxes has been the glue between these, but it
may not be enough to keep the angry, the pious, the small business
owners, and the finance capitalists together. Decampment of the most
alienated of the Trump supporters into a series of nationalist or
libertarian third party movements is not unlikely.
If
the Republican Party splits, it will not be the first such instance in
US history. A two-party system is less vulnerable to fissure than the
multi-party parliamentary ones that are under such severe pressure
elsewhere, but it is not unprecedented. Donald Trump may be the first of
a new, abrasive string of anger-backed candidates. He may equally be
the last candidate of the Republican Party as we have known it