Trump’s victory underlines a sense of dread, of what lies
in the dark spaces.
The world is in revolt. We do not have a clue about the
depth of distemper that has occasioned this revolt. Nor can we fully comprehend
its likely consequences. The honest truth is that almost all the basic
assumptions that were brought to bear on understanding American, and perhaps
global politics, are being shattered. We pretended that our techniques of
analysis captured deep undercurrents. Donald Trump has revealed a form of
politics we had not seen and an America we had not understood. He has charted a
new chapter in history. It is hard to deny him that.
We can now claim to retrospectively understand the causes
of this extraordinary victory. They were hidden in plain sight. What prevented
us from seeing them were our pre-judgments. Or perhaps, as Trump would
diagnose, the bias of the supposed liberal establishment is now so deep that it
has warped its cognitive ability to understand the world. But the broad
narrative was always clear. The revolt against globalisation was deep and
pervasive. The fantasy of a post-racial politics, of a politics not premised on
ethnicity, was just that: A fantasy. The demographic fantasy of a “coloured”
coalition standing alongside gender solidarity underestimated the counter
resistance the very idea would generate: It unleashed a significant white
counter mobilisation. Anti-globalisation and racial nativism powered each
other; the former gave the latter a respectable intellectual basis while
nativism gave globalisation its emotional edge. We can dwell on Hillary
Clinton’s vulnerabilities as a candidate, her identification with a tired and
corrupt establishment, a charge levelled against her by both Left and Right. We
can now speculate that our reading of American history always mistook a small
episode in its identity for the whole: The America of Warren Court liberalism
and the Cold War sense of global purpose was an aberration in American history.
On the economic front, we can now argue that it was going
to be always hard for a centrist liberal, tagged with the brush of elitism, to
combat three economic discontents simultaneously: Inequality, plutocracy, and
anti-trade. In past elections, these have appeared individually, not together
in a cocktail, as Bernie Sanders had suggested. The perception of these three
ills overwhelmed any small consolation that the American economy was not that
bad; with a modest recovery under difficult circumstances. But the Left had, in
some senses, already damaged the candidate on the credibility of the economy.
We can spin all these narratives. But truth be told, they
will appear more of a retrospective gloss on the single most improbable
electoral achievement in human history. There is still something unfathomable
about this victory. Trump is now being described as an agent of enfranchising
the disenfranchised. Electorally, it is hard to argue with this assessment. But
it is the peculiar alchemy of this election — and perhaps a testament to the
widespread support Trump has garnered — that the term “disenfranchised” is more
complicated that it looks. It includes sections of the working class. But it
also includes college graduates, worried less about class marginalisation, than
some anger about America’s direction and its place in the world. The election
was a post-modern election in this sense. Some sense of disenfranchisement is
structurally clear. This may be true of sections of the working class. But a
sense of disenfranchisement can also be created: By conjuring visions of a
world overrun by people who are different, by the fear of immigrants and women
wielding power. Do people outside the big cities resent the structural privileges
of big cities, as seems to be happening, where cities are markers of power. Or
do they feel disenfranchised because of the culture and lifestyles those cities
represent? Is it the dispossessed sacking Rome because Rome is oppressive? Or
are they sacking Rome because Rome seems a symbol of licentious freedom? The
answer is not either/or. But it was Trump’s alchemy to fuse both senses of
disenfranchisement into an electoral coalition. We thought Trump was vulnerable
because he had annoyed so many different racial groups. It turned out that he
could, instead, mobilise several different resentments.
Donald Trump has shifted the tectonic plates of politics
in a way unprecedented in the annals of electoral history. He was an outsider
to politics. His party, while never in open revolt, did not quite know what to
do with him. His personal record would, in any other world, create a mountain
of electoral vulnerabilities. His charisma, if we can retrospectively call it
that, is certainly of an unorthodox kind. He did not have any conventional
ideological pedigree. He did not have a long run movement or organisation. He
has no experience of any public office. He had all of one newspaper
endorsement. But he seems to have intuitively tapped into the mood of the
moment. For Americans who were feeling inhibited, all that seemed to matter was
his utter lack of inhibition. The very thing that should have been his
vulnerability: His lack of decorum, his racial and gendered offensiveness, his
lack of consistency, his disregard for facts, became his strength. It is hard
to guess how much American voters subscribed to these tenets. But the persona
seems to have convinced them that he could, to borrow the line from Star Trek,
go where no man had gone before. Americans were willing to go to uncharted
territory. He had the audacity to promise to take them there.
This election will test American institutions like no
other. Will the messy and sometimes infuriating system of checks and balances
that has been the bulwark of American liberty, survive this impatience with the
messiness of politics? Trump described those institutions as rigged. He ran
against them. What shape will they now take under a new dispensation? He
promised to rewrite the founding ideology of America as a nation of immigrants.
What would America without that founding commitment look like? The consensus on
global economics — a gradual movement towards freer trade, more global
integration — has now been blown to smithereens. What will replace it? The
election was nasty and divisive. Even if Trump is enfranchising some of the
marginalised, he threatened to disenfranchise others. Will he be able to get
rid of the poison his campaign has generated in public discourse, even as he
promises new greatness? It is his peculiar achievement that we are now asking
all the foundational questions. But there is also a sense of dread, of what
lies in the dark spaces, where no man has dared to go before. With Trump, one
thing is certain. Never a dull moment. Perhaps that is all that politics was
yearning for.
The writer is president CPR, Delhi and contributing
editor, ‘The Indian Express’
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