Patrick French - The end begins now Trump’s presidency is year zero in a new world order // Keshava Guha - Trump’s victory will not 'Make America Great Again' – it will deepen its decline
The end begins now Trump’s presidency is year zero in a new world order
On Wednesday, the world changed. An idea of itself that the West believed in and promoted in the wake of two devastating world wars came to an end. Liberal values always work best when you are in the ascendant, and most Americans no longer feel in the ascendant. This is the start of the next stage of history, a triumph of the outsider. For Americans, the election result represents a victory for white nationalism, and for the idea that the majority can apply the values of identity politics to itself. Donald Trump’s attack on elites and institutions was secondary to this fact. His campaign made the majority feel as if they were a put-upon minority, and as in other countries, this won the vote. As a candidate, he was not a thinker but a reflector, a mirror. “I am your voice,” he told a delighted crowd when he won the Republican nomination.
Keshava Guha: Trump’s victory will not 'Make America Great Again' – it will deepen its decline
The reasons for Trump were also the reasons for Brexit - John Harris
Trump’s Victory Was Not a Class Backlash From the Disempowered
Clinton's Democratic Party is more like Rahul Gandhi's Congress than we realise
On Wednesday, the world changed. An idea of itself that the West believed in and promoted in the wake of two devastating world wars came to an end. Liberal values always work best when you are in the ascendant, and most Americans no longer feel in the ascendant. This is the start of the next stage of history, a triumph of the outsider. For Americans, the election result represents a victory for white nationalism, and for the idea that the majority can apply the values of identity politics to itself. Donald Trump’s attack on elites and institutions was secondary to this fact. His campaign made the majority feel as if they were a put-upon minority, and as in other countries, this won the vote. As a candidate, he was not a thinker but a reflector, a mirror. “I am your voice,” he told a delighted crowd when he won the Republican nomination.
Trump was able to
articulate the fears of an American white majority that knows it will be a
minority by the middle of this century. Barack Obama is the
last black president for a long while. As Samuel P. Huntington predicted in
2004, ethnic intolerance was likely to resurface as a political force in
America. “Historical and contemporary experience suggests,” he wrote, “that
this is a highly probable reaction from a once dominant ethnic-racial group
that feels threatened by the rise of other groups.”
This was a campaign
ruled by confirmation bias, with a media that disliked what Trump was offering
and so convinced themselves he would lose. His astonishing victory leaves his
opponents wondering: Was it about Hillary Clinton’s weakness as a candidate,
was it about misogyny, was it about the economically left-behind? I am not
convinced it was any of these things. Trump won because he was an insurgent
candidate, a disruptive antidote to both main parties and to politics-as-usual.
Most voters who earn less than $50,000 a year voted not for Trump but for
Clinton; and 52 per cent of white women voted for Trump. You can blame
globalisation, neoliberalism, outsourcing, the establishment - but above all,
this was a reaction to the way the world has changed. Certainties about status
have evaporated. What do investors do in a crisis? They flee to the safety of
gold. What do voters do? They flee to the gold of ethnic solidarity and
traditional social ideas, they flee to the cultural solidity of an imagined
past. In this respect, the US is far from unique: We saw it in the UK over
Brexit, and we see it with alarming force in the rise of Europe’s hard-right,
nativist political parties, who were the first to congratulate President-elect
Trump and climb on his bandwagon.
Trump may not be an
isolationist president, but he will surely be an autarchic one. He sees
alliances in transactional terms, as a businessman of questionable talent who
is always focused on the deal and the short-term advantage. If he is not
getting a financial return from the Baltic states, he may decide they are
expendable. I’ll talk to President Putin. It’s gonna be beautiful. NATO,
tomato. We’ll make a new alliance when we need it. As the US acts unilaterally,
so other large powers will do the same. There is every reason for them to act
in advance of the fact, and to create their own reality at a time of global
insecurity.
If China wants to
crack down on Hong Kong or extend its remit over the South China Sea and create
a wider, Sino-centric sphere of regional influence, or Russia wants to annex
some neighbouring territory, what better moment to do it than around the time
of inauguration day? We do not know what President Trump’s foreign and security
policy will be, because his statements during the campaign were strikingly incoherent.
In a presidential campaign, the US media plays a game to see how much an
aspiring candidate knows about the rest of the world. Remember how George W. Bush was
caught out, unable to name General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan? The exception
was Hillary Clinton, who with her experience as secretary of state could
analyse global problems with acuity — and look how far it got her. If you read
Trump’s answers on, for instance, the problem of Syria, Iraq and IS, all you
see is an ignorant, randomly-generated word-soup of distracted remarks. We
cannot go back and parse his speeches, his writings or his track record,
because he has no experience in government. Trump is a zero, and his presidency
is year zero in a new world order where rules may be disappearing... read more:
Keshava Guha: Trump’s victory will not 'Make America Great Again' – it will deepen its decline
Some years are branded
for all time by their political events: 1789, 1848, 1917, 1989. It is too early
to add 2016 to that list, or to speculate on the historical significance of a
Donald Trump presidency. But Trump’s election itself is the logical culmination
of a year that has ended, decisively, an era in the West that began with the
end of the Cold War.
Liberal
internationalism is in retreat, both in politics and in economics. White
voters, especially working-class and rural ones, have rejected rule by elite
consensus. Nativism, xenophobia, sexism and outright racism have been deployed
more openly and effectively than for decades. The United States and its closest
ally Britain have turned inwards.
Trump’s election has
been widely described as a stunning upset. It is liable to be compared to
Brexit. But such a view is difficult to reconcile with the facts. On the eve of
the election, Trump was level with Hillary Clinton, or within the margin of
error in national polls, and within striking distance in every battleground
state. The most influential forecaster, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, rated
Trump’s chances at 35% or over for much of the past week. A
one-in-three shot – hardly Leicester City. As with Brexit, the idea that this
was a shock result only reveals the extent to which expectations are shaped by
wishful thinking.
A victory for
bigotry: In this narrow sense,
Trump’s win was unlikely but not unexpected. More generally, the fact that
Republicans had a strong night isn’t surprising either. Since 1945, there have
been ten US presidential elections in which the incumbent party had been in
power for two terms or more. In eight of those ten elections, the challenging
party won. Barack Obama is the third consecutive two-term president to be
succeeded by a member of the opposite party.
But, in so many other
ways, this is one of the most bizarre – and appalling – events in American
political history. Donald Trump will be the 45th President, but the first true
outsider, with no history of either civilian or military government service.
Six in 10 voters, according to exit polls, regarded him as unqualified for the
office. Majorities also doubted his temperament and judgment. Unlike every
modern presidential candidate, he did not release his tax returns, and is
believed to have paid virtually no income tax at all for the past 20 years.
Trump ran a campaign
of open ethnic and religious polarisation, targeting Hispanics and Muslims in
particular. Perhaps the most unsavoury aspect of all was his sexism – embodied
in the leaked 2005 video in which he bragged about committing sexual assault. Over 60 million
Americans have voted for a candidate who is brazenly racist and sexist. It is
fatuous to absolve these voters of moral responsibility for his election –
every vote for Trump is on the spectrum from tolerance of racism and sexism to
an enthusiastic embrace of those things. His election is, thus, evidence of the
enduring extent of bigotry in the US. A narrow majority of white women
supported a candidate who has been accused of assault by twenty-four different
women.
How we got here: Trump’s election is,
rightly, the cause of such dismay that it is tempting, in pondering how we got here,
to look not for causal factors but for people and institutions to blame. Such a
list might begin with a Republican Party that has, beginning with Richard
Nixon’s Southern Strategy, practiced dog-whistle politics and subtle racial
polarisation for half a century. In the early stages of the Republican primary,
Trump’s rivals refrained from directly attacking him for fear of alienating his
voters.
Bernie Sanders and his
allies pushed an agenda that was free of Trump’s bigotry but similarly
protectionist and anti-internationalist. These outsider candidates of right and
left shared the view that globalization, particularly in the form of free-trade
deals, has disproportionately benefited the Third World at America’s expense.
Liberal internationalism might have rejoiced in American policies that exported
prosperity, but Sanders and Trump, in very different ways, embodied a new,
inward-looking nationalism. Trump’s decisive victory in the Rust Belt states of
Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania depended in part on Sanders
supporters who didn’t vote for Clinton.
Others will point to a
primary process that rewards ideological extremism, and to the electoral
college system, which renders the votes of a majority of Americans meaningless,
and concentrates the campaign in a handful of “battleground states”. FBI
director James Comey will be accused of having swung the election – unfairly,
given the extent of Trump’s Rust Belt victory... read more:
http://scroll.in/article/821175/trumps-victory-will-not-make-america-great-again-it-will-deepen-its-declineThe reasons for Trump were also the reasons for Brexit - John Harris
Trump’s Victory Was Not a Class Backlash From the Disempowered
Clinton's Democratic Party is more like Rahul Gandhi's Congress than we realise
Rahul Gandhi
represented the accumulative authority that the Congress believed it possessed,
and the concomitant faith in the institution of the bureaucratic welfare state.
Hillary Clinton represented slowly acquired knowledge, and the related belief
that facts and expertise were values in the service of public welfare. Clinton
and Gandhi were not running as individual leaders, they were running as representatives
of institutions of power. Voting against them – rather than voting for Modi or
Trump – must be understood as a vote against institutional politics and the
knowledge political institutions collectively possess rather than a vote
necessarily in favour of far right regimes…. What is sweeping the globe, from
India to the US, is not simply far right xenophobia – though that is one of the
most serious and pressing issues of our time – but the simultaneous and
devastating repudiation of centrist institutional knowledge and expertise in
favour of individual authority...
http://scroll.in/article/821227/linked-by-loss-is-hillary-clinton-the-rahul-gandhi-of-america
see also
The rise of American authoritarianism
Michael Moore’s “Morning After To-Do List”
The Trump Effect
