The Truth Usurper
This essay relates the rise of Donald Trump to the displacement of the Industrial
Age by the Information Age, and explores how Trump’s anti knowledge posture is
seen as empowering by those who are left behind in the new world of IT
billionaires, globalisation and neo-liberalism. Trump’s attacks on
progressivism in general, and political correctness in particular, is sharpened
by his attacks on truth itself, devaluing a commodity held dear by the college
educated elites, but seen as dispensable by the Trump base of non suburban
whites.
Whilst the preponderance of media focus is dedicated to the activities and intrigues surrounding President Donald Trump, the question remains: how did Trump muster the electoral college votes to win the presidency? An analysis of the forces that brought Trump to power would seem to be a far larger story than Trump himself, particularly when one considers that, without an understanding of the electoral landscape that delivered the presidency to Trump, one is left without insight into the future of US politics, from the 2018 congressional to the 2020 presidential and beyond.
Whilst the preponderance of media focus is dedicated to the activities and intrigues surrounding President Donald Trump, the question remains: how did Trump muster the electoral college votes to win the presidency? An analysis of the forces that brought Trump to power would seem to be a far larger story than Trump himself, particularly when one considers that, without an understanding of the electoral landscape that delivered the presidency to Trump, one is left without insight into the future of US politics, from the 2018 congressional to the 2020 presidential and beyond.
The failure of
establishment Republican candidates to hold off the rise of Trump in the 2016 Primaries
can be traced back to the growing disconnect between the clarion calls of the Republican
standard bearers and the anxieties of middle America. With stagnating wage
growth and a disillusionment with foreign wars, America’s working class have been
yearning for change. Yet the political milieu of the Republican party,
including the recently-formed tea party wing, have become more entrenched in
their hard-line views on small government and a strident foreign policy. Indeed,
there has perhaps always been a tension between Republican conservative
doctrine and the conservative base.
In an article by Zack
Beauchamp, published by Vox in July of 2016[1],
Beauchamp outlines how “In 1955, William F. Buckley created the intellectual
architecture of modern conservatism by founding National Review, focusing on a
free market, social conservatism, and a muscular foreign policy. Buckley’s
ideals found purchase in the Republican Party in 1964, with the nomination of
Barry Goldwater. While Goldwater lost the 1964 general election, his ideas
eventually won out in the GOP, culminating in the Reagan Revolution of 1980.” As
he relays in his dialogues with Avik Roy, Beauchamp proposes that the success
of the conservative movement to connect with a whole new voter base, known as
the Reagan democrats, is likely to have never been due to its commitment to
economic liberalisation and a hawkish foreign policy, but may have rested
solely on a social conservatism that pervades America’s Mid-West and South.
Trump’s alternative outsider
message was simple and integrated: he was against the neo liberals’ commitment
to globalisation, he was against the neo conservatives’ ideological war footing,
and he was against liberal progressivism. In his negative stance on
progressivism, Trump retains the one thread of Buckley’s triumvirate that is
perhaps the most in tune with the new Republican base.
Interestingly, Bernie Sanders agreed with the first two of Trump’s positions, questioning neo liberal globalisation and neo conservative foreign policy. In this, he may well have been able to mitigate the swing to Trump in states that switched from blue to red in 2016. Yet the Democrats decided to run with an insider, one with a track record of supporting international trade deals and one known for holding aggressive policy positions with regards to Russia and other international theatres. With a longstanding relationship with Wall Street, and an ever-accumulating list of minor to moderate scandals, Hillary Clinton was singularly poorly placed to run in an electoral year where the populous were yearning for change. Yet the Democratic National Committee (DNC) apparatchiks worked tirelessly to guarantee her anointment as the Democratic presidential candidate, persuading other less-tainted candidates to step aside, and throwing up administrative hurdles, such as unfavourable debating schedules, to hinder Bernie Sanders’ campaign. In contrast, Reince Priebus took a lot of flak for not working harder, as the chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), to obstruct the path available for Trump to take the mantle as the Republican candidate. Is it any wonder then that, whilst Debbie Wasserman Schulz, as chair of the DNC, did all in her powers to prevent Sanders from claiming the Democratic nomination, it was the Republicans, who, in refusing to interfere in the democratic processes of their Primaries, won the final test of the presidential electoral process by winning the White House?
Though it’s doubtful
that Clinton would ever have lost the Democratic Party Primaries, given a
fairly robust firewall of bloc voters in the south, the question that needs to
be asked, particularly as we head into the 2018 congressional elections and
start contemplating the 2020 presidential election, is whether Sanders would
have beaten Trump in a head to head. As Sanders appealed to the
anti-globalisation and anti-neo liberalism forces, the question becomes: how
critical was Trump’s anti-progressivism to his electoral victory. Would it,
alone, have won the day for him?
The antipathy carried
by the working class towards progressivism has built up over a number of
decades, as the left swung its support from fighting for the economic equality
of workers, to fighting for the rights of women and oppressed minorities, seminal
to which was the passage of civil rights legislation under Lyndon Johnson in
1964. With the fermenting of an ever-increasing social
divide between the urban college educated sophisticates and the industrial and
rural workforce, the gains made by
the progressive movement have now become precarious.
As the great American pragmatist philosopher of the 20th century, Richard Rorty, predicted in his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country:
“The nonsuburban
electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for
a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is
elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and
postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the
shots. . . . One thing that is very likely to happen is that the
gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by
homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into
fashion. . . . All the resentment which badly educated Americans
feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find
an outlet.”[2]
Trump’s attacks, in
fact, represent an assault on political correctness as much as they do on progressivism.
He continually succeeds in generating outrage by dispensing with all forms of public
decorum. Every week there is a new assault by the POTUS on our sense of
propriety. And of these, the greatest assault on our sensibility is his seeming
total disregard for truth. Starting with his high-profile championing of the
birther movement, the movement that claimed Barak Obama wasn’t born in the US,
to his ridiculous claim that thousands of Arabs were celebrating in New Jersey
after the collapse of the World Trade Centre in 2011, Trump is evidently happy
to perpetuate all sorts of nonsense no matter how divorced from reality they
may be.
But Trump can also be
transparently honest. At times, there appears to be little filtering on his
streams of consciousness. After the sacking of FBI Director, James Comey, on
May 9, in which White House officials, including Vice President Mike Pence, declared
the firing to have been instigated by recommendations provided by the Deputy
Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, Trump went on to tell NBC that he was going
to fire Comey regardless of the Rosenstein recommendations. Trump’s version of
events puts in question his motivations for firing Comey, given his request to
Comey, on February 14, to “let this go” in relation to FBI investigations into
Trump’s one time National Security Advisor, Mike Flynn, and then Comey having
asked for a significant increase in funds for the Russia probe just days before
his sacking. Such honesty from Trump forms a narrative that could well come
back to haunt him when the Special Prosecutor, Robert Mueller, delivers his
findings.
Trump may be facing a
similar problem with the sequence of events that started with Donald Trump
Junior, on June 7, 2016, eagerly accepting an invitation to meet with a Russian
lawyer to receive “information that would incriminate Hillary Clinton”. Hours
later, in his Republican Primaries victory speech, Trump declared that he was
going to give a major speech on the Monday in relation to the crooked dealings
of Clinton. After the Sunday, June 9, meeting between Donald Trump Junior, Paul
Manafort, Paul Kushner and the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, turned
into a fizzer, with no incriminating evidence against Clinton being provided,
the promised Monday speech by Trump also failed to eventuate, although, it must
be admitted that this was far from the first time that a Trump declaration
dissolved into nothingness.
The rather peculiar,
and slightly sociopathic, aspect of Trump’s honesty is that it tends to have no
basis in facts. As has been quipped of American Presidents: “Washington
couldn’t tell a lie, Nixon couldn’t tell the truth, and Trump couldn’t tell the
difference.”[3] As
Trump stands at the dais, musing on his greatness, and the terrible nature of
his and his base’s adversaries, there is a frightening lack of grounding in
facts, be they of dates, or numbers or of events. The best information we can
get out of Trump is that “it’s been bad for a long time, long time”[4]
and that he has “a very good brain”[5].
What Trump is, in fact, doing is devaluing the commodity value of truth. By being so carefree with what is true and what is not, with even the logical foundations of truth, as he contradicts himself between sentences, Trump is reducing the political currency of truth. All the whilst, his base continues to stand by his side. Regardless of how blatant is his ignorance of the facts, no matter his disregard for knowledge, those 35% of voters that comprise his core constituency stand firmly behind him. Why? Because, wittingly or unwittingly. Trump is speaking directly to the enmity that has been growing amongst the white working class towards the knowledge class.
Over the last 50
years, as the industrial age has been replaced by the information age (following
the invention by Alan Turing in 1936 of the Universal Turing Machine, otherwise
known as the all-purpose general computer), the world has witnessed the college
educated evolve from the chattering middle class to become the wealth owning
class. The heroes of American capitalism are no longer iconic industrialists,
such as John D. Rockefeller or Howard Hughes. They are the IT entrepreneurs,
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg.
Adding fuel to the
fire, the rise of neo liberalism has created further economic pressures on
workers. With the fall of the iron curtain, the political centre of politics
has shifted several steps of the right. The revelling Tories have gone so far
as to suggest that the collapse of Soviet Communism implies the moral and
functional failure of any system that does not subscribe to the principles of
laisssez-faire global liberalism. (We saw this type of absurd application of
the law of the excluded middle being laid out in Australia recently when
Finance Minister, Mathias Cormann, argued that any move to the left will lead
to the economic failures that brought down the Berlin Wall, to which the Manager
of Opposition Business, Tony Burke, responded that “without Mathias Cormann I
never would have known that the Soviet Union was built on negative gearing and
discretionary trusts.”)
In addition to the
post Cold War dominance of neo liberalism, the effects of globalisation have added
further strains to the western workforce over the last 20 years. The ability to
shift capital and labour costs between nations has seen large numbers of
manufacturing jobs leaving US shores, and picking up in Mexico, east Asia, and
elsewhere. Yet the makers of the technology that drives globalisation, those in
Silicon Valley and other IT centres, whilst also subject to “off shoring”,
remain relatively immune from the impacts of globalisation.
Although generally
holding liberal leftist political views, the college educated are cementing themselves
as the new bourgeoisie of the twenty first century. In accepting and exploiting
the tenets of the new world order, that is, the acceptance of open trade
agreements and an economic policy that primarily serves Wall Street, the
intellectual class have exacerbated a class divide that is now feeding the
toxicity of American politics.
The dysfunction of
American politics is not the result of a prevalence of short sighted
politicians in Washington. It is the result of the deep division that plagues
American society. On the one hand are the college educated elites, who every
year find themselves less connected to the plight of the white working class. On
the other hand are the disenfranchised white folk, who find succour in Trump’s
message of anti globalisation,
anti neo liberalism, and anti progressivism. And within this message, the
subversion of truth plays no small part. One ought recall,
of course, that Trump found his way into the conservative movement though the
bizarre conspiratorial backwaters of the Breitbart crowd, with its paranoid
bleating on the deep state and birtherism. In power, Trump's anti progressive
attacks on immigration, through his attempt to deliver executive orders banning
entry into the United States from several Muslim countries, has been
supplemented by his anti-science stance on health, promoting anti-vaxxer,
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to chair a commission on vaccine safety, and the
environment, pulling out of the Paris climate accord. The
anti intelligentsia swagger carried by Trump, and his cohorts, Steve Bannon and
Sebastian Gorka (albeit before their forced departures by the new Chief of
Staff, John Kelly) represents the revenge of the jocks avenging the revenge of
the nerds. As Gorka boasted back in December, “the alpha males are back”. And
with them comes the devaluation of the truth commodity index that is so
welcomed by the Trump base.
So can the cultural
divide be broached? The Democrats still seem bent on focusing on the woes of
Trump, rather than confronting the limitations of their own constituent
boundaries, drawn from the identity politics of the last four decades. Yet we
do see, in a new breed of Democrats, such as Bernie Sanders and Elisabeth
Warren, a commonality with the Trump agenda that could readily swing back much
of the worker vote, in particular in the rust belt states of Pennsylvania,
Michigan and Wisconsin that switched from Democrat to Trump in 2016. The
fervour with which the left has adopted a progressive agenda may necessarily
need to be reconciled with a platform that reaches out to the broad sweep of
American communities.
As Rorty noted in Achieving Our Country:
As Rorty noted in Achieving Our Country:
“I think that the Left
should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a
market economy.
This was the business
the American Left was in during the first two-thirds of the century. We
Americans should not take the point of view of a detached cosmopolitan
spectator. We should face up to unpleasant truths about ourselves, but we
should not take those truths to be the last word about our chances for
happiness, or about our national character. Our national character is still in
the making. Few in 1897 would have predicted the Progressive Movement, the
forty-hour week, Women’s Suffrage, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, the
successes of second-wave feminism, or the Gay Rights Movement. Nobody in 1997
can know that America will not, in the course of the next century, witness even
greater moral progress.”
The alternative, one
may imagine, is that the new world order is here to stay, that the divisions
between the educated and the uneducated become entrenched. Perhaps, in due
course, the white working proletariat will come to accept their new position as
the under-class of American life. Perhaps, though one somehow doubts it.
[2] “Achieving Our
Country, Leftist Thought In Twentieth Century America”. Richard Rorty. Harvard
University Press, 1998
[3] This quip is derived
from an original quote from Mort Sahl directed towards Ronald Reagan, but seems
even more fitting when applied to Trump
[4] https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/06/22/remarks-president-trump-and-vice-president-pence-congressional-picnic
[5] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/mar/17/donald-trump-i-consult-myself-on-foreign-policy-be/
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