And by anybody we mean even the much reviled Donald Trump.
Where do you start? I guess we start by the inordinate amount of uncertainty that went into the election day itself this year. Contrary to the two previous elections, FiveThirtyEight led by Nate Silver was incredibly mealymouthed with his prognostication. He cited just how many people were 'undecided', and that the distribution of Hillary Clinton's votes were too concentrated in urban areas, leaving the rural electorates wide open for speculation. This view stood in stark contrast to the definitive pronouncement he was able to make going into the two Obama elections, and so therein we could see ample ground for the kind of seismic shift we saw.
The way things turned out, all those 'undecided' people were in fact Trump supporters. They were just too embarrassed to tell the pollsters they were actually going to vote for Trump, and therein lies the clue to understanding what the hell just happened. The media collectively created an environment where it was shameful to support Donald Trump by stigmatising him with everything from racism through to sexual assaults (hey, count me in on the guilty side there), and they did such a good job of it, the people who agreed with key planks of his platform felt ashamed to say they supported a man who was allegedly all these terrible things.
Now, let's not get too carried away. There is nothing sensible about most of Trump's policy platform. But it was very direct and very simple; clearly simple enough that the lefthand side of Bell curve could understand. And just as it happened with the Brexit vote in the UK, all it took was enough from the right hand side of the Bell curve to defect to the stupid side for catastrophic electoral consequences to unfold. In that light, it's amazing how the media convinced itself Hillary Clinton was actually a good candidate.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, A Candidate From Hell
I was a Hillary Clinton backer back in 2008. Obama blew her away in June that year and the rest is history. One of the frustrating things about Hillary in that campaign was how she couldn't articulate a position that transcended bits of policy positions cobbled together. She might have been great with details, but she had no way to present the big picture. It stood in stark contrast, not only with Obama who came in with a big picture vision of hope, but also her husband an ex-President Bill who was marvellous at presenting a picture of where he wanted to go.
After that election, I browned off from the idea of Hillary Clinton as presidential candidate. This year's run was always on the cards since that defeat in July, but you never really saw that she became a better candidate in the intervening 8years. The public office record of Hillary Clinton is actually much shorter than her public profile. In 2002 she became a Senator for New York state, and ran for POTUS in 2008, after which she managed to get a seat at the cabinet table for four years. During which time she presided over rather hawkish events in Libya as well as Syria with a dose of shooting Osama bin Laden. So, really she had 10years as a public official, added on to which she was First lady for 8years, but that's really not a political office so much as a ceremonial seat. She was short on experience, on top of being a not very good salesperson for her policy position.
And yet, this is the person the Democratic National Committee chose to line up behind, and to the extent that they gerrymandered their own system so well (i.e. by hobbling Bernie Sanders' legitimate campaign), the DNC in fact set the whole world up for this marvellous bit of political failure we see today.
The DNC has a lot to answer for. Yet, it's clear Hillary was the Regressive Left's candidate from day one, and here we are, watching that project burned down to the ground. I'm just wondering if any of these Regressive Left types are going to take note, let alone understand the significance.
Because Bernie Would've Beaten Trump
This was one of the crucial things about the Bernie Sanders candidacy - as an outsider, he was in position to take a sledgehammer to the machine that made so many voters unhappy and outside. Of course, that would have meant the DNC would lose out on its vested interests as well, so they decided the safer candidate was Hillary Clinton. It overlooked the fact that the electorate was looking for a big change. Theft that the electorate was looking for a big change probably goes to the heart of what's wrong with the DNC. If you ask the DNC, they would tell you that the 8 years of Obama's presidency were an outright success. If Obama's presidency were such a success, why are there so many people unhappy and on the outside?
Obama's presidency was a massive attempt to shore up the status quo in the wake of the GFC. If you lost your life savings the GFC, and then never recovered it during the anaemic growth of the last8 years, then you might not be so positively disposed towards President Obama. Combine that with being called a racist any time you object to any of his policies, and maybe you start getting a picture of how vast swathes of white flyover-land might have decided they wanted a big change. As an encore to the Obama administration, the DNC managed to pick the candidate who promised in no uncertain terms that she was for more of the same.
As for Bernie, he was addressing the grassroots and they were responding. It is not hard to believe that those same people might have voted Trump to punish the DNC, or simply stayed home. The DNC will want to blame them, but they would be wrong. They had a candidate who could make inroads into the real plight of the American people, and they decided they wanted the pre-fab apparatchik. They've only got themselves to blame.
End Of The Clinton Dynastic Politics
I write the subheading, mostly in hope. Just as we don't need more Bushes, we don't need more Clintons running for high office. Age would suggest it would be unlikely that Hillary would run for office again. I guess Bill would want Chelsea to run for President one day, but that's exactly the problem, the dynastic politics begets the kind of corruption that hobbled Bernie Sanders' campaign, which in turn hobbled the Democratic Party. You don't get something for nothing in the world of politics.
The election machine of the Clintons would likely stay in place, and maybe somebody can ride upon it to challenge Trump next time; that's entirely conceivable, for it's hard to imagine the Clintons bowing out of politics completely, or for them to abandon the apparatus that so efficiently delivered Hillary to the doorstop o theWhite House this time. Yet in all honesty, we're sick of the dynastic politics and the American electorate is showing signs it wants to move on.
It's Not One Thing
There's this vein of critique doing the rounds that the Trump victory proves that America is one racist nation, or that it is one sexist nation. I would warn people from trying to compress the entire meaning of the Trump victory into a trite one-liner.
I confess I do find it a little amusing that the women who are shocked by this are saying this like this:
Many women in the empty Javits Center concluded that the country was sexist and rejected Clinton in a large part because she was a woman -- and was now headed backwards when it came to women’s rights.Maybe the electorate simply don't buy any of your discourse? I know, it's hard to believe, but maybe the brand of academic feminism that places such an importance on Hillary being a woman is exactly the wrong kind of intellectual tool to understand what people didn't vote for her. My two cents would be to suggest that it's not that these people don't value these things, it's that they value other things more - and a vote for one or the other candidate is an incredibly un-nuanced tool to dissect thought.
“If Hillary Clinton were a man, tonight would be a much different night,” said Dana Nicolette, who manages a wellness center on Martha’s Vineyard. “Do people not know what autonomy over our own body means? They haven’t read history books? I have no words. I have no idea. I don’t know how as a woman, you could vote for that person who I don’t even want to say their name right now.”
Not even the KKK are voting Trump on just the race issue alone. They are likely voting on a whole range of issues. Similarly, there are non-racists voting for Trump and for that matter non-sexists, non-misogynists and non-capitalists even. The above kind of academic feminist discourse attempts to label-and-shame these people when it is exactly what foments their resentment towards the 'elite' who push Hillary Clinton their way.
Indeed, the label-them-and shame-them routine that has become the staple of the internet era radical feminism is in essence driving more people away from their candidate than it attracts them. The reductio ad absurdum of such electorate support is 100% of the women vote, but 0% of men vote. You'd still only get to a split result with 50% of the population; and frankly presidential politics has to be much bigger than that.
Equally it can be observed that if Trump's support truly were white, male, and old, he shouldn't have enough of a constituency to get to 25%. The fact that he got over 50% in enough electorates clearly demonstrates he wasn't a candidate that could be boxed into this kind of discourse. It's not like Trump is some Mens' Rights Activist either.
Making Trains Run On Time
Before Mussolini tagged up with Hitler, he had along run presiding over a growing Italian economy. The fascist playbook of state and corporate interests looking for synergies while marching a lot of people around actually did okay. Could have done better? Possibly - but there were real reasons why Fascism found adherents around the globe, as a competing ideology to communism. Of course, Mussolini's better moments have been summarised as "he made the trained run on time," so we should all take it with a grain of salt.
Now, I'm NOT a fan of fascism, but in President Donald Trump, we have to understand that his policies are fascist, and so we have to parse how this might play out. If we're lucky, he won't appoint himself dictator, and when he does leave office, he just might have presided over some economic growth. That wouldn't be something to sniff at; but to get to that point, he's going have to break some eggs in the classic fascist playbook. One imagines Wall Street is in for a surprise.
I'm also not being hopeful; instead I'm offering up the tiny possibility that Trump's time in power is not going to be a total and utter loss.
Having to go through Mussolini's track record to find some hope is a tough call, I admit.
No comments:
Post a Comment