Take Out the Clowns
In May this year I posted a comment on my blog – ‘Can Trump Do It?’ – musing on the prospects of a Trump re-election in November.
(See https://www.mikeberrywriting.com/mike-berry-blog/2020/5/30/can-trump-do-it )
I’ve just reread this piece in the aftermath of the outcome and tumultuous events of 3rd November. I somewhat cautiously – ‘courageously’ — said back in May that Trump probably couldn’t win again. I was cautious because I had been wrong in 2016, like many others. I was optimistic because I thought that the peculiar convergence of factors, the perfect storm, that delivered a Trump victory in 2016 was highly unlikely to arise again. The voters had had four years to experience the man in action. He had continued to focus on his base, that diverse collection of distressed white working class and small town voters, committed libertarians, struggling farmers and small business owners, wealthy business interests and older Americans. His actual as opposed to overhyped achievements in office were modest. He didn’t build the great big wall. He didn’t drain the swamp. He didn’t improve the lives of his supporters, other than those high income earners who stand to pocket all of the long term benefits of his tax cut legislation. And he did nothing to gain control of the pandemic that has cost more than a quarter of a million American lives, and counting. Surely that would be enough to easily see him off. It wasn’t.
But Trump had the benefits of incumbency and made ruthless use of executive power to choose compliant public servants/sycophants, sacking them like faux-apprentices when they failed to deliver what he demanded – namely, unqualified loyalty to the person of the chief and an ability to carry out, if not anticipate every Trumpian whim. (In this game the champion apprentice was Rudy Giuliani.) His re-election campaign, to the extent that it expressed a strategic aim, bore down on the electoral system, seeking to delegitimise the time-honoured mechanisms and norms that had overseen the routine selection and succession of presidents for more than a century. It was not sufficient to leave the usual forms of Republican Party voter suppression to red state legislatures and executive officers.
He continued to sideline and dismiss critics, demonise opponents, attack the mainstream media, ignore expert advice, stack judicial appointments and attempt to subvert long established norms and rules. He floated the idea of delaying the November 2020 election and attacked the US postal system as incapable of handling the expected flow of mail-in votes, while at the same time installing an expert in voter suppression to run it down. He or his cronies appear to have accepted well in advance that he couldn’t win if all registered voters were allowed to vote. As election day drew near his threats grew, more frantic, promising to reject any result that did not result in his victory. Local businesses boarded up their front windows. Police forces were mobilised. The White House was protected by a ring of steel. Gun sales and bullet-proof vests boomed.
In the end, the centre held. After the most brazen and bizarre campaign since the nineteenth century, Donald J. Trump was defeated at the polls in November 2020. Trump will fight to the end, deploying every delaying legal and underhand tactic available. On the day after the election, his Vice-President began to solicit donations to fund the succession of legal challenges to the outcomes in vital swing states. He claimed victory in one of his most bizarre performances in the wee hours of November 4th. But failing an event of pandemic-like proportions, his time is almost up. He has been run down by the tortoise-like shuffle of an even older white man. The gamble by the Democratic Party establishment appears to have paid off. Trump will not concede and will use the next few weeks until Biden takes the oath of office from Chief Justice Roberts on January 20th next to wreak as much damage as possible on American society and the people who failed to recognise and accept this very stable genius. Prepare for a verbal scorched earth policy. He is constitutionally incapable of accepting defeat. His brittle personality recoils from the very suggestion. He will eventually leave the White House, still proclaiming victory over the ‘losers’ of life, blaming everyone but the man he sees in the bathroom mirror. He will return to his true love, building and exploiting his brand.
He could run again for president in 2024. But that assumes that he could maintain the rage and control of the Republican party, bristling with younger members eager to have a crack at the top job and party seniors happy with the achievement of tilting the Supreme Court markedly to the right; content also to use their Senate majority to frustrate the Biden administration until the Mid-terms, with an eye to 2024. For movement conservatives, Trump has completed his God-given task. One intriguing possibility is that Trump could form and market his own political movement and stand as an independent in 2024. There is a precedent here; Theodore Roosevelt stood as a minor party candidate and lost in 1912, splitting the Republican vote and handing victory to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
Trump’s political success and his seemingly aimless and frankly bizarre twitter-blitz has always bemused liberal opponents, and often wrong-footed them. “A politically inspired focus on Trump’s instinctive illiberalism and chronic mendacity deflects attention from a final paradox: namely, that he is inflicting the greatest and most enduring damage on American democracy not by lying continuously but by telling truths selectively, especially half-truths with which liberals are inclined to agree”, so say Krastev and Holmes In their book, The Light That Failed. By focusing his base upon their obvious contemporary economic distress, he is able to pivot attention on the undeniable facts of rising economic inequality and insecurity associated with liberal internationalism and the elites driving these outcomes, while hiding the processes actually causing inequality and insecurity and keeping the identities of the true beneficiaries, the one per cent (and the political use of their wealth), in the dark. It is a bait and switch act of breathtaking audacity. Hacker and Pierson, in their book, Let ‘Em Eat Tweets, term this dynamic outcome, ‘plutocratic populism’, heralding a political menage of money, outrage and identity. The same on a less spectacular scale underpins the rise of right wing populism in Europe and the outcome of the Brexit result, in particular. Failure of liberals to recognise and deal with the fact of increasing immiseration and marginalisation throws the support of the miserable and marginalised behind a persuasive demagogue. The only essential difference between Trump and contemporaries like Hungary’s Orbán is that Trump acts instinctively not strategically. It is his peculiar personality and political psychology that is in the driver’s seat.
The long term impact of the Trump disruption will take time to become apparent. The conservative swing of the Supreme Court will almost certainly influence the shape of American politics and society for years, possibly decades to come. The ultra-partisanship and Trumpian-McConnell character of the Republican Party is likely to linger long in the large shadow of its instigators. Trump himself was simply a political chancer who happened to find a way of promoting his brand by acting as the front man for movement conservatives led at the legislative level by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. For the GOP’s wealthy supporters, Trump was a ‘useful idiot’ who conveniently delivered the tax cuts that, if left intact, will intensify the inequalities of power and fortune that disfigure American democracy. However, his mercifully short occupancy of the White House on the back of minority voter support presages the very real threat of a future authoritarian takeover by a competent and thus much more dangerous autocrat.
The Republican leadership has pioneered a new model of representative democracy – minority government – a large minority to be sure, 48 per cent or so. And they have accomplished this by putting into effect the aristocratic intentions of the framers of the US Constitution, those highly educated, rich, slave-owning gentlemen of Virginia who imposed a system of ‘checks and balances ‘designed to frustrate the will of the uneducated majority, otherwise known as the dangerous classes. The conservative check on progressive legislation is ensured by, first, the over-representation of small states in the Senate, second, by the indirect selection of the president in the electoral college and third by a Supreme Court whose composition can be progressively tilted to the right. It looks like President Biden will be forced to govern with a Republican controlled Senate majority prepared to do what the Congress did to President Obama – namely, block, block, block. Biden will also face a Supreme Court stacked with freshly minted right-wingers set to rule against existing precedents that have the support of clear majorities of Americans, notably Roe v Wade.
So, the past decade has demonstrated the systematic bias of America’s democracy towards minority rule, embedded in the Constitution and reinforced by socioeconomic, demographic, geographic and political trends. But the turbulent history of the republic that has survived wars, foreign and domestic, economic depressions, assassinations and gun massacres, a series of crackpot political movements and the would-be monarchical conceits of self-promoted saviours, suggests that the train will roll on for some time yet. The death of American democracy has been much exaggerated. But, to quote another nineteenth century luminary after victory against a real dictator, “it was a close-run thing.” Next time may end differently. Trumpism has underscored the many failings of the American experiment unleashed by the Founding fathers at the turn of the modern age. The next Trump – hard as it is to believe – may be much worse, because much smarter. Can Western democracy survive rule by minority government?
The Biden administration’s most urgent task will be to use whatever leverage occupancy of the White House and control of the House of Representatives and state legislatures grants it to substantially renovate America’s ramshackle electoral system in order to remove the barriers that systematically thwart the electoral will of the majority. This won’t be easy, but failure here invites another Trump. Beyond that, the Democratic Party will need to really address the underlying patterns of class inequality and exclusion that power America’s particular form of right wing populism. The fact that the blue wave failed to arrive, and Trump garnered 70 million votes, means that 2016 was not an aberration. If the Democrats don’t act to reconnect with the disaffected and scorned and conquer the myth of meritocracy and complacent self-congratulatory hubris of the liberal elites, the Democratic dawn will fade again to black. This might have happened had a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren won the Presidency drawing on programs like the Green New Deal and building links with progressive networks like the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025.
Can Biden do it?
BUT Wait, there’s more! Various commentators have pointed to a nightmare scenario, consistent with Trump’s norm-busting performance on election night. Suppose he so delays and muddies the election result that the Supreme Court dominated by conservative justices, three of whom owe their elevation to him, intervenes and decides to award the election to Trump? Unlikely but possible. Or what about if the delays prevent the electoral college from making a formal choice in time, as happened twice in the nineteenth century, and the decision is thrown to the House of Representatives? Then Trump would win because all states have a single vote and there are more red than blue states there. Or what if one or more of the red states turned blue like Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia send Republican electors to the electoral college to vote against the majority result in their states? Conversely, what if the Democrats win the two run-off Senate races in Georgia, tying the count at fifty all, throwing the Senate to the Democrats on the casting vote of its president, Vice-President Kamal Harris? Enough I hear you say. Let’s wait and see if we are witnessing the death of the American experiment, Bye-Bye Miss American pie.
Postscript. The Australian media is saturated with the American election. This is understandable given our unofficial status as the 51st state and long term ally. A widely respected Australian political journalist described Trump as ‘the ringmaster of a circus tent