WTF just happened? is a question being asked around the world after the US Presidential election.
In some places it is a cause for celebration and no doubt Vladimir Putin’s entourage is breaking open the vodka and getting ready for a second celebration when Trump stops the Ukraine war in one day – as he has promised – by giving Putin whatever he wants.
The Age summed up the situation with a headline, Here’s Donny, referencing the film The Shining and the line made famous by Jack Nicholson.
It said: “He is a man guilty of 34 felonies, twice impeached by the House, accused of racism, misogyny and inciting a riot. But for the second time Donald J Trump will become President of the United States of America.”
But that rather misses the point by neglecting the most important – question – why did it happen? To answer that we need to go back decades.
After WWII much of the Western world seem to herald a new era of peace, cooperation and consumerism– quickly overtaken by US-Soviet rivalry and a succession of wars – many of them launched by the US. The US was defined by a belief in exceptionalism, divine inspiration and – inevitably – hubris.
Nevertheless, for much of the Western world the post-war decades were paradisical compared with previous eras – secure jobs, increased access to housing, almost universal car ownership and even trips to the Moon.
But much of that changed with a succession of leaders – Thatcher, Reagan, Blair, Brown, Hawke, Keating and others – who were obsessed with ‘reform’ more generally known as neo-liberalism. Society was to be more competitive, freer, more entrepreneurial and no longer held back by publicly owned services.
Privatisation was a mania where everything which could be sold off was sold off. The UK water industry is one notorious example of the consequences of that. Australians might also ask whether Qantas has been better as a private company than as a nationally-owned one.
It would take a massive volume to detail all the examples of privatisation, deregulation and the consequences of it all.
The only problem was that an awful lot of people got left behind. Public schools were deprived of funds while private schools built swimming pools; union dominated workplaces were attacked and replaced by casualisation, insecurity and lower wages; and, meanwhile markets boomed (with the odd crash in between) and inequality – which had been progressively reduced in the postwar period – grew.
In every western country there emerged a left behind class which became resentful and angry. The left behinds lived in places where services were poor, jobs were insecure and traditional social hierarchies were overturned. For the US South it was voting rights for African Americans. In Australia and the US it was long-haired protestors against the Vietnam War and in recent years – the legions of woke people.
A cynic would argue that wokeness was a plot by the ruling classes to get young people obsessed with pronouns while they got on with raping and pillaging the environment. It served a double purpose for conservatives – an opportunity to ridicule claims about climate change and other progressive policies while simultaneously appealing to a past in which everyone knew their place and didn’t challenge the status quo.
Conservatives – perhaps more correctly called reactionaries – were more successful than progressives in framing what and who had caused these problems. The whole process was turbo-charged by pernicious social media from which the Elon Musk’s of the world now stand to benefit hugely.
Demagogues – from Trump to Viktor Orban – surfed the wave. Possibly Dutton will be next – aided by the hapless Albanese unable to develop or articulate progressive policies.
In a Trump second coming US evangelicals saw an opportunity to make the US more godly. For progressives amazed that they would choose Trump as vehicle for this, his sinning and later embrace of the Bible were ample evidence that he was a messenger from God who had seen the light and would spread it.
This election was those evangelicals victory. To them the determination to abandon welfare policies; repeal Obamacare; deport migrants; impose economy threatening tariffs; and give government roles to grifters and sleazes was a small price to pay for their victory – or indeed yet more well-deserved attacks on the ungodly and progressives.
For the left-behinds Trump was their hero because he was believed to fight against all the ‘elites’ the left-behinds hated. Faced with pollsters they may have lied about their preferences (witness how wrong the polls were) or polling methodology more probably just missed a whole category of voters who are generally missed out of the story of US exceptionalism.
The irony – or perhaps the tragedy – is that those who secured the Trump victory, will soon discover that things will probably get worse. If they do the blame will not be put on Trump but on the Others.
Meanwhile if you think the immediate future under Trump is horrific just imagine if this overweight, junk food consumer, cognitively impaired President drops dead or is incapacitated JD Vance will become President. He may well be worse than Trump because he is smarter than him.