Pearls and Irritations

Trump’s victory has exposed, for a second time, the failings of the entire US political system and its pursuit of a capitalist, imperialist agenda.

We need to look beyond conventional politics and policy to understand Trump’s triumph. The election was really about America’s declining quality of life.

When Donald Trump won the US presidency in 2016, upending the political establishment, it gave America a unique opportunity to examine closely what lay behind his victory, what was really ailing the country.

Instead, it spurned this chance for a deeper, wider inquiry. The liberal media and the Democrats devoted four years to trying to remove Trump from office. Trump’s relationship with the liberal media became one of mutual loathing and goading; it was hugely destructive. In showing such contempt for Trump, the liberal media also derided his supporters, deepening the national division they accused Trump himself of provoking.

Generally speaking, during Trump’s first term, liberal commentary took as a benchmark, a frame of reference, the old political status quo. It was as if they had forgotten the legitimate grievances that took him into office, and believed the task was to restore politics to what it had been before his election, even though everything had changed and needed to change. Much of the coverage implied that there was little wrong with the US that removing Trump would not fix.

The liberal media embraced Joe Biden’s election victory with sighs of relief over his centrist policies and a return to political normalcy. “Cometh the hour, cometh the man”, The Guardian proclaimed. But the story did not end with Trump’s eviction from the White House. The liberal media’s celebration of Biden’s victory was another aspect of their failure to understand how profoundly things were changing. Nothing had been settled.

I made these observations in a 2022 essay in the US magazine Salon. A short version was published in P&I. How will politics and the media respond to his second term?

Donald Trump’s resounding election victory this month should not have surprised us. He has an extraordinary ability to connect with people and to acknowledge their unease about their lives, their country and their future.

This unease goes deeper than the issues that the campaign focused on, such as the economy, immigration, abortion. These may be what politicians and commentators believe matter most. Even voters may say these are the things that mattered to them. But this is, at least in part, because this is what they are asked about – by pollsters, journalists and politicians. The parameters of debate are set for them, and debate framed on these terms. But I don’t believe people’s lives, the quality of their lives, can be captured so easily.

In my 2022 Salon essay and P&I article, I argued there are other ways of thinking about America and the challenges it faces. It was an attempt to think about what was happening from a different perspective. What I sought to articulate then, and seek to do again now, is the need to close the widening gap between a scientific view of the world and the prevailing political one, between a view that demands a transformation in our way of life if we are to meet the challenges we face, and an essentially business-as-usual politics.

My hope – and it may be a wishful, naive one given political realities – is that Trump represents a political focusing on this gap, an opening up of a potential for radical changes in political priorities. His decisive win, including gaining a clear majority of the popular vote, hints at this possibility, although you’d never know it from the mainstream commentary.

My interest is in why so many Americans voted for Trump, regardless of his character or his policies (such as they are). My analysis falls well outside mainstream political commentary in that it has to do with the entirety of the American way of life, not specific issues – economic, social or environmental. Thus, it goes beyond the domain of policy to embrace questions of vision and story. Trump’s slogan of “Make America Great Again” resonated because it acknowledged loss and decline, whatever the merit of his policies.

This wider, deeper frame of reference also explains the widespread mistrust, frustration and disillusionment with institutions, especially government, with their specific purposes and inevitable inertia. And it explains how Trump sidestepped this hostility Most political leaders are ‘organisation people’ chosen by their parties to represent their politics. Trump is not a party man; he chose his party and moulded it to fit his vision of America.

My perspective draws on my research and writing on population health and wellbeing, how we define and measure human progress, people’s views of humanity’s future, and the challenges of sustainability. It was Trump’s emergence on the US political scene in 2015-16, and the public and media response, that aroused my interest in applying my work to American politics.

My 2022 essay argued that a deepening divide existed between the American people and politicians and journalists, and it was this that Trump recognised, and the Democrats did not. I told a story about an America that existed largely beyond the serious attention of mainstream politics and news media. Instead, these institutions ignored or marginalised the story’s deeper significance, at a great cost to the country.

In other words, the story was not about the usual things that are said to have caused the crisis in American democracy: policy gridlock, electoral fraud, political corruption, even insurrection. Nor was it about the competition between the ideologies of capitalism and socialism, nor the various threats to democracy, such as autocracy, plutocracy, and kleptocracy.

The story drew on people’s profound disquiet about life in America, and on the existential challenges America faced, both physical and social. This condition was also true, to differing degrees, of other liberal democracies including Australia, and beyond.

I noted that when societies come under increasing pressure and strain, as they have today, they tend to fracture along traditional fault lines such as class, religion, ethnicity or race. Those in power promote and exploit these fractures. Profound public disquiet is easily manipulated, and expressed as more obvious or tangible grievances.

So while the inequalities and oppression faced by minorities have their own, legitimate, narratives, they can also reflect something more: liberal democracies today are floundering, seemingly incapable of dealing with today’s civilisational and global challenges – biophysical (eg, climate change), socio-economic (eg, growing inequality), and psychosocial (eg, the crisis in mental health).

This fracturing is especially apparent in America because of its susceptibility to a political focus on racial divisions and antagonism. This emphasis is obvious in recent politics, especially with Donald Trump and the far-right during the 2016 campaign. However, the Democrats also played on these divisions in the sense of using them for political leverage or gain – as revealed in Hillary Clinton’s infamous ‘basket of deplorables’ remark.

The danger in the fraying and fragmentation of public debate and discussion is that we lose sight of the bigger picture, and its more fundamental elements, with the result that we are caught up in perpetual conflicts over what are, at least in part, derivative or secondary causes and consequences.

The standpoint of ‘we are all in this together’ offers the advantage of creating more generous and tolerant ways of understanding today’s world, encouraging people to look past the rancour and conflict promoted by politicians and media, a condition that has become so entrenched and ingrained that it appears to be the natural and inevitable order of things.

We need to place the fundamental frameworks of how we understand the world at the centre of political debate. The interconnected risks facing humanity cannot be solved by focusing only on the discrete, specific issues that characterise and define today’s politics, however legitimate the concerns are in themselves.

Environmental writer and activist Joanna Macy expressed this opportunity succinctly the first time around: Trump’s election was ‘a very painful waking up’, she said; if Clinton had won, ‘we would have stayed asleep’. This was a relatively common view among environmental and leftist commentators, especially around the time of the election. They saw Trump’s victory as exposing the failings of the entire US political system and its pursuit of a capitalist, imperialist agenda. And they were scathing of the Democrats, notably Clinton and Obama, for their complicity and collaboration in this agenda.

It looks like America, and the rest of the West, including Australia, have been given a second opportunity to ‘wake up’. The 2024 election results reveal starkly the truth behind my comment three year ago that, ‘Nothing has been settled’.

Decades of political action and inaction have failed to meet the challenges posed by climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution and other environmental problems; growing technological anarchy where we lose or cede control of new technologies like AI; the growth of corporate political power and the concentration of wealth in fewer hands; the risk of spreading warfare, including nuclear war; and the emergence of a multipolar world in which America is no longer dominant.

These and other challenges pose a risk of societal and even civilisational collapse, as I have discussed in recent writing in Salon and P&I. It may already have begun. America and the West need a rupture or discontinuity in what people want, and who they want to be. This includes politically.

If Kamala Harris had won the election, America would have continued its “status quo” politics. Trump presents a conundrum. He could make things much worse. Or he might, just might, set the country a more constructive historical path. Out of the chaos of the times, something better might come.

What Trump does in his second term depends not only on him, but also on how the people, congress, the media and others respond. This response must be different from the way they reacted to his first term. It should accept the legitimacy of the deep-seated unease and disquiet that swept him into office, however flawed his policy responses might be.

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