The root causes of Trump

The Republican Party of the USA will select Donald Trump as their presidential candidate in November’s election. Trump has dominated the news for so long that we should pause to take in the incredulity of this choice. At least he has not yet been elected president, but we should not be complacent about that either, no runner in a two horse race starts without hope and his opponent is vulnerable.

Trump is almost the antithesis of a credible president. He lacks integrity, gravitas, knowledge, experience or humility. For his entire career he has been a narcissistic bully. Given a $200 million loan to start his business by his Dad, he cannot hope to empathise with the lives of everyday Americans.

A strange thing has happened in serious news media. Journalists do not know how to balance their distaste and disrespect for Trump with their obligation to be objective, and many have broken ranks and become openly hostile. David Brooks and Michael Gerson, both generally leaning towards Republican arguments, have both described him as unfit.

Yet the bandwagon continues to roll and the wheels may stay on as far as the gates of the White House. It is worth trying to understand how this could possibly come about. Perhaps there are lessons to learn and not just tears to shed.

As I often find with this type of analysis, it is hard to separate proximate causes from root causes. I tried to write a list and to group it and to place genealogy lines to connect them. In the end I came up with three strands of argument, although they certainly overlap.

The proximate cause from the first strand is the appalling quality of the Republican field of candidates. There were seventeen, so it was hard for any to stand out without pandering to primary colour stereotypes. At one stage Ben Carson, who appears to possess no coherent relevant political thought whatsoever, was leading the field.

How could they be so bad? Apart from the fringe players, there were the tea party evangelical types and the establishment types. I can hardly be unbiased about the tea party types, but on this occasion they surpassed themselves by coalescing around as obnoxious a guy as I can imagine, Ted Cruz. Usually the wacky tea party guy will survive a long time in the process thanks to conservative core voters, but on this occasion he became the last man standing besides Trump, thereby giving Donald a free pass to the finish line, at a time when almost anyone vaguely literate and likeable could have stopped him at the last fence. This happened because the establishment field were out of touch and cancelled each other out and were generally pathetic.

How could this happen? Well, one strand of argument searches back through the US political system. The Republicans are a broad coalition of groups. Money and lobbying power matter a lot more than policy or competence. Acceptance from the more extreme end of the coalitions requires weaselled positions. Many voters in primaries are extremists, and career politicians must pander because the gerrymandered constituencies mean the risk to an incumbent comes from his own extreme flank. So in the end most become remote from the electorate, and sacrifice all principle to stay in power, which requires ever larger dollops of money from groups with vested interests and more extremists.

One ultimate cause of this is a two-party duopoly with huge barriers to being overturned. This trail ultimately leads back to the founding fathers bequeathing a system with unintended consequences. The leverage of the Supreme Court and the massive geographical disparity across the land entrench the duopoly, while the president has little direct domestic power, so must either be unduly cautious or some sort of bully. Theodore Roosevelt called it the bully pulpit, and Trump certainly has one necessary quality for that. What a shame that this trait can only spell disaster for foreign policy.

The second strand also starts with the pathetic candidates, but traces back towards a root cause of the Republican policy platform. There isn’t one, really. They have the social extremist agenda from anti-abortion, anti-LGBT and pro-gun wings. There is a paralysing commitment never to raise any tax – thereby condemning any necessary rebalancing or investments while forever growing the deficit. And there is vilification of democrats. They won the mid-terms on the simple platform that Obama was a despicable villain (and, sotto voce, black) and Obamacare a catastrophe, just because it includes the word Obama.

This lack of platform stifles any debate and more or less excludes authentic candidates. It has also sown the seed for Trump in another way. The Republican electorate is right to feel let down. The establishment politicians fail to act on anything substantial, talk mostly about archaic social irrelevances, pander to special interests and allow the economy to become ever more unequal. If I am a Republican, the Democrats cannot be the answer because Obama is the devil and Clinton some sort of witch. But my own lot seem to have let me down too. Time to support someone who is anti-establishment and who plays to my deeper nativist fears. What else is there?

Readers of this blog will be aware that I end up blaming Thatcher and Reagan for nearly everything, and here I go again. The absence of a coherent Republican platform springs directly from Reagan. The end of progressive taxation, the rise of greed and lobbying and the ballooning of debt started with Ronnie. He got lucky with the Cold War, and is now untouchable, even to centrists. The result is no credible Republican policy – and Trump.

The third strand has a proximate cause of celebrity culture. In the new world of social media and short attention spans, entertainment trumps fact or thought, and Trump is an undoubted master at playing this culture, lies and all. One specific part of this culture is the death of real news. TV news is now designed as an entertainment program, while radio news is little more than propaganda, so most Americans are not really exposed to any thoughtful portrayal of their country or the wider world, a vacuum ideally suited to Trump.

Apart from general technology trends, does anything else lie behind this third strand? Well, Hollywood and TV give the public what they want, and what the public wants is partly driven by their level of education. It surprises me how few Americans are able to see beyond bumper sticker portrayals, or have any curiosity to learn more.

How could this happen? Well a conspiracy theorist might suggest that this suits the elites and the military and other special interests (like whites), but I am not quite so cynical. Maybe generations of prosperity have made educators and parents lazy and complacent. Maybe also there is some denial and guilt at play – denial so that people don’t have to think too hard about their unsustainable, greedy lives and guilt about the legacy of racism and other national sins. For a nation of churchgoers, this is remarkable indeed, but the Church leaders have largely succumbed to big money too.

One deeper root cause for all of this might be what is called American exceptionalism. Lazy leaders pander to a thoughtless portrayal of the USA as somehow superior, and people feel good about that and don’t want to delve too deeply in case the image loses its gloss. Perhaps only an empire held together by tribal types of creeds could be so one-eyed, be so careless over education and allow its curiosity and humility to slide. The curse of empires runs deep – the UK hasn’t shaken it off yet, as evidenced by the crass stupidity of potential Brexit.

So we have three linked strands, each feeding the others. The entrenched system, the follies of Reagan and the curse of exceptionalism between them have led us to Trump. One benefit of root cause analysis is that it often signals antidotes – if these things caused Trump, maybe they can also cure us of him.

I am not optimistic. Both parties will shake the system and their coalitions after the disastrous 2016 campaigns, but there is insufficient momentum for change. It may take another generation for Republicans to move on from their beatification of the Gipper. Empires crumble slowly and painfully, and the last ones to notice and respond are always the subjects of those empires.

There is one other antidote to Trump, and that is Trump himself. We see it in Europe, when the fascists gain power they usually mess up and lose some allure. Even a near-Trump presidential experience might be enough for the next Sanders to break through. We can only but cross our fingers and hope, especially that Trump messing up might not include nukes. Or next time we could end up with president Kardashian.