Trumped

It has been an extraordinary seven days. In common with many, I did not really sleep last Tuesday night, after the possibility dawned that Trump might actually win. A racing mind followed a racing heart. The following day, rainy and miserable, I made the wise choice to head to the city for some tourism and art therapy. It was interesting to observe how life seemed to carry on as normal. And three times during the day, artistic performances and rehearsals transported me from gloom – just as art at its best can.

The result was stunning, and opinion polls have once again proven fallible in the age of the internet. But for me a narrow Clinton win would have been almost as stunning, only not in its implications. Even if Clinton had won, over fifty million people would have voted for Donald Trump, a man almost everyone I know would consider manifestly unfit for any office, let alone president. How could this happen and what does it mean?

There has been some excellent writing about this during the final weeks of the campaign. Lexington in The Economist has been good, but Time magazine, for a change, has been better. Three articles caught my eye – one long essay about the end of truth, an opinion piece by the reliably excellent Joe Klein and a tongue-in-cheek effort by Joel Stein.

The long essay covered a topic that has been getting plenty of airtime, but explored it in great detail. Even fifteen years ago, there were limited outlets for current affairs, and these were largely honest, widely read, and fully trusted. Fox might have been a bit to right of NBC, and ITN a bit racier than the BBC, but all were careful to maintain balance and to base their journalism on fact. Tabloids stretched things further, but even they stayed within broad boundaries wherein opinion was separated from claimed fact.

In that environment, politics was about establishing policy differences and making these resonate with voters. We had manifestos, policy documents and evidence. All this has broken down, outside of marginalised publications such as the ones I read or watch, which most people find dull, irrelevant and condescending. Instead we have talk radio, blogs and services such as Breitbart, in which the agenda is everything and the evidence nothing. In as much as we choose to follow current affairs at all, we select services to feed our biases, and amplify that through social media, generally from people with similar bias. The article explained the extent to which this change has happened, and exposes the motivations of some actors (including Trump himself). Sadly it offered few solutions. Finding some has suddenly become an urgent task for society.

Trump’s campaign understood this new world and exploited it brilliantly. People like me, the so-called elite, observed it but underestimated it. To us, every gaffe or exposure of Trump made him less electable, and we waited with increasing frustration and bemusement for everyone to get the message. Poor old David Brooks on PBS initially saw a Trump ceiling at about 20% of Republican primary voters, and then had to increase his ceiling month after month, though never to the level that actually prevailed last Tuesday.

Joe Klein took this further, predicting that Trump’s campaign would change communication forever. While hating Trump’s content and method, he observed that Clinton’s communication, copying tried and trusted methods from the last fifty years, was stale to the point of rottenness. Nothing she said had not been tested on focus groups or moulded by committees, and it showed. Often, nothing was said at all, notably about e-mails or her other vulnerabilities. The language was that of the weasel, coming across as manipulative, condescending, inauthentic and filtered. This, combined with the obvious truth that no recent politician had actually got around to implementing much that they claimed to aspire to, doomed her message for a large segment of the public. And it consigned that method of campaigning to the dustbin. Klein is hopeful for how the next generation of really engaging politicians could use this new reality to create lasting energy. That becomes another urgent challenge for society.

Lexington took a historical perspective, and found that electorates, and especially Americans, are always roused by the idea of defending what they see as special and theirs. So a campaign that played up risks of terrorism and national decline was always likely to resonate.

Stein’s article adds another linked dimension. The prevailing wisdom among the elites was that the campaign was content free, and that this was a bad thing. We nerds love minutiae about tax and healthcare. But how many voters seek to understand much about these things? Stein posits that actually this election was all about content, basic content that had been swept under the carpet in previous campaigns, content about attitudes to race, globalism and societal norms. I struggle to accept this completely, but I would, wouldn’t I? It is certainly a fascinating claim.

If Stein is right, perhaps the abiding messages from the election are about defending a way of life and readiness for social change. Most of us in New York, Chicago, LA or San Francisco, living in open and diverse cities, think that it is now beyond debate that we should take a global view, accept our fellow humans in whatever shade of colour, creed or sexuality they wish to present, and to push towards gender equality. This has become axiomatic for us and for the Clinton campaign, and we can bully and patronise people who are not ready to accept these things.

We forget that most people do not share the benefit of our urban experiences. Sometimes, we forget that most of us were not always like we are now, indeed by our current standards we were racists and homophobes maybe only ten years ago. And it is too simple to categorise American as urbanites and cowboys. Last weekend I visited Greenville in South Carolina for a wedding. A lot of America is like Greenville, a wealthy, well-kept town with a large hinterland, welcoming smiles and modestly conservative values. Most people will go regularly to church. There is a thriving restaurant scene, some integration and some tolerance, but people fear their comfortable way of life being threatened and they certainly don’t like to be lectured or patronised, far less considered deplorable.

Lexington had these people in mind. So perhaps did Joel Stein. They are behind urbanites in their values, but does them make them hateful racists? They probably see the urban elites as going too far, too fast, and resent what they feel is characterisation as backward rednecks (with their beloved parents even worse). They probably think a world where there needs to be separate toilets for every letter in an ever-lengthening acronym is a bit weird. This doesn’t make them right, but it might explain their votes. We social liberals can draw comfort that history is on our side – we will just need to be a bit more patient than we thought. But we might think a bit harder about our judgments in the meantime.

Many such people will have concluded that Trump himself was just grandstanding, and that any outsider, even a distasteful one, might do better than yet another regular, sneering politician. The fact that Trump seems already to be backtracking on most of his policies might even mean they are partially right. There will also be Latinos who themselves resent other immigrants abusing the rules, black voters fed up with softness towards gangs and spongers, and women who think boys will be boys but that uppity women are even worse.

In any case, here we are. I am fearful for the future, but find I have another 52% (well, 49% this time) to find respect for, for the second time this year. There are some good possible outcomes domestically – only a Trump would have a hope for a grand bargain on something like tax and entitlements, by setting himself up as some sort of referee. Internationally, it is harder to be optimistic, and the bad scenarios are very bad indeed.

And, while there will undoubtedly be victims from this reverse, liberals might be able to learn and to come back stronger once again. There will be more good journalism to chew on in the coming weeks, gritted teeth and sour taste notwithstanding. And plenty of food for thought for blogs.