To put Donald Trump's president-electhood into perspective, I have been rereading my overthumbed John Micklethwait's and Adrian Woodridge's 'The Right Nation: Why America is Different.' Published in 2005, The Right Nation is a remarkably perspicuous book about how America, despite lapses of liberal-seeming regimes (both Democrat and Republican), is essentially a conservative country, politics-wise. I have found some of the passages of the book eerily relevant to recent events. Below is one: 'As for elitism, rather than dreaming about creating an educated 'clerisy' (class, if you will), the Republicans ever since the 1960s have played the populist card. Richard Nixon saw himself as the champion of the "silent majority." In 1988, the aristocratic George HW Bush presented himself as a defender of all-American values against the Harvard Yard liberalism of Michael Dukakis. In 2000, George W Bush, a president's son who was educated at Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School, played up the role of a down-to-earth Texan taking on the might of Washington.' Reading the book before Trump's tricky victory, I realised that this passage had melted into the larger analysis of American politics, but now it leaps out at me. Donald J Trump is the last in the gallery of Republican presidents who rode to power through the agency of crass populism. I say crass, but in one form or another, populism seems to have worked for these men, as evidenced by how they were able to harvest a number of American 'Belts'. There is the ever-dependable Bible Belt. The marginally moveable Rust Belt. The Gun-nutters' Belt. Amorphous White America Belt. And, particularly in the case of Trump, a sizable girth of Racist Belt, held up by sturdy and close-woven Braces of 'Deplorables.' Trump has been able to harness the hackneyed jingles of Republicanism, bellowing them from rooftops, haranguing from the tribune of tart politicking, he has been able to cram Nixon's 'silent majority,' Bush the Elder's 'all-American values,' and Bush the Younger's hail-fellow-well-met dudeishness into his 'make America great again' warcry. A few people have compared Trump with the slave-owning, Indian-hounding, frontiersmanlike Andrew Jackson, America's 7th president, a flighty and muddled comparison, but that is not my concern here. Anyway, the mugwumpish demiurge of the Democratic party had long been dead before the incubation and hatching of the ' Right Nation' in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Although loopier and kookier than his 'conservative' forebear, Trump took more than a few leaves out of the tract of Barry Goldwater, a Republican presidential candidate, in 1964. Goldwater opposed equal rights for blacks; he haughtily countervoted the Civil Rights Act. He was seen as a 'bigoted nut', and to a large extent, he was. Micklethwait and Woodridge sum him up: 'It wasn't just a question of extremism. Goldwater cheerfully broke all the basic rules of politics. He sometimes started speeches by listing all the people he didn't want to vote for him. He told an audience in Texas that an aeroplane contract should have gone to Boeing in Seattle rather than to a local company. He denounced Johnson's antipoverty program in poverty-stricken West Virginia... One fan created a soft drink called "Gold Water - The Right Drink for the Conservative Taste." With characteristic political sensitivity, the candidate (Goldwater) promptly spat it out. "This tastes like piss!" he spluttered. "I wouldn't drink it with gin." Needless to say, Goldwater was beaten by Lyndon B Johnson in the 1964 election. But then, it was a different America - or, shall we say, Uncle Sam. It was the Uncle Sam who could still see the difference between 'right-minded' and 'Right-minded,' uncynical Uncle Sam who hadn't developed a thick skin to nuance; conscientious Uncle Sam who was still mulling over ways to atone for past sins, who was still somewhat avuncular, trying as best as he could to commune with the ghost of Uncle Remus. At least in looks, Donald Trump is as different from Remus as possible. Even in temperament. For one thing, Trump is neither cuddly nor biddable. And for an heir to Goldwater, he is indeed a mutant, a Midas-pawed alchemist who has turned Barry Goldwater's baser ambitions into a frightfully garish reality. If anything, Trump is as loose-tongued as Goldwater, if not recklessly so. Because where Goldwater had only been antipoverty in impoverished West Virginia, Trump had told Iowans that they were stupid. But he had defeated Mrs Clinton in Iowa because Iowans had lapped up everything he said, including the slur. As it turned out, Trump's boast that he could shoot someone on New York's Fifth Avenue and get away with it is no hot air. He didn't shoot - or hasn't shot - anyone, but the way he was apotheosised during the campaigns, he would indeed have got away with murder. He disrespected women and boasted about abusing them, yet he got 53% of white women's votes. He called Mexicans rapists and ne'er-do-wells, yet 29% of Latinos voted for him. He lied, he bragged, he bullied. He taunted a disabled man. He faked piety, yet the majority of American Christians voted for him. He refused to release his tax records, yet almost half of the American electorate voted for him, with the fusty Electoral College system tipping the balance in his favour. This unlikely and considerably unlikeable monstre sacre is America's president-elect; he is now cakewalking towards the White House. One wonders what happened to Uncle Sam and the United States of America. Probably nothing. Or nothing. It is not as if Trump is a Satan-spurned golem let loose from far-flung badlands unconnected with America; he was birthed from the mouldering womb of the American body politic. Thomas Frank, that fantastic and prolific chronicler of the rise and rise of the American Right, is still pitching around for unambiguous answers in his books. Something stands out, though, as it does in the Right Nation: a discrete American character, a logic-shy New World ethos. Americans always yodel their exceptionalism - perhaps Trump is the exception that merely proves a slightly undifferentiated rule. The authors of The Right Nation got a few things right in the book - the pharisee politics of the Right, the Republican party's macropolitics, America's intrinsic conservatism, the lingering sainted odour of Ayn Rand, the ever-lurking hegemony of the Right - but even for them, a post-Platonic and cartoon-conservative figure like Donald Trump was difficult to adumbrate.
No comments:
Post a Comment