States of Matter. The American horror story

As the shock result of the US presidential election began to unfold late Tuesday, Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman wondered if its underlying message was simply that the US was “a failed state and society”. Another commentator, a veteran of several past Republican administrations, fretted that the victory of a “disordered personality” meant that seething incivility had finally broken the surface, irretrievably rending the social fabric.

Autopsies of the Hillary Clinton campaign have concluded it failed to discern the undertone of resentment against a political establishment seemingly indifferent to livelihood anxieties. And the electoral map that emerged on Tuesday bore out this diagnosis. Donald Trump, a candidate whom incumbent US President Barack Obama had repeatedly dismissed as “unfit” for the job, had ridden to victory by a mass switch of voting allegiance in the American Midwest, the rust belt where symbols of industrial might today lie in disrepair and once busy working communities sunk in despair.

It was a region that responded to Obama’s message of hope in 2008 after scam artistes on Wall Street had created a global financial crisis. Obama requited his obligations by promoting a stimulus plan and a bailout for critically endangered industries in the Midwest. He staunched the bleeding well enough to earn a second term in office and now ends his White House tenure with historically high approval ratings.

It seemed that the Democratic party needed only to embrace the Obama legacy to earn another term in the White House. That may have been a viable strategy, except for the enthusiasm deficit. Because of her long years in public life and the attack machine assembled by the Republican right-wing, Clinton, through the campaign, was the target of incessant vilification.

“Crooked Hillary” was Trump’s normal reference to his opponent, and his rallies — laden with solipsistic banality and vacuous boasts — only sparked to life when the faithful were roused to chants of “lock her up”. Clinton did little to fire back, allowing Trump’s sordid record of business scams, tax cheating and sexual misconduct, exposed in steady driblets by the press, to speak for itself.

Three inept performances followed in the presidential debates, showing Trump up as a person fully deserving the honour of “unfitness” for office. A severe drubbing seemed his inevitable fate, when, with eight days left for election day, James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, chose to make public a trove of messages which he felt may have a bearing on Clinton’s use of an unauthorised mail server during her tenure as Secretary of State. In the week that followed, the race tightened as Trump rubbed in the message — patently absurd, as it turned out — that a Clinton presidential term would be an unending Constitutional gridlock.

Finally, there was an undercurrent of support for Trump’s racist rhetoric, a political leaning that dared not speak its mind, except within the secret confines of the polling booth. Virtually every opinion poll taken in the days before the election had Clinton leading in the so-called “battleground states”, where allegiances were flexible between Republicans and Democrats. On election day, the shift to Trump was largely within the margin of error of all the polls, but amazingly consistent across virtually all battleground states. Coupled with a flipping of allegiance of traditionally Democratic states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, that allowed Trump to run away with a comfortable majority in the electoral college while losing the national vote by roughly 200,000.

Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House of Representatives, chose to sequester himself from the Trump campaign because of the risks of associating with an ideologically dodgy and politically unsavoury character. When he emerged from his isolation to congratulate the unlikely winner, Ryan used a strange and opportunistic locution: Trump, he said, had won because “he heard those voices out there which were otherwise not being heard”.

It would clearly have been more appropriate to say that by giving voice to sentiments that dared not express themselves in the public realm, Trump unfettered the politics of resentment in a way that will have fateful consequences for civility within US society.

When Obama was elected the first African-American president, the joke going around in a world on the edge of an abyss, thanks to decades of financial excess, was that he had assumed a job that no white man was willing to take. And Obama’s key achievement over eight years may have been to restore a semblance of sanity to a global order thrown into deep turmoil by decades of unbroken right-wing ascendancy in the US. Republican presidents cast in the Reagan mould had been in power for all but eight of the years that followed 1980. De-industrialisation, begun under Reagan, was well advanced and finance and information technology had emerged as the dominant sectors. Inequalities were growing rapidly as the US went from being the world’s largest capital exporter in the 1970s to chronic deficits ever since.

Trump has no solutions. If anything, his taxation plan will exacerbate inequalities, without yielding the resources to implement his declared ambitions in infrastructure and inner cities development. His trade plan, which is nothing but a relapse into 1930s-style protectionism, will disrupt global flows and considerably diminish the incentive that China, the European Union and other surplus economies have to fund the US deficit.

Multiplying social fractures and rising discontent seem inevitable. And if like demagogues before him, Trump seeks to compose domestic discord by diverting the destructive energies elsewhere, the current global turmoil would seem like a passing triviality, a mere way station towards years of chaos.

Sukumar Muralidharanis an independent writer and researcher based in Gurgaon

COMMENT NOW