There is a seismic shift occurring in America today. The current election has elucidated a sentiment in American politics, reflecting an evolution that has been building and is about to manifest in a new way. There is a fundamental feeling of frustration and mistrust of the US government. America is struggling to understand its place in the world and it’s the government’s relations to its populace. But why is this happening and what does it mean for the United States?
The overall feeling felt by many Americans today is emanating from two sources:
1. The failure of the American government to govern in a fair and equitable manner.
The failure to hold accountable those responsible for the sub-prime mortgage adventure has caused a fundamental mistrust of the government that permeates every level of the American public. This failure was viewed by much of the population as a profound unfairness and violation of the ‘American way’.
Bernie Sanders understood the American public’s feeling of this unfairness and identified a frustration in the center to left population. Sanders was honest about the fact that there are deep problems in America.
Donald Trump comes at it from a different angle. The Republicans have always been critical of ‘too much’ government and its powerful influence on the US. Their position has always been to diminish the involvement of government in the “free market” and in the life of US citizens. Trump capitalized on this feeling in the populace. As a businessman, he looked at the marketplace and saw a section of disenfranchised voters. He decided to engage them, since both parties did not view them as viable participants in the election landscape, and therefore, there was never any value in appealing to them. Instead, Trump decided to incite them. He spoke to them in a language legitimizing their experience of alienation and their perception of corruption within the US government. He gave a voice to ideas that for the first time were considered mainstream and legitimate. It addressed the core level of frustration and anger from the masses of conservative, white, lower income Americans. He legitimized a rhetoric that validated this cohort’s perception in order to engage a group of people who are not able to voice racist and sexist beliefs. The xenophobia that has been an unarticulated reality of the US, and that has been reinforced in the post 9/11 era, is now legitimate, thanks to Donald Trump. Many countries in Europe have also legitimized a politics that is built on isolation and hatred.
Trump took his cues from Republicans who came before. The party condoned any type of criticism of the Democratic government with no concern as to the moral impact. The result? They upped the ante. Trump went down a road that Republicans had never walked previously; he crossed a line that never before was crossed. He picked up where the Tea Party left off. This is the stuff of revolutions.
The French and the Russian revolutions began with ideologies that mobilized disenfranchised people. With each incarnation of a new leader, the revolutions became more radicalized, until the leaders of the revolutions looked very much like the thing that they were originally fighting against.
Trump’s politics are the seeds from which a revolution emerges.
I do not believe that Trump will succeed in this election; however, I do believe that he has fundamentally changed the political landscape of the United States. He has dislodged elements of predictability and reliability thereby limiting our understanding of the future.
The result of Trump’s politics is that anything is game. He is saying this is how the current government works, there are no rules, everyone cheats and you can’t trust them.’ Capitalizing on his position, he does just that. By using double speak and creating a narrative that reinforces the untrustworthiness of government, he makes real the very thing that he is condemning.
2. The United States is struggling for identity.
The Hillary Clinton camp is utilizing the post-World War Two vision of America; the one where the US government is a ‘principled and value’ driven country. It is an ‘ethical’ power in the world whose goal is to behave as a model to both its citizens and the world at large.
The competing version of this perspective is the Trump position, which believes that Clinton’s America does not exist and that the rhetoric of the past is simply the past. He argues that there is an essential dishonesty in US politics in the government’s failure to call out the reality of the inherent problems in America. This lack of governmental honesty requires America to come clean, own the problems and start to solve them. There is some truth to this position. This truth gives a certain legitimacy to Trump’s stance and erroneously leads people to believe that many of Trump’s other statements are true, when in fact, they are fallacies.
The polarity between the Clinton/Trump positions are at their core arguments about what America is today and how it wants to define itself in the future. Even if the candidates do not see their positions in this manner, they both represent critical differences in ideology about American identity and how it should move into the future.
The difficulty in these elections has partly been the fact that the two candidates are using very different visions of America. Trump’s fury at Clinton is representative of the deep anger inherent in a section of the American public, because of the failure of American politicians to address their needs. Clinton has been a politician for most of her life and thus is viewed as responsible for this failure. Clinton’s rhetoric that ‘we can do more because we are great and always have been’ is lost on many people because they don’t believe the message anymore.
America is at a crossroads of identity in its place in the world and position in history. It has tremendous domestic challenges and is faced with international security issues that have never existed before, because of the existence of technology that has empowered disenfranchised groups throughout the world. Perhaps the economic and security problems exist worldwide and it is playing out in the US election campaign.
Regardless of the reasons, the US election has given a mainstream voice to radical positions that were previously unacceptable in modern American politics. This voice will resonate no matter who wins and the US will have to decide who it wants to be in the face of mistrust and alienation by the American people and perhaps the world at large.