Delusional Politics

by Hardeep Singh Puri

  Trump’s public humiliation by the President of the United States was, in a sense, a harbinger of things to come. It might even have influenced the character of Trump’s presidential campaign, which he announced four years later.

  In an analysis of the 2011 White House Correspondent’s Dinner, Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker writes, ‘For the politics of populist nationalism are almost entirely the politics of felt humiliation—the politics of shame.’ 8 Trump’s ensuing presidential campaign did just this. His campaign’s populist rhetoric leveraged the humiliation that the American right believed it had experienced at the hands of the left. He played to the ears of a populace ignored by the tide of the western liberal democratic order; a populace seeking freedom from a growing leftist voice that sought to shame and alter their way of life.

  It is far-fetched to assert that Trump’s pursuit of the US Presidency originated from a single night in the Washington Hilton hotel in 2011 over some one-liners. In an interview with the Washington Post during his presidential campaign, Trump stated, ‘There are many reasons I’m running, but that’s not one of them.’ 9 But as Trump’s public persona slowly evolved into a treasure trove for entertainment and jest, his self-alleged thick skin grew lean. Stack upon stack of jeers and taunts ushered Trump towards his eventual realization: ‘Unless I actually ran, I wouldn’t be taken seriously.’ 10

  The question then remains: How did a satirized businessman’s efforts to gain public stature 11 result in the restructuring of US politics and policy?

  This chapter seeks to trace and understand the hidden social conditions in the US—conditions predating Trump’s political pursuits—of which Trump was merely an enabler for public reveal. It attempts to dismantle and examine the post-Trumpian leftist mantra: Trump is the symptom, not the virus.

  It is entirely possible that the United States had not fully absorbed an internationalist African-American as President and was not prepared to break the glass ceiling for a first female president. In the final analysis, the Electoral College was won or lost on just 107,000 votes in three states in the Rust Belt 12. What this requires is that the undercurrent of angst be separated from why the election was won or lost. The ‘angst’ has to be addressed. Public opinion, like the proverbial pendulum, will swing the other way.

  Brewing Angst

  On 8 November 2016 when it was clear that Trump was going to carry the Electoral College, our younger daughter Tilottama was, like many others, baffled. I had predicted the victory of the presidential candidate. Her disbelief was echoed throughout New York, where I attended an election-viewing party at the house of a former colleague at the International Peace Institute (IPI) and dear friend, John Hirsch and his wife Rita. I had been hesitant to reveal my predictions and under strict instructions from my wife to restrain myself in this group, which was by all standards a diverse but uniformly liberal one. Another colleague from IPI at the dinner reported that I was wearing a red turban, brighter than the fumes of rage that ravaged liberals only a few hours later. A particularly attentive French man, Arthur, reported that this was perhaps my way of signalling either my prediction or political preference. Nothing of the sort. I wear brown or red turbans on Tuesdays to take advantage of the calming effect of planetary configurations, as per advice rendered by Lakshmi early in our marriage. Having been married now for over forty-three years, this advice I have come to greatly value.

  The warning signs for the current US political revolution have long been present. In a 2014 survey, 13 the Pew Research Center revealed that ‘partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive—than at any point in the last two decades.’ Americans have gradually fortified their political silos, where an increasing number of people believe their opposing political party poses a ‘threat to the nation.’ 14 Thus for an understanding of Trump, it is crucial to first seek insight into his voters.

  Victims without a Language of Victimhood

  In Strangers in Their Own Land, sociologist Arlie Hochschild travels to the heart of the deep red to understand, with compassion rather than judgement, the factors that have pushed the right further right. Her findings can be split into two categories, discussed in some detail below.

  First, the right holds traditions and beliefs that they think government impedes, making a knee-jerk reaction only natural. Second, these traditions, the foundation of their culture and way of life, are increasingly condemned and shamed by liberals. These communities held little to no claim to the changing undercurrents of a liberal, internationalist America, yet were expected to conform to its standards. These two factors, seasoned with a desperation to reclaim the American identity, created the ideological partition that hoisted a populist revolutionary.

  For the first category, Hochschild holds that contempt for government is determined through the lenses of religion, hatred of taxes, and loss of honour. 15 In several interviews with Rust-Belt dwellers who identify as Republican, Hochschild highlights their commitment to politicians who ‘put God and family on their side’, 16 their religious practices overshadowing any other potentially pernicious views they hold. The role of the elected representative/politician in public office as servants to their constituents, then, must be to further uphold and enforce religious customs in public policy. This expectation creates favourable opportunities for Republicans with overarching agendas to harness votes through lesser issues that resonate with religious voters. ‘The rich man’s social economic agenda,’ she writes, ‘is paired with a bait of social issues.’ 17 Deregulation, fated to harm these communities, is masked by issues such as abortion that easily elicits a guttural reaction from religious devotees. Government intervention in these issues, if not to work in favour of their held beliefs, could ‘erode the spirit of a community,’ 18 they believe. The cornerstone of their culture is under attack by big government, and it threatens to replace the sense of unity in their communities.

  Their sense of unity and tightness in their communities is further put at risk through taxation. The right’s hatred of taxes does not stem from a principled refusal to redistribute wealth, as some on the left may argue, but rather from a desire for self-controlled redistribution at the local level. Several of Hochschild’s interviewees, despite aversion towards paying taxes, donated regularly to members of their community. Their means are different from liberal income-redistribution, but their intent is the same: ‘To give those who are struggling (for) more security and opportunity.’ 19 The government taxation system is too distant, too grandiose, and too ambiguous, they would argue. It encourages a practice of makers and takers. Hardworking Americans are exploited to pay for freeloaders who make no concerted effort to contribute to the communal pot.

  But benefiting from government programmes places them in the same boat as the takers and strips them of their honour. The hardworking American does not depend on government handouts; rather than working to reshape the system to work in their favour, they prefer to live without it. In their eyes, the federal government had done little to support them, appearing only to draw from their hard-earned income or to penalize them. If they were not afforded benefits and support from the federal government—even if they themselves refused to accept it—why, then, should they contribute to providing these services to others? They believe the government poses a dilemma for them: walk down a one-way street where they give to the faceless and undeserved for nothing in return; or join the brigade of poor me’s who live off the toils of other Americans and lose honour.

  Hochschild’s analysis provides greater understanding for why these communities support Republican candidates who seek to remove the social safety net from which they can, but choose not to, benefit. The result is candidates designing campaigns around fleeting yet sufficiently distracting social issues, 20 all the while discreetly tinkering with socio-economic policies that genuinely affect the standard of living and well-being of their constituencies. This creates, what Hochschild aptly describes as, ‘victims without a language of victimhood.’ 21

  Th
en comes the politics of shame. Each political party increasingly gets its news from TV channels and news outlets that lean towards their political views. Republicans rely more and more on Fox News; Democrats tilt towards supposedly non-partisan but reputably left-leaning sources such as CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times. 22 In return, reporting moulds to best allure its audience. Hostility towards the other side festers. The right feels persistently attacked by the left-wing media, and feels it is depicted as racist and bigoted. The right believes the left attempts to instil a sense of humiliation in them, simply to carry on the right’s age-old rules and customs. The revamping of the western liberal democratic order excluded the voice of the right, and now expected them to conform to its standards. Under these circumstances, the right sought ‘release from liberal notions of what they should feel.’ 23 They sought an outlet for their frustration and a voice that would restore their dignity that was robbed by the left.

  Their search came to fruition through a candidate for the US presidency who transformed their shame into anger, and who vented this anger through rhetoric shunned by the left. He broke liberal-praised norms and political correctness and spoke to the aggrieved American in their language. The right empathized with the candidate who, himself, was a victim of shame.

  I remember when I first came face-to-face with this angst early in 2016, when it was beginning to manifest in subterranean turbulence. During my time as vice-president at IPI, I had grown accustomed to the warm welcomes of the concierge at the UN Church Center, where the IPI headquarters on the corner of 44th Street and First Avenue is located. He enjoyed showing us pictures of his granddaughter, and my colleagues and I shared affection for his positive energy and wit. Then, almost overnight, everyone’s favourite grandfather-figure substituted picture-sharing with pro-Trump speeches. At any given chance, he would engage passers-by to enlighten them on the rising champion, the ‘man with change in his eyes’. He began taunting one of my dear young friends and close adviser, Omar El-Okdah, telling him to return to his home country of Egypt. It mattered little to him that Omar had as much of a right to live in the United States where he was born and whose citizenship he cherished as much as that of his country of origin, Egypt. Through Trump, the concierge saw a formerly unimaginable bright future for America, and it was one that did not welcome my Muslim friend.

  I share this anecdote not to demonize or shame the concierge. Resolution rarely ever comes from tagging the opposition with labels that pose them an exception. Calling the concierge crazy, as many in the Church Center did at the time, sets him apart from the nationwide phenomenon. It sets him as an outlier, someone with a deep-rooted psychological problem, rather than a victim of pseudo-populist delusion. But this was a pattern across the United States. The left demonized and shamed the right, as many did the concierge. Dialogue was off the table, which only outcast him further from his liberal surroundings.

  In the end, he disappeared from the Church Center. He stopped showing up for work, and few have heard from him since. A brief exchange with the building manager revealed that he was spending more time with his family. The concierge was not an outlier. He was a man filled with angst who held beliefs that were shunned by his peers; a man who bet on the winning horse, while his environment ridiculed him for doing so. So rather than dismantling the mind of the man who placed the winning bet, let’s take a closer look at the winning horse, and how and why he snatched the victory.

  Trump

  At the height of distress in the dawning weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency, as panic-driven liberals engraved words such as unstable, vicious and aggressive into Trump’s media coverage, 24 historian Stephen Wertheim wrote in the Washington Post, ‘Trump isn’t an isolationist. He is a militarist, something far worse.’ 25 As a student of history myself, with an eye trained for historical military leaders, throughout the course of Trump’s populist presidential campaign, I had noticed signs of his delusion-ridden military obsession. His fetish can be traced back half a century to his youth as a rogue-gone-vogue.

  ‘As an adolescent I was mostly interested in creating mischief, because for some reason I liked to stir things up, and I liked to test people,’ muses Trump in his 1987 flagship book The Art of the Deal. ‘It wasn’t malicious so much as it was aggressive.’ 26 This statement—which we can now judge as perennial—launched his short-lived military education. Seeking to discipline his rabble-rouser son, Fred Trump sent Donald Trump to the New York Military Academy, a school reputed to ‘[whip] rebellious youth into shape’. 27

  Though unimpressive in his earlier years at the academy, by the time Trump graduated in 1964, he had left his mark, earning nicknames such as big shot and ladies’ man, 28 and ascending to the rank of Captain. But the greatest consequence of Trump’s time at the academy is not the early signs of his now-amplified public persona. It is, as his co-author of Art of the Deal Tony Schwartz asserts, Trump’s adoption of social Darwinism. ‘Trump felt compelled to go to war with the world,’ he argues. ‘It was a binary, zero-sum choice for him: You either dominated or you submitted. You either created and exploited fear, or you succumbed to it.’ 29

  This sets the baseline for his presidential campaign and ensuing presidency. It was the rallying cry that the time had come for the neglected American right—who by their own account had been submissive, though liberals would argue otherwise—to take the reins. It was the process of converting the right’s existential angst into furore and collective action. It was Trump spawning his army for his self-fabricated war with the world.

  Failure of the Democratic Party: NObama and ClinDONE

  I would be remiss to credit Donald Trump’s electoral victory solely to the riled-up, marginalized, white-working class in the Rust Belt. These voters had long remained faithful to the Republican Party. Indeed, candidate Trump reinvigorated their political activism. But according to exit-poll data, the electoral outcomes of the Rust Belt were not swayed so much by an increase in blue votes, as a ‘collapse’ in Democratic support, with high rates of Democrats opting to avoid the voting booth or to vote for third-party candidates. 30 In almost all income brackets, Democrats lost more votes than Republicans gained them.

  Questioning why the Democratic Party was abandoned by its constituents goes hand in hand with the mystery of Trump’s ability to attract non-traditional voters.

  Demographic changes as a result of globalization misled political pundits, who had, at the turn of the century, prophesied a growing Democratic electorate. 31 This is not an inaccurate statement. There are certain demographic categories—African-Americans, Hispanics, LGBTQ, and so on—whose majority will remain faithful to the Democratic Party for the foreseeable future. The political promiscuity of the minority within these groups, on the other hand, is the point of focus.

  Their inability to commit to the Democratic Party may be explained through this question: How long can a campaign of hope be sustained until voters realize that hope is the end, not the means? At what point, does hope become a dead end?

  The reality is this. The world’s largest industrial democracy has not been able to adjust to a phase of slow growth and the loss of jobs in the manufacturing sector due to imports. The other sectors of the economy have also, in relative terms, registered lacklustre performance. For five decades leading up to the 1980s, the ‘lowest 90% of Americans took home 70% of the growth in the country’s income’. From 1997 onwards, the ‘American people pocketed none’. 32 Trade, or lack thereof, has produced inequality, and Americans are upset. Promoting hope got them to get up and dust off their coats, but in the end, they had nowhere to go. As Thomas Frank writes in his 2016 book, Listen, Liberal, ‘That’s where we are, eight years post-hope. Growth that doesn’t grow; prosperity that doesn’t prosper.’

  Given the seeming state of chaos in the United States under Trump’s presidency, it is easy to reminisce about President Obama’s tenure with appreciation. But absent the juxtaposition of Trump, Obama was not the revered leader he is today. His loss
of popularity over the years exhibits a larger trend in US politics. In the mid-term election following his 2008 victory, the Democratic Party lost the highest number of seats in the House of Representatives to the Republicans in sixty-two years. 33 In the mid-terms following Obama’s 2012 re-election, the Republicans seized control of the Senate. 34

  Whatever the factors influencing these results—and they are limitless—the downward trend was inherited by 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, which further exacerbated her unpopularity that dated back to her early days as First Lady. She clinched the popular vote by nearly three million votes, an indisputable majority. 35 But this is about half a million less than the margin Obama held over Mitt Romney in 2012, 36 and almost six million 37 less than what he held over McCain in 2008. Most remarkably, ‘almost one in four of President Obama’s 2012 white, working class supporters defected from the Democrats in 2016’. 38

  Considering the social fragility brought on by the existential angst in the American right, Clinton was a prime target for pent-up anti-establishment anger. Looking past the various scandals used to destabilize her campaign, Clinton was viewed as the quintessential Washington ‘insider’. She was the heir-apparent of the preceding administration, her presidency being forecast as more or less a continuation of the Obama years. Even Obama himself anointed candidate Clinton as the heiress to his third term in an address at the Democratic convention in July 2016. 39