In it's coverage of the US election, the British media has largely
focused on personalities. In doing so,
it is impossible not to spend a lot of airtime talking about the flamboyant (to
put it mildly) personality of billionaire former Apprentice host Donald Trump. A great deal of this is the result of Trump’s
own overt racism and misogyny. But the
Clinton campaign has a good deal of responsibility for this too. This is because they are running a carbon
copy of David Cameron’s failed Brexit campaign.
Hillary Clinton is the US Remain candidate; the
self-proclaimed safe pair of hands who will maintain business as usual for the
next four years. Like the British Remain
campaign, there is no vision of the bright future that Americans can look
forward to if Hillary wins. Instead, the
mainstay of the campaign is about just how awful her opponent is, and just how
horrible things are going to be if people are dumb enough to vote for him.
As David Cameron discovered – to his, and our, cost – there comes
a point when your austerity policies have ground a sufficient number of faces
into the mud, that people will vote against anything
that the government supports… even Brexit… even Donald Trump.
The problem for those of us on the eastern side of the North
Atlantic is that our media rarely reports on the domestic politics of the
USA. This leaves us fondly believing
that the presidential election is something akin to a British general
election. Trump and the Republicans are
assumed to be something like the UK Tory party, while Clinton and the Democrats
are assumed to be like Labour. In
reality, Bill Clinton did to the Democratic Party what Tony Blair failed to do
to New Labour; turning it into the centre right, establishment party. This forced the Republicans to breakdown into
an approximation of UKIP, containing warring factions of Tea Party head-bangers,
Christian fundamentalists and gun fanatics… although still presided over by
Washington insiders who had no intention of ever delivering on the promises they made to their followers.
A more accurate way of viewing the current US election would
be to imagine a contest between Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Farage. Seen in this way, you begin to understand why
so many women and black voters look set to stay at home, even if this gives the
presidency to someone as hateful as Trump.
It is why at least a minority of Bernie Sanders’ supporters look likely
to actually vote for Trump, while many more will support Jill Stein. And it is
why, despite all of the Trump scandals, not only is he still in the race, but
he appears to be overtaking Clinton.
Dig beneath the surface of the official statistics that the
Clinton campaign uses to claim that all is well with the US economy, and you
discover a more
disturbing picture. While those
fortunate enough to hold salaried positions within the orbits of Wall Street, the Washington Beltway
and Silicon Valley continue to enjoy six- and seven-figure salaries and all of
the benefits of a globally integrated economy, Middle America has been decimated. As American essayist John Michael Greer observes:
“I suspect that a great many
financially comfortable people in today’s America have no idea just how bad
things have gotten here in the flyover states. The recovery of the last eight
years has only benefited the upper 20% or so by income of the population; the
rest have been left to get by on declining real wages, while simultaneously
having to face skyrocketing rents driven by federal policies that prop up the
real estate market, and stunning increases in medical costs driven by Obama’s
embarrassingly misnamed “Affordable Care Act.” It’s no accident that death
rates from suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol poisoning are soaring just now
among working class white people. These are my neighbors, the people I talk
with in laundromats and lodge meetings, and they’re being driven to the wall.”
One cannot help but notice the similarities that underlay
the British vote to leave the European Union.
As Guardian journalist John Harris warned
in the weeks leading up to the vote:
“Hardly anybody talks about the
official campaigns, and the most a mention of the respective figureheads of
each camp tends to elicit is a dismissive tut – but just about everyone agrees
that this is a fantastically important moment, and a litmus test of the
national mood…
“In Stoke, Merthyr, Birmingham,
Manchester and even rural Shropshire, the same lines recurred: so unchanging
that they threatened to turn into clichés, but all the more powerful because of
their ubiquity. “I’m scared about the future” … “No one listens to us” … “If
you haven’t got money, no one cares.”
Promising business as usual to millions of families in the
respective rust belts of the UK and USA is simply not going to work. All of the hope that swept Obama into office
has been spent. Nobody is listening to
the political class anymore because (just like Tony Blair’s fictitious “third
way”) it was a confidence trick. As
Greer points out:
“The talking heads insisted that
handing over tax dollars to various corporate welfare queens would bring jobs
back to American communities; the corporations in question pocketed the tax
dollars and walked away. The talking heads insisted that if working class
people went to college at their own expense and got retrained in new skills,
that would bring jobs back to American communities; the academic industry
profited mightily but the jobs never showed up, leaving tens of millions of
people buried so deeply under student loan debt that most of them will never
recover financially. The talking heads insisted that this or that or the other
political candidate would bring jobs back to American communities by pursuing
exactly the same policies that got rid of the jobs in the first
place—essentially the same claim that the Clinton campaign is making now—and we
know how that turned out.”
When Trump says he is going to tear up the trade treaties
that allowed corporations to move people’s jobs to Asia, it resonates. When he tells Ford’s executives that if they
move their factories to Mexico, he will slap a 35% tariff on them so that they
will never sell another car in America, it resonates. When he tells the member states of NATO that
they have to pay their fair share if they want to remain in the club, it
resonates. These are the messages that have brought thousands of people to Trump rallies. They are the messages that the media has largely ignored.
Perhaps it takes a comedian to draw the conclusion that
nobody else want to make. US comic Bill
Burr (contains swearing) points out
that:
“If Trump wasn’t such a jerk-off, it’s really
what the country needs. You need somebody
who isn’t part of the f***ing system…”
In this, the Clinton campaign’s decision to focus on Hillary’s
long career in politics is backfiring in exactly the same way as Cameron’s decision
to use a parade of establishment figures to warn of the dangers of leaving the
EU backfired. When the people – or at
least a large enough minority of them – have lost faith in the system, you have to
demonstrate how you are going to change things.
Will Trump deliver?
We may never know. The US Electoral
College system awards Hillary Clinton around 100 delegates before the election
has begun because of the Democratic Party’s control of California and New
York. Even if Trump wins the popular
vote, Clinton is still favourite to win the election. But Trump can still do it if he is able to
swing key states like Florida (where Bush defeated Gore 16 years ago).
While a Trump victory is likely to produce the sort of media
hysteria that followed the UK referendum result, Trump is no more likely to be
able to deliver on his promises than are the Leavers in the UK. Trump will have to sway a resentful congress
to deliver on his domestic policies. And
while he will have more freedom of movement in foreign affairs, the military-industrial
complex is unlikely to roll over if the trillions of dollars of military
spending (and all of the jobs that go with it) is threatened.
This hints at a deeper and far more troubling problem. If Clinton wins – as is most likely – things will
stay as they are. Inequality will increase. Poverty will worsen. US taxpayers will
continue to bail out a finance and banking industry that should have been allowed
to crash eight years ago. The US will
become ever more embroiled in foreign wars from which it has no idea how to
extricate itself. It will continue to
support global corporations at the expense of domestic jobs. It will continue to incarcerate a third or
more of its black population. And
gradually, the anger and resentment will grow.
If, on the other hand, Trump wins, it is highly unlikely
that he is going to reverse the ills of four decades of globalisation and
neoliberalism. The power of the
corporate lobby in Washington more or less guarantees that what few reforms a
Trump presidency is able to deliver will favour the already wealthy… most
likely at the expense of the poor. And
gradually, the anger and resentment will grow.
As Greer warns us:
“Thus the grassroots movement that
propelled Trump to the Republican nomination in the teeth of the GOP
establishment, and has brought him to within a couple of aces of the White
House in the teeth of the entire US political class, might best be understood
as the last gasp of the American dream. Whether he wins or loses next week,
this country is moving into the darkness of an uncharted night—and it’s not out
of place to wonder, much as Hamlet did, what dreams may come in that darkness.”
Four year from now (if not before) the anti-establishment leader
who emerges to take on the Washington insiders is unlikely to have the kind of
skeletons that fell out of Trump’s closet on the road to 8th November. But he or she may have all of the racism, misogyny
and misanthropy of the very worst kind of right-wing populist… a candidate with
all of the skills and none of the flaws of Trump. In the absence of a serious shift in economic
and social policy, American democracy would struggle to defeat such a figure…
still less outlast one.
