OK, guys,
this is the deal: I’ve been half stuck writing an ultra-dense post on Marxist economics
(an oxymoron, I know), but being the kind of exhaustive nutso I am it has taken
me from “Limits of Capitalism” by David Harvey to “Late Capitalism” by Ernest
Mandel to “Monopoly Capital” by Baran & Sweezy to “Studies on the
Development of Capitalism” by Maurice Dobb. And of course I had to go back to “Capital”
by Marx himself, specially volumes 2 (just to confirm how abysmally bad and
muddled it was) and 3. And to “Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism”
by none other than Lenin (just for funsies). Long story short, I’m still mired
in the midst of it, not knowing when I may finish. So, as I usually do, I
started a new post in parallel, to keep my mind occasionally out of the depths
of bad metaphysics posing as bad economics. Only it turned out to be conceptually
even more demanding (a project of mine for a long time, which was going to be
an appendix of my dissertation but I finally pulled it out for lack of time: a
refutation of Libet’s arch-famous experiment which has been construed countless
times as the definitive refutation of the existence of free will, to which I
answer bollocks, but going anywhere more nuanced than that requires apparently
endless amounts of intellectual heavy lifting… again, I hope to be able to
share an accessible version anytime soon).
So just to
keep my faithful readers entertained, and for my own amusement, I decided to
spend some time writing about the most non transcendental issue I could find in
the news, the one less likely to require any sort of mental exertion, and being
an avid follower of the American electoral process I obviously settled in the
baffling (for all the punditocracy at least, we’ll see that the proverbial men
in the street have a different view altogether) rise in the polls of the
bombastic casino magnate and real state mogul of the title. As most informed
citizens may know, currently the Donald leads the field of candidates to be the
standard bearer of the Republican party come next November by a substantial margin,
both nationally and in the first states to vote (Iowa –where he seemed to have
lost ground to similarly implausible candidate Ben Carson for a while, but
where he is solidly back at top; New Hampshire and North Carolina). He has been
doing so for months, which makes his rise, at this point, substantially
different from that of similarly outsider candidates in the last election cycle
(when we saw the likes of Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry
and even Sarah Palin climb to the top of the republican primary polls for brief
stretches of time, before the conservative electorate had a good look at them
and decided they were not presidential material): Will Trump win?
Being a bit more
than two months away from the first actual votes being cast (1st of
February in Iowa), I don’t see how Mr. Trump may be dislodged of his position.
He could try to offend Latinos, a rising voting bloc with increasing influence
in the November election, by calling them rapists and threatening to deport 11
million of their brethren. He could try to disparage women, doing inappropriate
comments about his only female contender (Carly Fiorina). He could try to alienate
further the party’s orthodox anti-tax-at-any-price group suggesting that tax
increases are not entirely off the table. He could try to drive away the
hawkish wing of the party asserting he has no interest in nation building,
troops on the ground (except for guarding the Southern border) or any “serious”
foreign policy initiative distinct from talking tough to Putin, Arafat, whoever
is leading China these days and Bashar el Assad… oh, wait, he has already done
all of the above, and in each occasion pundits to the left and to the right
have declared it the beginning of the end of his lead and the turning point
leading unavoidably to the demise of his candidacy, only to see his lead
consolidate in subsequent polls.
At some
point, we have to accept there is a good chance that come February he is still
leading, and starts to transform that lead in more delegates than any other
candidate, up to the republican convention in July. Maybe not yet the biggest
chance, but definitely not a negligible one. In the remaining of this post I
want to discuss what may prevent that from happening, and how likely I think
that scenario is. According to most analysts, Trump has benefitted so far from
a highly fragmented camp. The big money behind more conventional (and more
palatable to the party’s establishment) candidates has been too divided to let
its influence be noted, but at some point (sooner rather than later) it will
start coalescing. Also, at this point in previous races the vast majority of
the electorate hasn’t been paying any attention at all, so when asked by
pollsters who they would vote for, rather than confessing their ignorance they
offered the only name they recognized, which would favor inordinately the
candidates with a more widely known “brand” (an area in which Mr. Trump can not
be beaten). As the real voting approaches, the received wisdom goes, voters
will seek more information, get more familiar with the proposals and the
personas of the different alternatives and gravitate towards someone more
viable (more electable, with a broader appeal, that could attract the number of
moderates needed to win a general election, an area in which you would expect
the magnate to be very vulnerable).
The fragmentation is indeed bound to diminish
in the following months, as more and more contenders realize they don’t have a
snowball’s in Hell’s chance and quit (I’d say Christie, Huckabee, Gilmore,
Santorum, Pataki, Kasich and Fiorina will exit first, followed by Carson, Bush
and Paul, leaving just Rubio and Cruz to battle it out with the Donald ‘til the
end). However, I’m not that sure about the “more information” effect, as this
campaign has been accompanied by unprecedented levels of attention, attested by
the stratospheric following of the five debates celebrated so far. I’ll just
cite an admittedly non-scientifically, non-representative sample I directly
witnessed not long ago. One of my FB contacts asked his republican friends how
many of them would support Mr. Trump, were he the Republican candidate in the
general election. This person is as civil, accomplished and cosmopolitan as you
can dream of, so his network of acquaintances should be representative of the
most enlightened wing of the Republican Party. About 40 people answered, and
not a single one of them hesitated declaring they would vote for Trump in the
blink of an eye (some were even annoyed that the question was being posed at
all, while nobody seemed to have any qualms or made any question about that
vile, lying, mail-hiding, America-bashing Hilary Clinton that the Democrats
were about to coronate without such qualms). To say that I was surprised would
be an understatement. Some of the respondents I had interacted with before, and
I knew them to be also educated, sophisticated, financially secure, well
grounded and participating in the civic life of their communities. And they
were declaring their potential allegiance to an individual that, according to
the (mostly liberal, we have to concede) media was a bigot, a know-nothing, a fear
monger, a con man, a swindler, a populist, a peddler of dangerous racist fantasies,
a buffoon, utterly unelectable and would lead the GOP to its most embarrassing
and crushing defeat in centuries. It is then that I started really paying
attention to the Trump phenomenon and what it can tell us about the state of
American society, and to see that there is a whole undercurrent that the
mainstream press is not adequately reflecting.
Some of that
undercurrent is explained by the level of vitriol and mistrust I explored in my
post about increasing polarization that affect most (western and non-western)
societies: on polarization,
but some is specific to the dynamics of the American society. It has become a
commonplace to understand the Trump story as the manifestation of the anxieties
of a segment of the white citizenry that see its traditional grasp on most
levers of power slowly slip away. Doubtlessly, there is something of that (just
see the comments of his supporters decrying what they perceive as unpardonable
grievances: affirmative action that gives more opportunities to blacks than to
their kin and a lax immigration law enforcement that has allowed a considerable
number of Hispanics to shape the social fabric of an increasing number of communities),
but I don’t think that exhaust his appeal, or the capability of that appeal to
overcome what in other times would have been insurmountable barriers (the
electability issue). What I think the “angry old white males” narrative glosses
over is the amount of young males (mostly white also, yes) and of women that
are almost as much frothing at the mouth as the former at what they perceive as
the unrelenting attack of the current administration on everything they
consider good and worthy: Old Dixie, America’s standing in the world, the
sanctity of marriage, the freedom of each and every individual to be as bigoted
as they want (thus refusing to officiate/ serve/ register a gay couple, for
example) and of course, the right to have as many military grade weapons in
their homes as they damn please, irrespective of criminal history or even
mental state.
As it has
been documented, all those people (many of whom are not that old, and not male
to begin with) are fed up not only with the administration, but with the party
they expected would take a stand against it, and that for the last seven years
has been unable to roll back what they see as an irrepressible tide of
godlessness, secularism, state intervention in the economy and favoritism towards
that “other people” they consistently see as dangerous, riotous, degenerate and
undeserving (so whatever is given to “them” has to be taken from the law-abiding,
God-fearing, hard-working citizenry, all coded words for white, Anglo, mostly
Protestant). And that inability has driven them to be so extremely mistrustful
of the establishment candidates the party elders are trying to shove down their
throats that they see every Trump bluster and offense as a refreshing proof
that he is unbounded by the unholy alliance of convention and special interests
that fetters the existing cadres of the Washington bureaucracy, that he is not
in the payroll of big corporations, with an eye to go through the revolving
(and revolting) door that connects former lawmakers with the moneyed interests
of K Street and Wall Street, detrimental as that connection is for the “little
guy” with which they identify.
So I’d say I’m
more bullish on Trump's prospects than the majority of political analysts I’ve
read so far. I don’t think its irreversible yet, and if the electorate happens
to be a bit more rational than what I credit them for I think Rubio is the one
better positioned to end up being the party’s standard bearer (I don’t see how
if they suddenly start paying an inordinate attention to matters of general
electability the republican voters may pass over Cruz’s similarly glaring
flaws). But I don’t think it is going to be nearly half solved by March, so we
still may see a Republican party in full panic mode (we have seen “somewhat
panicky” so far) confronting the perspective of being represented in November
by the most unorthodox, most unhinged, most unbound by convention or
convenience candidate of its whole history. A candidate that, frankly, I can’t
see having an infinitesimal chance come November against Hilary (as I can’t seriously
imagine any other Democrat winning the nomination, barring an outright
indictment from the FBI in the mail affair, which seems highly unlikely, to put
it charitably). Be it as it may, it sure
as heck is going to be fun to watch.
No comments:
Post a Comment