Trump is
going to lose the general election, although by a smaller margin than what the
polls are currently predicting (my own take is he will be somewhere between
4-6% in the popular vote, and 180-190 of the electoral college). This much is
already apparent for those with a functioning brain, a feature that sadly seems
absent from many of the commenters in the political news of the outlets, like
the NYT, the WaPo or the Grauniad, that still courageously allow their
readership to express their opinions more or less loosely related to the pieces
they’ve read. Yep, surprising as it may sound, you can’t scan the comments
section of any piece of news related to the US presidential campaign without
finding many guys -they tend to be mostly men, although there is some
occasional lady- stating that no matter what the polls may or may not suggest,
Trump is gonna win in a landslide come the 8th of November (they
unfailingly take the occasion to fling some typically ugly epithets towards
Democrat’s candidate Hillary Clinton along the way). As they say, haters gonna
hate, and there’s not much common sense, third-grade level civility and a
healthy respect for the force of facts can do against the willfully closed
minds of some politically engaged individual (aka “low information voters”),
from whatever end of the spectrum. Funnily, some of the angriest, more caustic
and vitriolic denunciators of Mrs. Clinton are butt-hurt Bernie Sanders
supporters, that criticize her -and surprisingly end up lionizing Trump,
unsavory as he should appear to anybody with a minimally progressive
sensibility- for not being revolutionary enough, being a “bought and paid for”
puppet of corporate interests, being a status quo candidate, and thus somehow
justifies voting for an unhinged plutocrat that in almost a year of exposure
hasn’t been able to articulate a coherent policy on a single topic of interest
for the republic… a story I devoted some space to in an older post (of HIllary's and Donald's prospects)
but that has ended having much less impact in the dynamics of the election than
I thought it would have.
Again, the
result of the election is settled and foreordained, as the polls at this point in time are already clear and reliable enough: Clinton heads back to the
White House, most likely the Dems retake the Senate but not Congress, and the
only variable still in doubt is the margin of the Repubs defeat. It is after the
morning of the 9th of November 2016 is when things start getting
interesting in the old US of A. I think it is a fair assessment of the state of
American politics to say that some old coalitions have disintegrated, some
intriguing new ones may be in the first stages of formation, and some shared
narratives seem shakier by the day. Starting with the first:
Bye bye Republican Party. Doesn’t matter if Trump loses by
much or by little. The Genie is out of the bottle in this one, and the
disgruntled voters that, who would have guessed? Turned out to be the vast
majority of the GOP are not coming humbly back to the fold, tail tucked between
their legs, and start drinking again the kool aid about free trade, small
government, reasonable immigration, hawkish foreign policy (including an
unconditional support for Israel) and low taxes (mostly) for the rich enabling
a dynamic, unregulated economy that finally lifts all boats. The guys at National Review and the Weekly Standard are probably dreaming
with a sound drumming of Drumpf that will cause an epiphany in enough millions
of voters as to graft them back to their Country Club brand of traditional
republicanism, but I’m afraid they are in for a rude awakening. The ideology
they have been peddling for the last three decades (no kidding it always came back
to Saint Ronald) has the electoral support of between one and ten million
voters, and feels now as alien as XXth century objectivist philosophy to the
roughly fifty million (41% of the electorate that will show no compunction
whatsoever in voting for the Donald, assuming a low turnout election where only
50% of the 225.8 million people eligible to vote actually show up) that for all
those years they thought they shared their political outlook with.
In the
pundits’ mind, after Trump goes down in flames, those fifty million will be
willing to embrace a more moderate, sounder conservatism, very much in the line
advocated by the authors of the study conducted after Mitt Romney’s defeat in
2012. You surely remember: show more tolerance for gays and minorities,
especially Hispanics (to be shown in legislative support for a “comprehensive”
immigration package like the one crafted by the “gang of four”… man, this
really reads like very, very ancient history, and it was only four years ago),
propose something to replace Obamacare with to exhibit some concern for the
luck of those not so wealthy as the party’s donor base, assuage the concerns of
the elderly population about the continuity of Social Security and Medicare,
etc. You also know how well that worked: not a single point of the “Growth
& Opportunity Project” was followed through, and if it had been it would
have turned the base even more rabidly against the lawmakers trying to enact it
(remember Eric Cantor, insufficiently conservative for his own constituents,
and duly replaced by a Tea Party faithful that managed the not too shabby feat
of making him look like a moderate?)
So the GOP
is, for all practical purposes, dead and buried, no matter what it tries after
the election. They will nominally be in control of one house of government
(congress), but their ability to even mildly influence any legislation during
the next following four years is going to be zilch, nada, zero. They will still
enjoy an inordinate representation in local governments (at State level), and
that will allow them to exert a disproportionate influence in redistricting
(thus ensuring a number of safe seats for their brethren… until they crack some
more and an open civil war make those safe seats much less safe, more on that
later on), but they will have all but disappeared as a viable political force.
I like to
think about it this way: there will be roughly 225 million Americans above 18
years of age and with no criminal record, thus eligible to vote. Only half of
them will really bother to do so, which gives us a total size of the electorate
of 120-125 million voters. Thanks to growing polarization and self sorting 60
million of the potential voters, if they vote at all, will vote Democrat, and a
bit less (around 55 millions) will vote Republican (although they are less,
they have been much smarter in translating them into electoral advantage,
especially at State level). Between 5 to 10 million are more or less undecided,
and can go either way, or even throw their vote away voting for a 3rd
party option. So of the 55 millions of the Republican “base” we know 50 million
are going to vote Trump, because what the heck. They don’t care that the party
elders have warned them that the guy is a) racist (so are many of them, thank
you very much); b) a narcissistic spoiled brat characteriologically unfit to
occupy the highest office of the land; c) socially unreliable, and with strong
liberal tendencies; and d) economically a basket case, who nobody can define
what would do once in office (be against free trade? Or for it? Against
military intervention abroad? Or in favor of launching attacks in every country
that crosses him?). They will vote for him because they are sick and tired of
what they perceive as a rigged system that doesn’t care for them, doesn’t
provide them with what is rightfully theirs (at least the prospect of
continuously improving standard of life for them and those in their ingroup)
and especially doesn’t show the hypocritical pieties that other politicians
show towards those “outsiders” (be them immigrants, blacks, jews, homosexuals,
Wall Street bankers, or college educated kids) that they conveniently scapegoat
as pulling ahead and illegitimately benefitting from their toil and effort. So I find it very unlikely that those 50 million can be counted to toe the party
line ever again. That leaves the current establishment with 5 to 10 million
followers they can reliably count upon. Somewhat better than the Libertarian Party
(although it may gather as many as 15 million votes this peculiar electoral
cycle according to some polls, many of those would be more than happy to come
back to the Republican ticket once it is led by someone more of their liking)
and definitely better than the Green Party, but not by much.
Hello American National Socialist Workers’
Party, well, I don’t
think they will go for such a controversial name, but that’s in essence what a
good deal of the fifty million voters that are defecting the “old” GOP in this
election would end up forming. Let’s
see what may be the defining features of such voting bloc, forgetting labels
and their semantic charge for a moment: Ultra nationalism (to the point of jingoism)?
Check. Racial homogeneity (which easily derives into racial animus against
other groups where other races are more visible)? Check. Economic populism
(autarchy as logical consequence of the denunciation of free trade, big
government handouts to buy large masses of their supporters, state intervention
in the economy to redistribute to the well connected, etc.)? Check.
Authoritarianism and cult of personality? Check. Reverence for the “good old
days”, law and order (disorder seen as a convenient byproduct of some demonized
“other” existence, and thus highly conductive to the use of the state
repressive apparatus against such other), legitimation of a militarized police
and a strong military? Check and double check.
Look, I know
my “Goodwin’s Law” as well as the fella next to me, but what the rise of Trump
tells us is that a sizeable amount of the American electorate doesn’t have any
problem at all with a very strong totalitarian detour. A lot of ink has been
spilled recently about how Trump is (or is not) the darling of the alt-right,
or the neoreaction, or of White Nationalism. I’ve been following those
tendencies for years, and there are good news and bad news in that front. The
good news is that the most intellectually awake between them have not bought into
the Trump craze. They see him as just making it up as he goes, as an
unreliable, mercurial, deeply flawed personality. BUT. Not much worse than your
run of the mill democratic (small d) politician, starting with Clinton. So they
may occasionally hack for him just for the lulz,
just for driving mad the “Social Justice Warriors” and libtards and
cuckservatives and the like. The bad news is that what this situation is teaching
them is that they are not just a tiny bunch of geeky nerds typing away in the
darker recesses of 4chan, 8chan and the like. Beyond the usual readership of
the Daily Stormer (and of breitbart, and Taki) there are tens of millions of countrymen that are “harvestable”,
that can be recruited, may be in even bigger numbers when a more astute
operator, a true leader, comes to call them. They see all the flaws of Trump,
his essential unsuitability, and they see what for them is an electoral success
beyond their wildest dream.
So do not
worry, Donald Trump is not the future führer
of a reborn American Fascist Federation. After this election we will probably
not hear much from him in a long time (except as a cautionary tale from certain
orphaned conservatives of what supposedly happens when you stray from their
increasingly irrelevant dogma). The next guy that comes after him, draws from
the same well of resentment (social, economic and, yes, also openly racial) and
is able to attract followers from the other side reservoirs is the one we should be
concerned about. Because, as we are about to see, there is indeed quite a lot
to draw from.
Be careful what you wish for, Democrats. Let’s then have a look at the other
side of the aisle. The Democrats may rejoice for a while seeing the
self-destruction that has visited their longtime opponents, and dream with
decades of almost effortless political dominance in the face of such division between
a populist wing, too extreme to ever attract the majority of the electorate,
and a moderate one too impotent to ever attract again a significant number of
voters. But how solid will their control of their own electorate be? As has
been repeatedly noted, the Democrats have obtained electoral success (when they
win in November, they will have captured a majority of the popular vote in six
of the last seven elections, spanning almost three decades, no mean feat) by
keeping together a motley coalition with very different interests, and very
different outlooks of how the republic should be managed. Some members of the
coalition are socially conservative but economically progressive, expecting a
significant redistributionist effort from the state. Some are economically conservative
(favor a lesser participation of the state in the economy and accept a high
degree of openness of the American economy towards international markets) but
married to some socially progressive end (abortion rights, gay marriage,
multiculturalism, feminism, strong repudiation of traditional social mores…)
and some occupy some space in between, are satisfied with some aspect of the status quo and dissatisfied with other,
and thus would be in principle open to be pried from the Democratic coalition and desert to the opposing
team.
Specially
when we look at the elephant in the room: race. Let’s break down the numbers a
bit. We mentioned there were 225.8 million eligible voters in the USA in 2016,
of which only between 50 and 60% actually vote. Of those, 156.1 million are White,
27.4 million are Black, 27.3 are Hispanic and 9.3 are Asian. For the sake of
argument, let’s assume there will be 85.9 million White voters, 12.3 million
Blacks, the same 12.3 million Hispanic and 4.7 million Asians. Of the roughly 45
million of those that will vote for Trump (according to pols he is currently
around 42% of the likely voters, the core constituency of what only
half-jokingly I’ve called the future American National Socialist Workers’
Party) we can safely assume 90% are white, which leaves 45.9 million White
voters to be splitted between Clinton, Johnson and Stein. How many of those
45.9 do you think will not be willing to consider the allure of a more
revolutionary, better organized party that they see increasingly aligned with
their worldview and interests? Put other way, how many of them are so virtuous,
so positively repelled by any whiff of bigotry or racial hatred as to never
cross the ideological divide and end up feeling more comfortable with their
authoritarian (but racially more homogeneous) brethren?
History has
taught me not to put too much stock in collective virtue. Eight years ago, even four years ago any
discourse even minimally tinged with
the faintest smell of tolerance for racial discrimination would be electoral
poison, and the association with David Duke (a former Grand Wizard of the Klan,
no less) would have spelled the political death of any politician not willing
to put one thousand miles between himself and the guy. Today, obviously, that
rule doesn’t apply any more. In that sense, the cat is out of the bag, and we
can only wonder how things may look like four, eight or twelve years from now.
Let’s just leave it at me not being overtly optimistic…
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