I once declared myself to be a “political junkie”, only not of the political process of my home country, which I find boring, predictable and uninteresting, but of the USA, which I back then considered a harbinger of what awaited most developed economies, and now consider more and more a warning of what may befall them if they are not cautious and let their inner demons loose (as the Americans have done). However, although I’ve been following the 2020 presidential election (the campaign of which seemed to start somewhere around the 2nd of January of 2017, right after inauguration) I haven’t felt like blogging about it, as, exciting as it may have appeared on the surface, I have found it actually quite boring. Boring, predictable and uninteresting like my own country’s politics are indeed, unintuitive as it may sound, the adjectives best describing the whole improbable presidency of Donald J. Trump, for reasons I will detail in a moment (just a question of having the right analytical framework, which makes the otherwise unexplainable seem mundane). But a little of history, first.
The mostly unexpected triumph of
Trump in 2016 was but an advance of a development I had predicted for the next
electoral cycle: the realization by a substantial portion of the white working
class that they really didn’t have that many interests in common with the other
members of the Democratic coalition (which, simplifying a little bit, we could
characterize as feminist women, highly educated and credentialed professionals,
racial minorities and non-closeted non-heterosexuals -I just can’t seem to keep
track of the amount of capital letters required to identify them properly, so I’ll
just define them negatively, no slight or disdain intended).
Not only were their interests
different ,and I’m not thinking just in economic terms here… aesthetic
preferences have been trending for decades in more and more divergent
directions between the mostly rural, nationalist, Nascar-watching,
country-music-hearing, gun-toting part of the population and the urban,
cosmopolitan, NBA-enjoying, rap-and-hip-hop-listening mostly gun-free part, and
it is nigh impossible to consider yourself part of the same community as people
that employ their time, idolize public figures and even dress themselves in
forms so alien to you, but even their self-image was growingly distinct, one
celebrating “traditional” American-ness (as behooves a conservative party: baseball
cap, T-shirt and a pair of Levi’s, driving a Lincoln Navigator or a Harley fat
boy) and the other more open to “alternative” or simply up-to-date looks (won’t
even try to describe them, as my age and quintessential un-coolness would painfully
show). The moment you cannot identify with your supposed political co-religionaries
even from a purely aesthetic point of view (but remember my distinction between
political organizations and religious ones! it is the former we are talking
about here, not the latter!) in the sense of feeling “at home” between them, of
“seeing” yourself as a member of a single group to which they also belong, it
is impossible for you to claim to adhere to the same political party, and to
collectively pursue with them a common set of goals.
So it came to be that Trump was elevated
to the highest office of the land, probably as much to his surprise as to any
political analyst’s, which found it hard to fathom how the nation could have
chosen such a buffoonish, evidently unfit individual, as president. But chose
him they did (admittedly through the vagaries of the electoral college, but
those are the rules of the electoral game there), and for four years the
republic had to endure the most bombastic, ludicrous, shambolic, unhinged, splenetic,
scurrilous, corrupt, bigoted, uninformed, farcical, preposterous, delusional, discombobulated,
deranged and inefficient administration that modern political history has
contemplated (modern in the most literal sense: from the French Revolution to
our days I don’t think we can easily find a government in any developed country
that has shown such amazing level of incompetence, self-dealing, incuriousness
and scorn for reality, as told afterwards by its very participants, that joined
and were expelled from the corridors of power at an amazing speed, and all tell
the same tale of disfunction, cronyism and disdain for the public commonweal). For
America’s standing in the world and even the core viability of its political
institutions, Trump’s presidency has been an unmitigated, undisputable
disaster. A highly revealing one, at that, because for roughly 40% of the
population it was his predecessor’s tenure that was a chaotic mess deserving of
the long list of epithets I’ve heaped on this one, and it is only the press’
partiality towards Barack Obama (and vicious, vitriolic and wholly unjustified
animosity against the bastion of probity that succeeded the mongrel) that has
kept a higher percentage of the voting public unaware of all the good things
the 45th president has done for the nation (starting with saving it
from the abject forces of socialism, Islamism, unchecked immigration and most
likely rampant homosexuality).
The interesting question, of course,
is how could that be? how can such a substantial number of citizens of a
developed country, that have been subjected to a first class education
(nominally) harbor such impressions, plaintively at odds with reality? How can,
specifically, the lower strata of the (white) population refuse to see the
evident shortcomings of a son of privilege, a spoiled guy that most likely has
not worked five minutes in his whole life or produced anything of value (other
than a second-rate TV show notionally about putting contestants’ managing
abilities to the test in a bogus environment), famous for going through eleven
bankruptcies and for stiffing his (working-class) suppliers in the process? not
only fail to see such notorious features, but rather the opposite, identify
with him and project unto him their hopes, their expectations, their fantasies
and their desires of validation and approval? I remember being deeply shocked
24 years ago by the case of Louise Woodward, a 19 years old English nanny that
in 1996 killed (accidentally or not) the little baby under her care, eight months
old Matthew Eappen, in Boston. What so shocked me is the unmitigated outpouring
of sympathy of her countrymen, that never for a single minute seemed to doubt
her innocence and generously contributed to the legal defense fund created to
ensure she had the best legal counsel money can buy (she was initially
condemned for homicide, but had her conviction reduced to involuntary
manslaughter, and was freed from jail after less than a year). How, I wondered,
could a whole population suspend their moral judgment and rush in defense of a
person that, in the best case, had contributed through carelessness and very
likely impatience and rashness, to the death of an innocent child? Maybe in
part because Louise was lily-white and as English as they come, while the
Eappens where foreigners, of Indian origin and thus of a darker complexion.
Maybe it was simply because she had a British passport and thus for all Britons
she was “one of us”, no matter how ghastly the deeds she was accused of
committing, whilst her accusers were clearly “one of them”, whoever those
“them” may be…
The fact is, we tend to suspend
mightily our impartiality when judging people like us, and even more so when
they are somehow from our same tribe, perceived to belong to the same group as
us. The same applies to Trump’s followers, obviously. He may be a corrupt
plutocrat who is in politics only to enrich himself and his close family, and
not give a crap about the rubes that voted for him and about their beliefs,
religious or otherwise (this is, after all, the guy that has married thrice, admittedly
cheated on at least two of his wives, and had to pay to multiple porn actresses
to buy their silence, but that evangelical leaders maintain was for some reason
sent by God to righten our wayward ways, go figure…), but they simply can’t see
past “he is one of us” and, more important, “is against them”, a vague “them”
that each Trumpist can generously detail with the features he despises most of what
constitutes their almost mythical “other” (leftists, secularists, abortionist,
anti-gun, know-it-all university professors, women who do not conform to
traditional stereotypes, city-dwellers, SJWs, blacks who don’t know “their
rightful place”, Hispanics in general, gays and whatnot). So he must be a fine
person, and all the information about his conflicts of interest, his cavalier
decision making style, and the many blatantly wrong decisions and shameful lies
he continuously spouts must be a fabrication of the “lamestream” media, engineered
by the liberal elite, the “Cathedral”, world Jewry or whatever figment of the
fevered imagination of Fox News hosts is carrying the day between the deluded
masses of followers that keep on drinking the Kool-Aid (all the while accusing
the other side of being the addicted Kool-Aid drinkers for clinging to a
worldview opposed to theirs) and consciously or unconsciously filter out any piece
of news that may challenge their understanding of how the world works (a world
where “the left” -a sinister, secretive and utterly evil cabal- monopolizes
every single lever of power and is hellbent on destroying the sacrosanct American
way of life through a relentless assault on free markets, gun rights, religion
and the belief in American greatness and exceptionalism).
As they say, everybody is entitled
to having their own beliefs, but not everybody is entitled to have their own
reality, and the beliefs most GOP voters have harbored for the last 12 years (as
their flight from “reality-based” information started already with Obama’s
inauguration) have been increasingly divorced from anything happening on the
real, fact-based world. It may have never happened, or not to such extent, at
least, were it not for a media landscape (a TV network -Fox news- and the
distinctly American phenomenon of talk radio) that crystalized such (seen from
the outside pretty paranoid and unhinged) worldview and catalyzed the
perception of belonging to a distinct, differentiated group, easy to segregate
from the rest of the country (a rest formed, according to such weltanschaaung,
by the dreaded and despised “libtards” that are at the same time all-powerful
and unbelievably cunning but, being less than fully human, utterly incapable of
true willful action). With this way of describing the American political
landscape I don’t want to imply that only republicans (or conservatives of any
stripe, which is not exactly the same) are the only deluded ones, or that
democrats (or progressives in general) are free of any blame, or have shown in
the last decade and a half to be exemplary citizens, acting only with the
maximization of the social good as their purest and unalloyed aim and able to
the most exacting standards of truth and probity regarding the information they
perused.
The latter have their own list of
shortcomings and biases, sure, but, seen from the outside, having no dog in
that fight, with a hand over my heart… seriously guys (talking to American
friends now), don’t be fooled by appeals to false equivalence. There is simply
no comparison. What one of your political parties (the republicans), a section
of your media (Fox News first and foremost, but in its wake the whole Drudge
report, Tiki, Breitbart, all the way down to American Renaissance and
Stormfront) and your very own president have been doing is simply so beyond the
pale, the stream of bald-faced lies they unashamedly spout comes forth with
such frequency, such conviction and such gusto that one is really at a loss of
words to see it presented as somehow a “reaction” (measured and reasonable) to
the perceived excesses and blatant manipulation of… who or what? The New York
Times and the Washington Post? The CNN, MSNBC and CBS? The Daily Kos and the
Daily Beast and Huffington Post? You really think that Rush Limbaugh, Glenn
Beck, Dinesh D’Souza, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity are somehow the equivalent
of Ross Douthat, David Brooks, Michael Gerson, Catherine Rampell, Dana
Millbank, Max Boot (Max Boot! the uber-neocon!) and Gail Collins? that all of
them present a similarly skewed, understandably ideological view of what is
going on in the world? that both sides may sometimes stretch reality a teeny
weeny bit to make it conform slightly better to their previous expectations,
nothing distinguishing one side from the other in that respect? If that is the
case, I don’t know what I can tell you, because it is not a matter of us
talking a different language, but of us inhabiting different universes (and I’m
afraid there is a substantial difference between both: the one I see does exist
outside my head, and the heads of those that think like me -assuming there is anyone-,
whilst the one you see doesn’t).
As of today, it looks like the whole horror show is about to end in less than a month, with Biden leading in both national and state polls comfortably. But the experience of 2016, when Clinton held a similar lead (less consistent and less impressive as it may have been, it left little doubt in most pundits that it would be more than enough to propel her past the finish line) has everybody pretty wary of what may happen in November, 4th. Specially because if the election is close enough, given the level of incivility prevalent nowadays, and the doubts in the legitimacy of the whole electoral process sowed by 45th in his enthusiastic base (that has been bombarded with the message that their guy is leading, and only a massive fraud could rob him of a deserved victory, after all the amazing things he has done for the country in his first four years), the rancor and confrontation that may ensue would surely make the 2000 Florida recount look like a beautiful picnic in the park. But the different possible outcomes of the election, and their implications for America and for the wider world surely deserve a post of their own.
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