One reason why Trump has managed to not only retain voters but grow his support is that he has been an exemplary Republican President. His has not been an activist administration, despite the promises. He didn't build the wall, he didn't bring the coal & steel jobs back, he didn't pull out of NATO. For many GOP voters this isn't a problem, not simply because he can blame inactivity on an unhelpful Democrat-controlled House or bogeys like antifa, but because the failures affect few voters directly (his Florida win appears to have been down to retirees and wealthier Latinos, for example). He has also avoided alienating his supporters. His remarks over the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and the Proud Boys were seen by liberals as evidence of his moral debasement, but far from suggesting that he is a secret collector of Nazi memorabilia they merely indicate that he is a pragmatist keen to preserve all parts of his base. His tax cuts are seen as aspirational by many (the product of decades of ideological spade-work across the aisle) and his handling of the pandemic has been sufficiently obscured by supportive media to allow many voters to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Did the Covid-19 pandemic influence the result? If you argue that it did, and furthermore that Trump lost voters due to his mismanagement and performative ignorance, then the counterfactual is one in which no pandemic occurs and Trump retains those voters and possibly wins. If you argue that it didn't, then you have to conclude that the Democrats failed to make it a sufficiently decisive issue. The key takeaway for me is that Trump has recorded not only the highest ever Republican candidate vote (beating his own 2016 record) but more than Obama won in 2008 when pollsters were predicting a lasting demographic shift to a coalition of the young, liberal and minority centred on big cities. Trump's relative success can't be attributed simply to population growth, though that is obviously a factor. It suggests that the Republicans are now suceeding in generating fresh "angry white guys" and are even cultivating new reactionary groups among ethnic minorities that have hitherto cleaved to the Democrats. One of the keys to Trump's persistent popularity is that he is still seen as "not a politician", and that anti-establishment vibe clearly appeals way beyond the traditional conservative core.
It looks like the GOP will keep the Senate (the two Georgia run-offs are likely to split at best) and therefore a chokehold on Congress. I suspect the Republican party establishment won't seriously challenge the result (even if Trump and his administration does - though the manner in which he is doing it looks more like a grift to raise funds than a coup) as they'll calculate that Biden will be timid and they can block any legislation they don't like. This suggests it's going to be four years of posturing and little substantive change. This will be celebrated by centrists as a return to normality, and in many senses they'll be right. It will be like the Obama years - insufficient reform, the indulgence of Wall Street, more drones - but without the slick presentation and with even less appetite to fight the far-right. Centrist ideologues will no doubt interpret the close result as evidence that the Democrats must reject left-leaning policies in order to "heal the nation" and "unify" a polarised public. The subtext will be an attempt to allay the fears of independent and "moderate" Republican voters that socialism might enter through the back door.
Political polarisation in the US is real, but it needs to be emphasised that this is a product of the political system rather than a Jekyll and Hyde divide in the American psyche. Commentators and political scientists routinely blame the people without observing that they are channelled by the media into one of two camps whose cultural opposition masks significant consensus on economic, social and foreign policy. This is far more of a "managed democracy" than the UK, where less gerrymandering means the two-party system is prone to insurgent third parties, usually aimed at preventing Labour moving too far to the left or occasionally acting as ginger groups to push the Conservatives rightwards. US democracy was an elite stich-up at birth that inherited the factional approach of the British system. While the UK's democracy evolved through the struggle for suffrage and working class representation, exemplified in the replacement of the Liberal party by Labour, the US system largely maintained its 18th century form even as the party names changed (it even survived the Civil War). Interests would coalesce around individuals and these pseudo-monarchs would vie for the Presidency. The original convention that the loser in the election would be appointed Vice-President indicated how cosy the relationship was.
Maintaining the current system is key to maintaining the dominance of the Republicans and Democrats. While the UK has always had minor party representation, the current US House of Representatives has only one member not affiliated to the big two, and that's a Libertarian party representative who was elected as a Republican in 2018. One of the ironies of British commentators insisting that Labour should be more like the Democrats is that the US system forces broad coalitions and encourages semi-independence (e.g. Bernie Sanders, as one of only two independent Senators, running for the Democrat Presidential nomination, which would be the equivalent of Caroline Lucas standing for the Labour leadership). Party membership is not the site of contest it is in Britain. What matters are registered supporters (Labour's move towards giving them a say in the leadership contest was ironically held up as destabilising). Purges are rare in the US, but paradoxically this is because the party establishments are so dominant and money matters so much in winning elections at every level.
Democrat disgruntlement has grown as the biases inherent in the system have increasingly favoured the Republicans, but it is doubtful they would radically reform the system under any conceivable circumstances as that would potentially open the door to genuine multi-party politics. While the British left ponders once again whether it should work within Labour or challenge it, running independently of the Democrats is simply not seen as a credible option in the US where the left has consistently propped up the party. The GOP has only won the popular vote for the Presidency once in the last 30 years, when George W Bush was re-elected in 2004 (a vote that largely reflected patriotic support post-9/11 and which occurred before the debacle of Iraq became undeniable). Barack Obama had the capital to initiate reform in 2008, but even without the intrusion of the financial crisis I doubt he would have been inclined to do anything, preferring to believe that the demographic wind was behind the Democrats' sails and that they could make the existing system work to their advantage. Given Biden's bipartisan instincts and the GOP's dominance of the Senate and Supreme Court, the chances of substantive reform over the next four years are nil. And that means that a Trump revival in 2024 can't be ruled out.
Isn't the US political system dominated by two rival moneyed elites?
ReplyDelete* The Democrats are dominated by an elite based on intellectual property (as protected by patents and copyrights), which is based in big coastal cities and is inherently pro-diversity because more diversity means more potential ideas in order to solve any given problem.
* The Republicans are dominated by an elite based on land (whether that be farmland, mineral resources or urban real estate) which is based outside the big coastal cities and is inherently nativist because competition for land wealth is a zero-sum game.