Donald Trump supporters stand for the national anthem during a ‘Make America Great Again’ concert in Washington last month.
Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP
Amid
the ongoing protests against President Trump, calls for “resistance”
among Democratic politicians and activists, and the overheated rhetoric
casting Trump and his supporters as fascists and xenophobes, an outsider
might be forgiven for thinking that America has been taken over by a
small faction of rightwing nationalists.
America is deeply divided, but it’s not divided between fascists and
Democrats.
It’s more accurate to say that America is divided between the elites
and everybody else, and Trump’s election was a rejection of the elites.
That’s not to say plenty of Democrats and progressives don’t
vehemently oppose Trump. But the crowds of demonstrators share something
in common with our political and media elites: they still don’t
understand how Trump got elected, or why millions of Americans continue
to support him. Even now, recent polls show that more Americans support
Trump’s executive order on immigration than oppose it, but you wouldn’t
know it based on the media coverage.
Support
for Trump’s travel ban, indeed his entire agenda for immigration
reform, is precisely the sort of thing mainstream media, concentrated in
urban enclaves along our coasts, has trouble comprehending. The fact
is, many Americans who voted for Trump, especially those in suburban and
rural areas across the heartland and the south, have long felt
disconnected from the institutions that govern them. On immigration and
trade, the issues that propelled Trump to the White House, they want the
status quo to change.
During his first two weeks in office, whenever Trump has done
something that leaves political and media elites aghast, his supporters
cheer. They like that he told Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto he
might have to send troops across the border to stop “bad hombres down
there”. They like that he threatened to pull out of an Obama-era deal to
accept thousands of refugees Australia refuses to admit. They want him
to dismantle Dodd-Frank financial regulations for Wall Street and
rethink US trade deals. This is why they voted for him.
The failure to understand why these measures are popular with
millions of Americans stems from a deep sense of disconnection in
American society that didn’t begin with Trump or the 2016 election. For
years, millions of voters have felt left behind by an economic recovery
that largely excluded them, a culture that scoffed at their beliefs and a
government that promised change but failed to deliver.
Nowhere is this disconnection more palpable than in the American
midwest, in places such as Akron, a small city in northeast Ohio nestled
along a bend in the Little Cuyahoga river. Its downtown boasts clean
and pleasant streets, a minor league baseball park, bustling cafes and a
lively university. The people are friendly and open, as midwesterners
tend to be. In many ways, it’s an idyllic American town.
Except for the heroin. Like many suburban and rural communities across the country, Akron is in the grip of a deadly
heroin epidemic.
Last summer, a batch of heroin cut with a synthetic painkiller called
carfentanil, an elephant tranquilliser, turned up in the city.
Twenty-one people overdosed in a single day. Over the ensuing weeks, 300
more would overdose. Dozens would die.
The heroin epidemic is playing out against a backdrop of industrial
decline. At one time, Akron was a manufacturing hub, home to four major
tyre companies and a rising middle class. Today, most of that is gone.
The tyre factories have long since moved overseas and the city’s
population has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s. This is what
Trump was talking about when he spoke of “American carnage” in his
inaugural address.
Akron is not unique. Cities and towns across America’s rust belt,
Appalachia and the deep south are in a state of gradual decline. Many of
these places have long been Democratic strongholds, undergirded by
once-robust unions.
On election day, millions of Democrats who voted for
Barack Obama
in 2008 and 2012 cast their votes for Trump. In those earlier
elections, these blue-collar Democrats were voting for change, hoping
Obama would prioritise the needs of working Americans over the elites
and special interests concentrated in Washington DC and Wall Street.
For many Americans, Hillary Clinton personified the corruption and
self-dealing of the elites. But Trump’s election wasn’t just a rejection
of Clinton, it was a rejection of politics as usual. If the media and
political establishment see Trump’s first couple of weeks in office as a
whirlwind of chaos and incompetence, his supporters see an outsider
taking on a sclerotic system that needs to be dismantled. That’s
precisely what many Americans thought they were doing eight years ago,
when they put a freshman senator from Illinois in the White House. Obama
promised a new way of governing – he would be a “post-partisan”
president, he would “fundamentally transform” the country, he would look
out for the middle class. In the throes of the great recession, that
resonated. Something was clearly wrong with our political system and the
American people wanted someone to fix it.
After all, the Tea Party didn’t begin as a reaction against Obama’s
presidency but that of George W Bush. As far as most Americans were
concerned, the financial crisis was brought on by the excesses of Wall
Street bankers and the incompetency of our political leaders. Before the
Tea Party coalesced into a political movement, the protesters weren’t
just traditional conservatives who cared about limited government and
the constitution. They were, for the most part, ordinary Americans who
felt the system was rigged against them and they wanted change.
But change didn’t come. What they got was more of the same. Obama
offered a series of massive government programmes, from an $830bn
financial stimulus, to the Affordable Care Act, to
Dodd-Frank,
none of which did much to assuage the economic anxieties of the middle
class. Americans watched as the federal government bailed out the banks,
then the auto industry and then passed healthcare reform that
transferred billions of taxpayer dollars to major health insurance
companies. Meanwhile, premiums went up, economic recovery remained
sluggish and millions dropped out of the workforce and turned to food
stamps and welfare programmes just to get by. Americans asked
themselves: “Where’s my bailout?”
At the same time, they saw the world becoming more unstable. Part of
Obama’s appeal was that he promised to end the unpopular wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, restore America’s standing in the international
community and pursue multilateral agreements that would bring stability.
Instead, Americans watched Isis step into the vacuum created by the US
withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. They watched the Syrian civil war trigger a
migrant crisis in Europe that many Americans now view as a cautionary
tale. At home, Isis-inspired terrorist attacks took their toll, as they
did in Europe. And all the while Obama’s White House insisted that
everything was going well.
Amid all this, along came Trump. Here was a rough character, a
boisterous celebrity billionaire with an axe to grind. He had palpable
disdain for both political parties, which he said had failed the
American people. He showed contempt for political correctness that was
strangling public debate over contentious issues such as terrorism. He
struck many of the same populist notes, both in his campaign and in his
recent inaugural address, that Senator Bernie Sanders did among his
young socialist acolytes, sometimes word for word.
In many ways, Trump’s agenda isn’t partisan in a recognisable way –
especially on trade. Almost immediately after taking office, Trump made
good on a promise that Sanders also made,
pulling the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership
and proclaiming an end to multilateral trade deals. He also threatened
US companies with a “border tax” if they move jobs overseas. These are
not traditional Republican positions but they do appeal to American
workers who have watched employers pull out of their communities and
ship jobs overseas.
Many traditional Republicans have always been uncomfortable with
Trump. They fundamentally disagree with his positions on trade and
immigration. Even now, congressional Republicans are revolting over
Trump’s proposed border wall, promising to block any new expenditures
for it. They’re also uncomfortable with Trump personally. For some
Republicans,
it was only Trump’s promise to nominate a conservative supreme court
justice to replace Justice Antonin Scalia that won their votes in the
end – a promise Trump honoured last week by nominating Judge Neil
Gorsuch, a judge very much in Scalia’s mould.
Once Trump won the nomination at the Republican national convention,
most Republican voters got on board, reasoning that whatever uncertainty
they had about Trump, the alternative – Clinton – was worse.
In many ways, the 2016 election wasn’t just a referendum on Obama’s
eight years in the White House, it was a rejection of the entire
political system that gave us Iraq, the financial crisis, a botched
healthcare law and shocking income inequality during a slow economic
recovery. From Akron to Alaska, millions of Americans had simply lost
confidence in their leaders and the institutions that were supposed to
serve them. In their desperation, they turned to a man who had no regard
for the elites – and no use for them.
In his inaugural address, Trump said: “Today, we are not merely
transferring power from one administration to another or from one party
to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, DC, and
giving it back to you, the people.” To be sure, populism of this kind
can be dangerous and unpredictable, But it doesn’t arise from nowhere.
Only a corrupt political establishment could have provoked a political
revolt of this scale. Instead of blaming Trump’s rise on racism or
xenophobia, blame it on those who never saw this coming and still don’t
understand why so many Americans would rather have
Donald Trump in the White House than suffer the rule of their elites.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior correspondent for the
Federalist
. He lives in Austin, Texas
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/05/trump-not-fascist-champion-for-forgotten-millions
