Well, it’s finally over, and I think it’s fair to say I
called it. As I predicted back in January of this year, working class
Americans—fed up with being treated by the Democratic Party as the one American
minority that it’s okay to hate—delivered a stinging rebuke to the politics of
business as usual. To the shock and chagrin of the entire US political
establishment, and to the tautly focused embarrassment of the pundits,
pollsters, and pet intellectuals of the mainstream media, Donald Trump will be
the forty-fifth president of the United States of America.
Like millions of other Americans, I took part in the
pleasant civic ritual of the election. My local polling place is in an
elementary school on the edge of the poor part of town—the rundown multiracial
neighborhood I’ve mentioned here before, where Trump signs blossomed early and
often—and I went to vote, as I usually do, in early afternoon, when the lunch
rush was over and the torrent of people voting on the way home from work hadn’t
yet gotten under way. Thus there was no line; I came in just as two elderly
voters on the way out were comparing notes on local restaurants that give
discounts to patrons who’ve got the “I Voted” sticker the polls here hand out
when you’ve done your civic duty, and left maybe five minutes later as a
bottle-blonde housewife was coming in to cast her vote.
Maryland had electronic voting for a while, but did the
smart thing and went back to paper ballots this year, so I’m pretty sure my
votes got counted the way I cast them. Afterwards I walked home—it was cloudy
but warm, as nice a November day as you could ask for—and got back to work on
my current writing project. It all made an interesting counterpoint to the
nonstop shrieking that’s been emanating for months now from the media and,
let’s be fair, from politicians, pundits, and a great many ordinary people all
over the world as well.
I don’t see a lot of point just now in talking about what’s
going to happen once the dust and the tumult settles, the privileged finish
throwing their predictable tantrums, and the Trump administration settles into
power in Washington DC. There will be
plenty of time for that later. What I’d like to do here and now is talk about a
couple of things that were highlighted by this election, and cast a useful
light on the current state of US politics and the challenges that have to be
faced as a troubled, beleaguered, and bitterly divided nation staggers on
toward its next round of crises.
One of those things showed up with rare clarity in the way
that many readers responded to my posts on the election. All along, from my
first post on the improbable rise of Donald Trump right up to last
week’s pre-election
wrapup, I tried to keep the discussion focused on issues: what
policies each candidate could be expected to support once the next
administration took office.
To my mind, at least, that’s the thing that matters most
about an election. Four or eight years from now, after all, the personality of
the outgoing president is going to matter less than an average fart in a
Category 5 hurricane. The consequences of policy decisions made by the
presidency over the next four years, on the other hand, will have implications
that extend for years into the future. Should the United States pursue a policy
of confrontation with Russia in the Middle East, or should it work out a modus
vivendi with the Russians to pursue the common goal of suppressing jihadi
terrorism? Should federal policy continue to encourage the offshoring of jobs
and the importation of workers to drive down wages, or should it be changed to
discourage these things? These are important issues that will affect millions
of lives in the United States and elsewhere, and there are other issues of
similar importance on which the two candidates had significantly different
positions.
Quite a few of the people who responded to those posts,
though, displayed no interest in such mundane if important matters. They only
wanted to talk about their opinions about the personalities of the candidates:
to insist that Clinton was a corrupt stooge, say or that Trump was a
hatemongering fascist. (It says something about American politics these days
that rather more often than not, the people who did this were too busy
slandering the character of the candidate they hated to say much about the one
they planned to vote for.) Outside the relatively sheltered waters of The
Archdruid Report, in turn, that tendency went into overdrive; for much of
the campaign, the only way you could tell the difference between the newspapers
of record and the National Enquirer was by noting which candidates they
supported, and allegedly serious websites were by and large even worse.
This wasn’t the fault of the candidates, as it happens.
Whatever else might be said for or against Hillary Clinton, she tried to avoid
a campaign based on content-free sound bites like the one Barack Obama waged
against her so cynically and successfully in 2008; the pages of her campaign
website displayed a laundry list of things she said she wanted to do if she won
the election. While many voters will have had their disagreements with her
proposals, she actually tried to talk about the issues, and that’s refreshingly
responsible. Trump, for that matter, devoted speech after speech to a range of
highly specific policy proposals.
Yet nearly all the talk about both candidates, in and out of
the media, focused not on their policy proposals but on their personalities—or
rather on nastily distorted parodies of their personalities that defined them,
more or less explicitly, as evil incarnate. The Church of Satan, I’m told, has
stated categorically that the Devil was not running in this year’s US
presidential election, but you’d have a hard time telling that from the
rhetoric on both sides. The media certainly worked overtime to foster the
fixation on personalities, but I suspect this is one of those cases where the
media was simply reflecting something that was already present in the
collective consciousness of our society.
All through the campaign I noticed, rather to my surprise,
that it wasn’t just those who have nothing in their heads that a television or
a website didn’t put there, who ignored the issues and fixated on
personalities. I long ago lost track of the number of usually thoughtful people
I know who, over the course of the last year, ended up buying into every
negative claim about whichever candidate they hated, without even going through
the motions of checking the facts. I also lost track months ago of the number
of usually thoughtful people I know whose automatic response to an attempt to
talk about the issues at stake in this election was to give me a blank look and
go right back to ranting about the evilly evil evilness of whichever candidate
they hated.
It seems to me that something has been forgotten here. We didn’t have an election to choose a
plaster saint, a new character on My Little Pony, or Miss (or Mister)
Goody Two-Shoes 2016. We had an election to choose the official who will head
the executive branch of our federal government for the next four years. I’ve
read essays by people who know Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump personally, and
claim that both of them are actually very pleasant people. You know what? I
literally couldn’t care less. I would be just as likely to vote for a surly
misanthrope who loathes children, kicks puppies, and has deviant sexual
cravings involving household appliances and mayonnaise, if that person supports
the policies I want on the issues that matter to me. It really is that simple.
I’d like to suggest, furthermore, that the fixation on
personalities—or, again, malicious parodies of personalities—has played a huge
role in making politics in the United States so savage, so divisive, and so
intractably deadlocked on so many of the things that matter just now. The
issues I mentioned a few paragraphs back—US foreign policy toward a resurgent
Russia, on the one hand, and US economic policy regarding the offshoring of
jobs and the importation of foreign workers—are not only important, they’re
issues about which reasonable disagreement is possible. What’s more, they’re
issues on which negotiation, compromise, and the working out of a mutually
satisfactory modus vivendi between competing interests are also possible, at
least in theory.
In practice? Not while each side is insisting at the top of
its lungs that the other side is led by a monster of depravity and supported
only by people who hate everything good in the world. I’d like to suggest that
it’s exactly this replacement of reasoned politics with a pretty close
equivalent of the Two Minutes Hate from Orwell’s 1984 that’s among the
most important forces keeping this country from solving any of its problems or
doing anything to brace itself for the looming crises ahead.
Thus I’d like to encourage all the citizens of my country to
turn off the television and the internet for a few moments, take a few deep
breaths, and think about the tone of the recent election, and to what extent
they might have participated in the bipartisan culture of hatred that filled so
much of it. It might be worth pointing out that you’re not likely to convince
other people to vote the way you think they ought to vote if you’re
simultaneously berating them for being evilly evil with a double helping of
evil sauce on the side, or sneering at them for being too ignorant to recognize
that voting for your candidate really is in their best interests, or any of the
other counterproductive habits that have taken the place of reasonable
political discourse in today’s America.
The second point I noticed in the course of the election
campaign connects to the one just discussed. That’s the hard fact that the
United States at this point in its history may still be a single republic, but
it’s not a single nation—and it could be argued on reasonably solid grounds
that it never has been. Facile distinctions between “red” and “blue” states
barely touch the complexity, much less the depth, of the divisions that
separate the great urban centers from the rest of the country, and the
different regions from one another.
I think it was Pauline Kael who, in the wake of Richard
Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972, commented that she didn’t understand how
Nixon could have won—after all, nobody she knew voted for him! The same
sentiment is currently being expressed in tones ranging from bewilderment and
baffled rage from all corners of the affluent left and their hangers-on among
the mainstream media’s well-paid punditry. The 20% or so of Americans who have
benefited from the jobless recovery of the last eight years, and the broader neoliberal
economic agenda of the last four decades, very rarely leave the echo-chamber
environments where they spend their days to find out what the rest of the
country is thinking. If they’d done so a bit more often in the last year, they
would have watched Trump signs sprouting all over the stark landscapes of
poverty that have spread so widely in the America they never see.
But of course the divisions run deeper than this, and
considerably more ramified. Compare the political, economic, and social policies
that have the approval of people in Massachusetts, say, and those that have the
approval of people in Oklahoma, and you’ll find next to no overlap. This isn’t
because the people of one state or the other are (insert your insult of choice
here); it’s because they belong to different cultures, with incommensurable
values, attitudes, and interests. Attempts, well-meaning or otherwise, to
impose the mores of either state on the other are guaranteed to result only in
hostility and incomprehension—and such attempts have been all too common of
late.
Ours is a very diverse country. That may sound like a
truism, but it has implications that aren’t usually taken into account. A
country with a great deal of cultural uniformity, with a broad consensus of
shared values and attitudes, can afford to legislate that consensus on a
national basis. A country that doesn’t have that kind of uniformity, that lacks
any consensus concerning values and attitudes, very quickly gets into serious
trouble if it tries that sort of legislation. If the divergence is serious
enough, the only way that reliably allows different nations to function under a
single government is a federal system—that is, a system that assigns the
national government only those powers and duties that have to be handled on a
nationwide basis, while leaving most other questions for local governments and
individuals to settle for themselves.
My more historically literate readers will be aware that the
United States used to have a federal system—that is, after all, why we still
speak of “the federal government.” Under the Constitution as originally written
and interpreted, the people of each state had the right to run their own
affairs pretty much as they saw fit, within certain very broad limits. The federal government was assigned certain
narrowly defined powers, and all other powers were, in the language of the
Tenth Amendment, reserved to the states and the people.
Over the first century and a half of our national history,
certain other powers were assigned to the federal government by constitutional
amendment, sometimes with good results—the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of
equal protection of the laws to all citizens, for example, and the Fifteenth
and Nineteenth Amendments’ extension of voting rights to black people and women
respectively—and sometimes not—the Eighteenth Amendment’s prohibition of
alcohol comes to mind here. The basic federal structure remained intact. Not
until the aftermath of the Great Depression and the Second World War did the metastatic
growth of the federal government begin in earnest, and so in due time did the
various attempts to impose this or that set of moral values on the entire
country by force of law.
Those attempts have not worked, and they’re not going to
work. I’m not sure how many people have noticed, though, that the election of
Donald Trump was not merely a rebuke to the liberal left; it was also a defeat
for the religious right. It’s worth recalling that the evangelical wing of the
Republican Party had its own favorites in the race for the GOP nomination, and
Trump was emphatically not one of them. It has not been a propitious autumn for
the movements of left and right whose stock in trade is trying to force their
own notion of virtue down the throats of the American people—and maybe, just
maybe, that points to the way ahead.
It’s time to consider, I suggest, a renewal of the
traditions of American federalism: a systematic devolution of power from the
overinflated federal government to the states, and from the states to the
people. It’s time for people in Massachusetts to accept that they’re never
going to be able to force people in Oklahoma to conform to their notions of
moral goodness, and for the people of Oklahoma to accept the same thing about
the people of Massachusetts; furthermore, it’s time for government at all
levels to give up trying to impose cultural uniformity on the lively diversity
of our republic’s many nations, and settle for their proper role of ensuring
equal protection under the laws, and those other benefits that governments, by
their nature, are best suited to provide for their citizens.
We need a new social compact under which all Americans agree
to back away from the politics of personal vilification that dominated all
sides in the election just over, let go of the supposed right to force everyone
in the country to submit to any one set of social and moral views, and approach
the issues that divide us with an eye toward compromise, negotiation, and
mutual respect. Most of the problems that face this country could be solved, or
at least significantly ameliorated, if our efforts were guided by such a
compact—and if that can be done, I suspect that a great many more of us will
have the opportunity to experience one of the greatest benefits a political
system can bestow: actual, honest-to-goodness liberty. We’ll talk more about
that in future posts.
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