SO, THE Trump presidency was not an aberration. Joe Biden’s was merely an interregnum. This is the era of Donald Trump, the new normal (News, 8 November). The American people knew what they were getting — and they voted for it anyway.
Politics will be different from now on, and not just in the United States. The political psychologist Karen Stenner once said that at least one third of Western populations are predisposed to authoritarian solutions and attracted to populist leaders. But, in the US, a majority have now voted for a man who has legitimised rage, fear, and suspicion, and coarsened the language of public discourse — allowing his supporters to shout views that previously they did not dare articulate.
Mr Trump’s second term is likely to be even more unorthodox and untrammelled than his first. He has won the popular vote, and the Senate, and possibly the House of Representatives. Already, he is flexing his muscles from outside the White House, making appointments and laying down conditions for any future leader of the Senate which set aside elements of the checks and balances that the US constitution requires to curb the power of a President. His decision to allow his rich rabble-rousing backer Elon Musk to join his call to the President of Ukraine underscored his disregard for governing convention.
His supporters seem unbothered. Research by US academics suggests why. Voters are happy for a politician to lie, Oliver Hahl says, when they feel that that politician is their champion against a political system from which they are excluded. “He may be a son-of-a-bitch but he’s our son-of-a-bitch,” as the oft-quoted trope puts it. More important is that the politician tells them a “deep story”, which Arlie Russell Hochschild calls “a feels-as-if story” that deals with emotions rather than facts. In this case “envy, anxiety, grief, anger, and suspicion” tell Trump supporters that their cost-of-living crisis is caused by queue-jumping “blacks . . . women . . . immigrants . . . gays . . . [and] refugees”.
This is always portrayed as “a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil”, writes Richard Hofstadter in The Paranoid Style in American Politics. It renders every Trump supporter “a stranger in your own land” — Left Behind like some secular inversion of the Rapture.
Conservatives do not always vote on their economic interests, Jonathan Haidt argues, but, rather, on their “moral interests”, which is why the Trump campaign did not simply focus on the key issues of the economy and immigration, but targeted “woke” culture, spending hundreds of millions of dollars alone on anti-trans adverts attacking Kamala Harris’s support for transgender issues.
A raft of reasons have been advanced for the comprehensive rout of the Democrats in this election. Biden resigned too late. Ms Harris was the wrong replacement. She chose the wrong candidate for Vice-President. She advanced the wrong policies. But the real problem was more fundamental. Her party needs to find its own “deep story” that resonates with the reality that ordinary voters feel.
Until the Democrats do that, coming generations of Trump-followers will conclude that his approach is the one that they should emulate. Polarisation, belligerence, verbal violence, and an ostentatious lack of ordinary decency in engaging with political opponents will be the new order of the day. It is a frightening prospect.