America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing… America when will you be angelic? … America why are your libraries full of tears?
Allen Ginsberg
It appears that I am once again writing this column in the wake of a Trump victory. Eight years ago, I chose the Joyce quote about history being a nightmare, as the only words adequate to explain my immense disappointment at the American people. I ended that post on a rather hysterical note, promising to embrace Stoicism to get through the coming trauma.
This time around, sadly, I am not so surprised. The feeling is more of emptiness than despair. I may not have given America all, but I feel a numbing emptiness.
In my last post, I tried to briefly explain why I thought Trump ought not to be president. In this one, I am tempted to explain—or try to—why he won anyway. I probably shouldn’t. After every unsuccessful campaign there is a post-mortem, and the conclusions reached are usually rendered irrelevant by the next election. It’s clear that Biden and Harris made some significant mistakes, but, anyway, I’m hardly a democratic strategist.
Yet it does strike me that Trump’s victory signals that, as Kamala Harris said, we’re not going back. That is, we can never return to the status quo ante in the US, where the media was basically trusted, institutions were cherished, expertise respected, and political speech and ideology existed between narrow bounds of acceptability. Trump was not, as was ardently hoped, merely an aberration. Voters experienced a full Trump term and, somehow, returned him to power. They want what he’s selling.
There are a million things to say about the rise of the populist right, the alienation among young men, the changing media ecosystem, the lingering effects of the pandemic, etc., etc. For my part, I think inflation was the decisive factor. Even though the inflation suffered in the US was, by historical standards, rather moderate, it revealed the financial precarity of a huge swath of the public. Most people simply have no margin in their budgets, so even a modest rise in prices can be acutely stressful (I am speaking from experience here).
By my lights, Biden deserves only a very limited amount of the blame for inflation, since it was a worldwide phenomenon, not especially severe in the USA. Yet that so many people live on so little, and were only to have a decent standard of life due to cheap goods—many of them manufactured abroad—is a situation long condoned by the elites of both parties, including Biden. And in this election, Trump represented a rejection of these elites, while Harris (whose administration often downplayed the financial hardships) was their spokesperson.
I hesitate to predict whether Trump will, as many fear, permanently destroy American democracy. He will certainly damage it—he already has—but it may survive. I feel confident that he will continue to flout norms and will leave the country worse off than before. I fully expect the media circus of his previous administration to return, at least in part. Maybe the Democrats, as the opposition, will get their act together and find a message that resonates better. Or maybe Trump is such a poisonous presence that even the opposition will be debased in the new political culture.
What is clear, though, is that we’re not going back to the pre-Trump times. I would blame the electorate for being easily duped or irredeemably misogynistic. But, in Ginsberg’s words, “It occurs to me that I am America. I am talking to myself again.”
Lotz in Translation 