Why Did Trump Win?

Why Did Trump Win?

Let’s be clear about what the issue is here.  We could have elected a corrupt politician—Clinton is certainly that.  We’ve elected corrupt politicians before, and the republic has survived.  Instead, we elected a professional con artist who makes no pretense of being anything but a racist, sexist pig, who smooches the behind of Vladimir Putin, and who encourages his followers to violence.  Why did we do this to ourselves?

One reason is certainly that white working class people, especially those economists call the working poor, are scared and pissed off.  And rightly so.  They look around and see a system that is run by and for an elite, while their own prospects are grim.  Good jobs, jobs that pay enough to live decently, are disappearing to globalization or automation.  At the same time, massive immigration and sweeping social changes are exerting enormous pressure on their communities.  And if they complain about their falling prospects, they are told that they are responsible for their own misery (by conservatives who are likely corporate stooges) or that they are disgusting racists (by privileged bourgeois liberals who are quite unaffected by these pressures).  Increasingly extreme economic inequality, combined with the self-righteous moralizing of the elites, creates fertile ground for a demagogue.

Another reason, of course, is that some of Trump’s supporters are racists—or sexists or homohysterics, or religious fanatics—people moved by hatred of some other.  For some Americans, Trump is the perfect restorative tonic after eight years of a black president; it is no surprise that the nazis and the white supremacists supported him.  He is the perfect antidote to the threat of a female president.  He is not shackled by political correctness.

And, of course, there is ignorance.  Many people actually seem to believe the incoherent tripe that demagogues like Trump spout—long on promises, short on plans.  I think many Americans are under the sway of the delusion that Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence describe in their 1977 book, The American Monomyth.  If something is going wrong, it can only be because there are bad people doing bad things.  The solution is for a good guy (only one, a solitary hero) to ride in (on a white horse), shoot the bad guys, and then ride off, having returned everything to its natural state of goodness.  Clint Eastwood has made a lot of great movies out of this myth, but it generally doesn’t make for good government.

But why did Clinton lose?  More on that later.