Where the hell does one start when talking about Trump winning a non-consecutive second term as US President anyway?!?
I guess I will start by saying that as a recently retired ‘Gentleman’, I have joined a couple of the private members’ Clubs in Town. One, as you would know, is the Kelvin Club, which I joined almost 3 years ago. The other, to which I was Elected just over 3 months ago, is the Melbourne Savage Club.
I enjoy both Clubs. The Savage has a certain eccentricity combined with formality and traditionalism which suits my more Anglomorphic tendencies (I do self identify as Australian by birth, Italian by ancestry and culture, and British by virtue of all Australians being British subjects up until 1985). The Kelvin is much more relaxed and informal – a place where I can dress up in smart casual drinking gear (jeans with shirt and sports coat as compared to a suit and tie) if I want to settle in for an afternoon or evening of carousing in a genteel environment.
The Kelvin Club had a function on Wednesday to mark the US Elections (note the 16 hour time difference between New York and Melbourne). Trump supporters were invited to go upstairs and drink Budweiser, whilst Harris supporters were to congregate in the bar area and sip sparkling wine.
I did not attend. Aside from the fact that I find both Trump and Harris highly unpalatable as options for US President, I doubt very much that I would have felt comfortable in the presence of either of the camps watching the election unfold as a slow moving train wreck of democracy.
After all, I am very much to the Right of Centre, although I do tend to consider myself as a relatively sane Liberal-Conservative most of the time. I vote Liberal usually, and on the occasions that I don’t, I preference them above Labor and choose to protest vote for some mostly moronic right of centre third party (as in the past two federal elections where I found Scummo particularly repulsive as our prime minister).
Hence, I am not going to feel very much at home amongst the sort of middle class chardonnay socialist types who would have been hoping for Harris to win (despite the fact that in this election, I clearly saw her as the lesser of two evils). I don’t like Karens at the best of times, and even less when I disagree with their politics and general world view and they are tanked up on abundant sparkling wine.
Nor would I feel at home amongst the sort of people I imagine would have shown up to the Trump party upstairs. Trump is a vulgar and crass narcissist, and a lot of the sort of people who have become his fanboys (and girls) are just supporting his side either because they cannot imagine voting for the more progressive candidate (a very hard stretch for me, I must admit), or because they enjoy being contrary (although I am very much, if I am honest about myself, a contrarian and quite mischievous). More importantly, I think that some of those sorts who would have been upstairs would have been those privileged former elite private school educated sorts who bring out my latent anarchist tendencies.
Anyway, enough for me and my Footscray boy’s vague antipathy towards the upper middle class.
I did ‘celebrate’ the election result at the home of a friend who lives locally, and who was unapologetically and loudly jubilant about Trump winning. I carried a bottle of the Auld The Ernie shiraz to his home and we drank a few beers and a couple of bottles of red whilst eating some red meat and talking politics (his wife is in Italy for a long holiday, so he was otherwise bored).
I can see his point of view, but I am very bemused about the outcome and do not see any good coming out of handing the nuclear weapon codes (along with the world’s largest economy, most powerful military and the whole hegemony) over to Trump again.
Onto more serious and sober thoughts about the outcome. I can see some parallels between Trump and his groundswell of support with the fall of the Roman Republic.
Starting after the end of the Second Punic War, Roman citizens became increasingly landless and disenfranchised, dependant on rich patrons who became political machine operators and warlords.
Obviously those only supported the proletariat (as those below the propertied classes in Rome were called) because they needed their votes and muscle to pursue power against their rivals.
One particular scion of the aristocracy chose to spell his surname Clodius rather than Claudius (Claudius was a very ancient and aristocratic Roman family). This helped him to go on to manipulate the mob in the late Republic very effectively, although of course, no one was as effective as Caesar and his great nephew.
The only positive about that lesson in history is that the decline took over a century – if you measure it from when the Gracchi brothers (grandsons of Scipio Africanus who happened to become plebeian tribunes) were lynched by the Senate over their land reform proposals to when Caesar was also lynched by the Senate due to his overpowering ambitions.
What do we say about America now, two months before Trump is reinaugurated as President?
I see the ‘deplorables’ who support Trump so vehemently as very similar to the Roman mob – who lost their land and turned to demagogues like the aptly named Clodious and ultimately to Caesar. Starting from 1980 when ‘Neutron Jack’ Welch started his war on loyalty at General Electric, the American lower middle class has been decimated.
Blue collar factory workers, who expected a job for life, as per the post war consensus, with overtime and shift pay and benefits, comprised a large lower middle class. This blue collar base is angry and feels robbed of the American Dream – and they have turned to Trump.
Their Everyman is Homer Simpson, whose main employment over the 35 years of the TV show, has been as a usually inept nuclear safety inspector at his local power plant. He is a blue collar worker who has a job for life, and with it can maintain a stay at home wife, three children, two cars and a life of relative material affluence. It is interesting that, aside from his episodic career changes (eg Casino employee and Astronaut), Homer still has his nuclear power plant job. That sort of secure well paid blue collar job has for the most part disappeared since The Simpsons first premiered on TV in 1989.
Just like a lot of blue collar male Americans, Homer also tends to support the Republican Party – with the exception of his feud with George Bush Senior.
Let’s keep talking about The Simpsons, who happened to predict a Trump Presidency over two decades ago, for a little more. In an earlier episode, an elementary school pageant dedicated to Presidents’ Day features a skit where they salute the historically most ineffective presidents with a song which starts:
We are the mediocre presidents
You won’t find our faces on dollars or on cents.
Google it – I think it serves as a very effective crash course in US History.
The historian Paul Johnson, when discussing one of the later mediocre presidents, Gerald Ford, who took over in the chaos and crisis of legitimacy arising from the Watergate scandal, indicated that despite his views being sensible (on the rare occasions they emerged), he lacked gravitas. Johnson then went on to say ‘His successor was far worse’.
I was seven when Jimmy Carter was elected president, and only recently starting to notice the world around me in terms of politics and so on. His presidency was a disaster, but not the first in US history.
Is American Democracy strong enough to survive a second term of Trump?
I have to say that I am pessimistic about it.
But let’s face it, American Democracy has been on the edge many times. Trump is just the latest manifestation of crisis. Let’s peruse some lowlights and inherent flaws in the system.
First there was the combination of ‘mediocre’ and rapacious presidents throughout the 1840s and 1850s who steered the USA into civil war.
Then there was the causus bellum for that civil war – slavery. After emancipation, former slaves and their descendants were prevented from being full citizens in fact rather than just word for a full century.
Then we have that warped sense of justice Americans have which cause the highest incarceration rates in the world – one in every eleven people spends time in gaol at least once in their lifetime.
I think that Woodrow Wilson deserves a mention when talking about crisis in American Democracy. Wilson is probably one of the more overrated presidents. Vain, spiteful, disloyal and vindictive, he over extended the use of executive power to take the US into a world war on ideological grounds, whilst suppressing constitutional rights of the citizenry.
Then there were the populists like Huey Long, who inspired Sinclair Lewis to write a novel about the rise of an American dictator in the 1930s.
Let’s face it – there are a lot of weaknesses in the system right now. There is the excessive evangelical religiosity which underpins the political culture and the way that the criminal justice system has evolved. Then there is the monomaniacal obsession with gun ownership. Plus there is elimination of the lower middle class over the past two generations which has created an angry underclass ripe for demagogues to manipulate.
Aside from those, politics has moved from the consensus of the post war period right up to the mid 1990s to a polarising hostility between the two sides, where impeachments and governmental shutdowns are seen as normal partisan parliamentary tools.
Looking at all of this, I do not see things getting any better. So many people do not consider the political system as legitimate anymore, and express views that are hostile to democracy. At some stage, a tipping point could be reached and the constitutional order will collapse.
I hope this does not happen. The free world needs the protection of the USA to remain free from external threats like Russia and Communist China, and the example of its democracy to maintain the sovereignty of their people over despotism.
Lost For Words! 