Trump’s win: The reasons for unreason

I was wrong: Trump will be president of the United States.

Almost every other political observer outside the faithful followers of the Don, including conservatives, were wrong too. But that’s no excuse. As the Spanish saying goes, “the misery of many is a consolation for fools.”

However, I was not as far off as most analysts who, from the start, could not understand Trump’s appeal. “How can the good people of the United States, citizens of an advanced society, elect a bigot as their leader?”

Perplexed pundits and other critics resorted to the same flawed, circular reasoning, as did the opponents of another narcissistic leader in another time and place:

“Ridiculing him has been one approach. Calling him a ‘lunatic’ or a ‘raving maniac’ obviates the need for an explanation—though it of course leaves open the key question: why a complex society would be prepared to follow someone who was mentally deranged, a ‘pathological’ case, into the abyss.”[i]

Trump is crazy like a fox. The reasons for his appeal were clear to me from the moment he kicked off his campaign by bashing Mexicans and was rewarded with a big jump in the polls. Mediocre businessman but businessman still, he sensed that in 2016 there was a large untapped market for overt xenophobia and racism, possibly a larger market than ever before.

Establishment Republicans had been benefitting covertly from racism and xenophobia for decades, but only Trump has been willing to express such sentiments openly, loudly, proudly—and to propose a policy (an impenetrable wall) radical enough to satisfy those who hold them.

Moreover, as a con man extraordinaire, Trump knew many would buy into his wild promises as they had bought into his bogus university and multiple other scams. As H.L. Mencken wrote at his most cynical:

“No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

The real reasons for Trump’s ascent are not explained by his mental health or lack thereof but in the fertile soil in which the seeds of his simplistic, triumphalist ideology were planted.

Last week, I wrote about two of the main reasons for Donald Trump’s political resilience: (a) the existence of a large swath of politically uninformed or misinformed people in in the U.S. electorate and (b) widespread rejection among whites about the consequences of the country’s rapidly changing racial, ethnic, and cultural mix. These two categories obviously are not mutually exclusive.

Even discounting for Mencken’s elitist prejudices, there are indeed great numbers of people out there who lack basic political knowledge or any coherent ideology. They tend to vote because of vague impressions, unexamined assumptions, and vague feelings.

Last week the New York Times profiled the kind of voter I am thinking about. Debbie Biro, of Pennsylvania, is described as a “lifelong Democrat” who became a Republican to vote for Trump. The Times describes the thinking process that led to Ms. Biro’s political conversion:

“It came in January, when he [Trump] skipped a debate in Iowa to host a fundraiser for veterans—an event that later garnered questions about how much money he had given. Ms. Biro’s father served in the Korean War, and she said she admired Mr. Trump’s business skills, “and I thought it was nice he was taking care of the vets.”

The facts, which have been widely reported, are that Trump skipped the debate as a political stunt to stand out from his many Republican adversaries, unlike them a patriot first and a politician second; that how much money Trump gave the vets, after a long delay and being called out by the media, is unclear at best; that Trump’s real feelings about veterans are better reflected in his sarcastic comments regarding John McCain and his disrespect for the parents of a soldier who died a hero’s death in Iraq. To add insult to injury, while McCain sat in a POW prison in Hanoi, Trump managed to skip the Vietnam War because of a supposed injury that subsequently has never prevented him from playing golf or engaging in other strenuous physical activities.[ii] As to his business prowess, Trump has had multiple bankruptcies and his principal business skill seems to be his ability to make money for himself on a bad investment and leave other investors and contractors to take the losses.

The other main reason for Trump’s win: the fact that the racial, ethnic, and cultural transformation of the United States since the 1960s has produced an emotional reaction of increasing intensity among whites: concern, consternation, alienation, anger. This election was the final stage in the progression: sheer, irrational fury.

Racial and ethnic animus formed a large part of Trump’s winning equation. There is a chasm in the political outlook of whites, who make up by far the largest portion of the population, and Blacks, Latinos, Asians and other racial/ethnic minorities who, despite rapid growth, together still do not come close to constituting more than half of the electorate.

My mistake in predicting a Clinton win was to underestimate the number of people who fall into two classes of voters—the know-nothings and those afflicted by a degree of racism/xenophobia acute enough to impel them to come out and vote in droves for a candidate with zero qualifications and no credible policy proposals—an arrogant, autocratic man who lied so often during the campaign that the fact checkers were busy 24-7.

Let me share a provocative thought, long-held but never expressed in quite this way. For a long time, people in the United States spoke about “the Negro problem.” Politically, at least, what the United States suffers from instead is a white problem. If, like black voters were from more than a century, white voters had been disenfranchised in this election, Trump would have been crushed like a grape under an elephant’s foot.  And the United States, like most other rich countries in the world, would adopt policies to promote greater economic equality and a serious social safety net.

The numbers speak volumes. Although Hillary Clinton did not do as well as Barack Obama with key minority constituencies, she still performed fabulously well compared with Donald Trump. Among African Americans she beat Trump by 80 percentage points. She received more than two-thirds (67 percent) of Latino votes.

How did Trump win? He not only walloped Clinton among whites with no college degree (67 percent), he even beat her among whites with college degrees, 49 to 45 percent.

In this election, race trumped almost every other factor. What was Trump’s winning formula for attracting white voters, educated and not educated? “A Utopian vision of national redemption and racial purification, not a set of middle-range policies.” [iii]

Sound familiar?

Make America Great Again. Build a Wall

I have much more to say on this topic and will do so in other articles. For now, let’s remember that in any democracy in the world, Hillary Clinton would have been the winner for the simple reason that she won more actual votes than Trump.

I say “any democracy” rather than “any other democracy” because the United States is not now and has never been a democracy. Rather, it is a Republic with many archaic and undemocratic institutions built in—the Senate being one important case. Another important example is the Electoral College, which makes the popular vote mean nothing. The only number that counts is the delegate count in the Electoral College, and Trump won that.

[i] Ian Kershaw, ‘Hitler: 1889-1936, Hubris’ (1999)

[ii]  New York Times, November 11, 2016.

[iii] Kershaw, cited above.