I broadly agreed with you when you first made this claim, but I've been nurturing a glimmer of hope. That's been extinguished in the last couple of weeks. The conservatives on the Supreme Court appear to have completely given up all responsibility. The multinational tax dodging retreat shows the international community is pathetically incapable of making Trump face consequences. The breadth and scale of Trump's attacks on government have been extraordinary. And the actions of ICE are chilling, both because of widespread violation of rights and the emergence of a paramilitary.
And the resilience of markets and the economy have been extraordinary. Even a dramatic economic slowdown won't affect Trump now - there are enough people who will believe or pretend it's caused by Trump's scapegoat du jour.
And yet, I still find myself trying to find ways out of it. The urge to denial must be even stronger for those in the country.
The "urge to denial" is a variable, not a constant, for those in the country.
There are two remaining levers that I haven't seen JQ discuss yet:
First, the US is a federal system, and Democratic state governors have been much more impressive than their national counterparts. This is important for two reasons: first, the state governments are themselves quite powerful, esp when they coordinate, and esp when much of what SCOTUS is doing is empowering state govs (GOP will use this authority to repress in their states, but that's not all it can be used for as the response to Dobbs has made clear); second, in the history of US politics, new political coalitions are more often built by governors than legislators, and a number of cooperative state-level coalitions are being formed. Governors do not represent gerrymandered jurisdictions, thus governors are not as beholden to very small, highly-localized groups.
Second, the military remains highly professionalized, and it moves last. The "no kings" protest was the largest in US history, and lower-level courts are ruling against 47 well over 90% of the time. If there is widespread repression surrounding the midterms, and multiple Democratic governors ask the military to live up to their oaths... then all bets are off.
But what is potentially more important is the international response. And here the citizens of EVERY democracy can play a role, by working within their own countries to begin redirecting economic and cultural links away from the US as fast as possible. NO, I MEAN FASTER THAN THAT. This is why JQ's earlier series on "how to dispense with the US" was so important, that is happening but the pace needs to accelerate.
Following up on the last paragraph: redirecting economic and military ties away from the US as fast as possible was a central theme in Prime Minister Mark Carney's recent and successful election campaign. He is now trying to implement that. No easy task given Canada's unfortunate geographic location.
Correct, Carney sees this very clearly and he has the international credibility to do a lot of heavy lifting. And, so far at least, the Canadian public has taken a fairly unified stand in opposition to American imperialism.
But the same isn't necessarily true elsewhere. It seems that democratic publics of many countries would prefer their leaders to mollify or compromise with ("appease"?) 47, as a means of (e.g.) lowering inflation or otherwise not threatening growth.
This is not strategically wise. There is no natural "stopping off" point for 47. He is not joking when he says he wants Trump hotels on Gazan beaches. He also wants them on every other beach, and in every city. He will not stop until he has it all, and resistance only becomes more difficult in the future. So the time is now.
And if Trump takes a liking to some of Australia's pleasant beaches, will there be anything stopping him putting hotels on them? Will there be anything to stop Trimp taking whatever foreign military action he wants to achieve goals like this?
Another very worrying action is the bipartisan support for cryptocurrencies (the Genius Act), which will inevitably lead to hyper-inflation, as in the Weimar Republic.
I fear you are correct; however, I think you underestimate the influence of religion. The latter is in decline in the US and the religious are getting very concerned that their privilege and influence will eventually disappear and they will do anything to prevent that happening.
The problems with US democracy go far deeper than Trump or even the republican party.
People identify with their side of politics so much that if their side does something then it is good but if the other side does exactly the same thing its really really bad. Take protests for instance.
Both my parents were arrested (charged but not convicted) at an anti Vietnam war protest. I have been involved in protests against logging. The whole point of protesting is to get the government to change course.
Look at the so called "insurrection". This was simply a large peaceful protest trying to influence a congressional vote. During that protest some people managed to enter the capitol building. The fact that many people may disagree with their claims of electoral fraud (I think it was perfectly clear Biden won) shouldn't impact on their right to protest. The Biden administrations use of FBI and the "insurrection" claim to lock up many protesters, including people who didn't even enter the Capitol building sets a terrible precedent. This precedent can and will be used by future administrations to lock up people who protest about anything. The fact that so many people think it is ok to protest in support of their side but not the other is a far bigger problem than any specific protest.
More than twenty years ago George W Bush gave himself the power to order the killing of any non-US citizen anywhere in the world except the US. Obama, a democrat, then extended that power to let himself order the killing of any US citizen outside the US. Both Biden and Trump have continued to use that power. What if Trump now decides to start ordering US citizens to be killed in the US? Will we see predator drones circling US cities in the middle of the night blowing up people in their beds? Morally why would that be any worse that blowing up people outside the US?
US "democracy" has been dying for decades. To blame Trump is to miss the many real problems. I will make a prediction. Trump will be gone at the end of this presidential term, but the US will continue to get more repressive and more deeply divided and create more problems around the world. To change this something much bigger than just Trump going needs to happen.
However, it is crystal clear that Jan 6 was not simply a “large peaceful protest.” I find it very difficult to believe that you are not disingenuous in making this claim.
The evidence shows beyond any doubt that it was an attempted self-coup d’état by Donald Trump and a group of his supporters. For a detailed analysis with links to much of the evidence, see:
Hi Hugh, I don't for a minute support the Jan 6 protesters. I think the Congress did the right thing in endorsing the election of Biden. The point I was trying to make is that if the right to protest only applies to the "right" causes then it is not really a right at all.
The reaction by racist Republicans and "centrist" Democrats toward the winner of the NYC Dem mayoral primary, Zohran Mamdani, is a case in point of an alternate politics that pushes back against American-style fascism drawing massive attacks from...well, that very pro-fascist element AND its enablers that Mr Quiggin has bemoaned. Remarkable how even a suggestion of reordering political alignments away from the ghoulish state of affairs ushered in by tRumpism by just a candidate for mayor has caused such blowback, and it vividly brings home the point how ingrained the authoritarian impulse is, even amongst those nominally charged with defending democratic values who passively accept Die neue Ordnung.
Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein identified the US Congress as The Broken Branch in 2006. Today all three branches are broken — along with the so-called Fourth Estate and much of the voluntary sector. The 5 million or so people who turned out to show their disapproval of MAGA governance (if you can call it that) gives me some small hope that the end can be averted. But the end is nigh.
Resentment and the lust for retribution was and is a driving force for MAGA voters. But I suspect an equally important driving factor for many 'reluctant' MAGA voters and many non-voters was and is an insatiable appetite for excitement and entertainment. As Neil Postman put it in 1985, we are Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Biden was the last gasp (sigh, at least) of the old order that governed from the death of FDR through the end of Barack Obama's second term. Since the election of Reagan, the Democrats have attempted to revive the New Deal just as the Republicans have longed to repeal it. For a brief moment it seemed that Harris and Walz were going to break free of that, but the poll- and focus-group-addicted consultants — and the big-money donors — quickly put an end to that apostasy.
And as you note you can't understand the tenuous commitment of the US to democracy without recognizing the role that race has played and continues to play in US history, culture, and politics. How many people do not understand — or reject outright — the answer that Frederick Douglass gave to the rhetorical question he posed to the “Ladies of the Rochester Anti-Slavery Sewing Society” in 1852: What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July?
MAGA's goal is to erase the 20th century. In this it has been largely successful. The calendar has been turned back to June 1914. Peter Theil's and Ross Douthat's pretentious musings in the interview published by the New York Times earlier this week recall Marinetti's Declaration of Futurism of 1909 and Wyndham Lewis's Vorticist Manifesto of 1914. It's impossible for me to forget the connections of both to Fascism.
Yep, that's the Trump agenda: replace democracy with autocracy. But if you want a ray of hope, the popular and elite resistance seems to be strengthening. The lower-level federal courts have not been corrupted. Trump does not seem to be a particularly popular autocrat.
That the Republican party is a threat to democracy surely has been evident a lot earlier than Trump. Even back to tactics in the 2000s and 2010s. Republicans were more interested in rigging the system than appealing to the public for votes - see the rampart jerrymandering, voter suppression, and disenchantment, all the way back to Al Gore and the hanging chad.
The second point is about the legitimacy of Trump's electoral win in 2024. Why would a man who explicitly solicited foreign interference and paid off people for electoral benefit without punishment or sanction in 2016 (see Mueller report and Stormy Daniels payments) and attempted a coup in 2020 (see Jan 6) have been content with simply competing on votes in 2024? He wouldn't. He cheated again in the 2024 election, like he did in 2016 and tried to do again in 2020.
Why does it matter? It means that the US people didn't vote to end the rule of law and their democracy. As you've said above, that would be absurd - the equivalent of a 150 year old party abandoning democracy and keeping the support of voters. Rather, I think the better interpretation is that the US people were unable to overcome all the systemic barriers to voting, so were unable to vote to maintain democracy. That's not the same as voting in Trump.
In my opinion, much of the populism that the world faces is because moderate parties can’t admit that many people (wrongly!) hate immigration, and will hold their noses and vote for whoever seems ‘tough’ on it. If you look at approval ratings for Trump’s policies, for instance, immigration was strongly positive (no longer, but only -3%) while his approval ratings on the economy, trade and inflation are very negative. https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-silver-bulletin
Anti-immigrant politics is a winner for the right almost everywhere, and has been for a long time, but only in the US has it produced such a catastrophic outcome.
They don't hate immigration, they hate economic precarity, growing inequality and a degrading of social cohesion, but the moderate parties can't acknowledge these effects, because neoliberalism offers no solution to them. So when populists blame immigration, people feel seen, because at least their problems are being seen, even if misdiagnosed.
I think Robertiton was trying to answer the question "but why do they hate immigration?" I agree, it's the precarity of their economic conditions. Neoliberalism didn't fix things, so when Trump told them 'the other" was to blame, they fell for it, as voters almost always do (see Australian offshore detention policy). A couple of phoney wars against brown people following 9/11 cemented their beliefs. (In a prescient circularity, 9/11 was predominantly punishment for the US meddling in the Middle East in general, and Palestine in particular.)
They thought the Republicans had all the answers with Reagan's neoliberalism, then the Bushes'. But each time, that belief turned out not to make things better - in fact things got worse. The duality of American politics meant that the other side had a go in between, but they didn't provide answers either. The Tea Party's successes in the early 2010s should have warned the Democrats what was coming, but they only averted their eyes when Trump walked down that gilded staircase.
It is not the economic precarity that motivates out-group antipathy. It is "status threat," which is multifaceted chauvinism -- meaning, antipathetic towards foreigners, women, minority groups of all types, etc -- and hinges on the idea that relative gains (of others) are currently more salient to the status quo ante dominant group than absolute gains (of themselves).
The research of Diana Mutz is critical here, eg she shows how retrospective economic voting has never been *less* prevalent, but it also shows up in the priorities of the Trump administration: they do nothing to help the precarious, quite the opposite! They increase precarity to focus public resources instead on mass deportations and kleptocracy. Moreover, they do not hide these things but do them as loudly as possible, as a dominance play.
This is not a Polyanian double movement away from the volatility of the market. That has been offered in many countries, and rejected: Corbyn lost repeatedly, socdem parties are losing everywhere, if "Labour" wins at all it is a version of Labour that is essentially neoliberal.
Biden/Harris offered a robust expansion to the welfare state, which Obama had also previously delivered. Biden/Harris were pursuing the most aggressive antitrust policy of my lifetime (I was born at the start of Reagan's first term). Biden/Harris also expanded public sector employment and was the most pro-labor admin possibly in the nation's history.
Voters responded to this by voting for Trump, the candidate they perceived as *more moderate*.
Didn't matter. It's not what people wanted. They wanted someone to put outgroups in their place.
What has happened in the US that separates the US from other OECD places is simple: the US is more diverse, and the US has a longer history of racial cleavages affecting the nation's politics.
I think that 'they' hated the largely uncontrolled flood of migrants crossing the southern border during the first half of the Biden term. This was, by any measure, an abysmal failure of governmental responsibility
Is there an important difference between hating immigration and hating immigration because you blame it for bad things? Or are you saying that populist voters realize that immigration doesn’t cause problems, but vote that way because they think populist politicians are trying, even though the populist voters know that the populist policies on immigration are misguided?
I think there is an important difference, because if people hate immigration there is only one solution - to cease immigration - but if they hate the symptoms attributed to it, there is still space for a competent government to act. Then again, in the age of Biden, Harris, Starmer and Albanese, maybe competent government is sufficiently unlikely as to make the distinction moot.
Regarding the second point, I think populist voters are genuinely deceived as to the impact of immigration, although they are probably not questing to determinedly for the truth.
Immigration is almost never a 'flood', and has negligible adverse - and very strong postive - economc effects in western countries with low replacement rates.
When the architecture of democratic systems becomes so complex and impenetrable that it gives way to power, the people will prefer totalitarianism because it gives them hope for a path out of oppression. When everyone is oppressed under a radical new and changing regime, the most marginalised people in a democracy see a chance to climb out of the cesspool.
Optimists (Panglossians?) like me are down to hoping for white swan events. Such as:
- Trump dies, of natural or unnatural causes. His successor, lacking Trump's strange demonic charisma, fails to hold the MAGA coalition of oligarchs and bigots together.
- Rupert Murdoch dies (highly probable), James or Elizabeth wins the succession struggle (conditional fifty-fifty) and return Fox News to a normal conservative news organisation like Sky (conditional odds-on).
- The US economy implodes, starting with MAGA base areas in the rural and industrial Midwest= which Trump's asinine policies weirdly target with some precision (farm labour, farm exports, steel and aluminium components in manufactures, Medicaid and food stamp cuts).
- Democrats grow a spine and launch continuous mass protests as in Eastern Europe's colour revolutions.
- Progressive intellectuals come up with a comprehensible six-point plan for thorough constitutional reform (the second Reconstruction). Fire SCOTUS and start again, parliamentary not presidential system with PR elections, etc.
- A general collapse in public order with widespread street fighting and sabotage. The Army refuses to intervene, Order restored by Canadian, Mexican, Japanese and Chinese troops called in by a subset of state governors. Carney imposed as temporary dictator to oversee reconstruction, on the MacArthur model in Japan. Country renamed Vinland, to remind populace that you don't mess witth Vikings. (Daydream I know)
I omit a global financial crisis from a collapse in trust in US government debt, as this would harm everybody without leading to a democratic counterrevolution in the USA.
I don't think it's realistic to talk about immigration in such stark terms as some people are doing.
Many Americans talk about their heritage in a way that we don't. They openly and proudly identify themselves as Irish American, Mexican American, Lebanese American, etc and are also what Americans call "patriots". They acknowledge that the US wouldn't have achieved much of the positive things it has without immigration. Something, in my experience, most Australians don't seem to do despite the fact that around 96% of us are descended from migrants or are recent immigrants.
Yes, the MAGAs make up a scarily significant proportion of the population and they love the bashings and kidnappings by gangs of masked, unidentified, armed men and the disappearing of fellow human beings to countries where they wont be safe or locatable. But, according to a number of recent polls, the majority of Americans don't support the Trump/Miller actions. It will be interesting to see what comes of Terry Moran's upcoming Substack report on his trip back to Springfield where nobody was eating the dawgs.
Enormous numbers of US voters weren't paying attention and thought that he was going after violent criminals who were in the country illegally. Anyone who actually listened to Trump for any length of time, knew that was not what he was proposing and things would get incredibly bad (as they are doing). But, people voted without paying any real attention and just believed in the Trump brand.
And, let's face it, if it wasn't for Trump doing such extreme things that have gotten attention here over a significant period of time, Dutton's 'ME Oz Trump' routine could very well have played better here than it did, especially if the majority of Australians hadn't found him such an odious individual.
I wonder whether Trump will allow the mid-terms to be held, and if he does, will they be 'fair'. On the other hand, Heather Cox-Richardson talks about the US of the mid 19th Century and how it came back from its precarious situation not unlike this point in time (with racism and oligarchy taking control of politics) - https://youtu.be/UHK7YTsLt2A?feature=shared
Well said on every single point - thanks John. The concerning thing is the same forces are at work around the world and it’s a force that never sleeps. Here in NZ there’s a similar but lighter playbook
I broadly agreed with you when you first made this claim, but I've been nurturing a glimmer of hope. That's been extinguished in the last couple of weeks. The conservatives on the Supreme Court appear to have completely given up all responsibility. The multinational tax dodging retreat shows the international community is pathetically incapable of making Trump face consequences. The breadth and scale of Trump's attacks on government have been extraordinary. And the actions of ICE are chilling, both because of widespread violation of rights and the emergence of a paramilitary.
And the resilience of markets and the economy have been extraordinary. Even a dramatic economic slowdown won't affect Trump now - there are enough people who will believe or pretend it's caused by Trump's scapegoat du jour.
And yet, I still find myself trying to find ways out of it. The urge to denial must be even stronger for those in the country.
The "urge to denial" is a variable, not a constant, for those in the country.
There are two remaining levers that I haven't seen JQ discuss yet:
First, the US is a federal system, and Democratic state governors have been much more impressive than their national counterparts. This is important for two reasons: first, the state governments are themselves quite powerful, esp when they coordinate, and esp when much of what SCOTUS is doing is empowering state govs (GOP will use this authority to repress in their states, but that's not all it can be used for as the response to Dobbs has made clear); second, in the history of US politics, new political coalitions are more often built by governors than legislators, and a number of cooperative state-level coalitions are being formed. Governors do not represent gerrymandered jurisdictions, thus governors are not as beholden to very small, highly-localized groups.
Second, the military remains highly professionalized, and it moves last. The "no kings" protest was the largest in US history, and lower-level courts are ruling against 47 well over 90% of the time. If there is widespread repression surrounding the midterms, and multiple Democratic governors ask the military to live up to their oaths... then all bets are off.
But what is potentially more important is the international response. And here the citizens of EVERY democracy can play a role, by working within their own countries to begin redirecting economic and cultural links away from the US as fast as possible. NO, I MEAN FASTER THAN THAT. This is why JQ's earlier series on "how to dispense with the US" was so important, that is happening but the pace needs to accelerate.
Following up on the last paragraph: redirecting economic and military ties away from the US as fast as possible was a central theme in Prime Minister Mark Carney's recent and successful election campaign. He is now trying to implement that. No easy task given Canada's unfortunate geographic location.
Correct, Carney sees this very clearly and he has the international credibility to do a lot of heavy lifting. And, so far at least, the Canadian public has taken a fairly unified stand in opposition to American imperialism.
But the same isn't necessarily true elsewhere. It seems that democratic publics of many countries would prefer their leaders to mollify or compromise with ("appease"?) 47, as a means of (e.g.) lowering inflation or otherwise not threatening growth.
This is not strategically wise. There is no natural "stopping off" point for 47. He is not joking when he says he wants Trump hotels on Gazan beaches. He also wants them on every other beach, and in every city. He will not stop until he has it all, and resistance only becomes more difficult in the future. So the time is now.
And if Trump takes a liking to some of Australia's pleasant beaches, will there be anything stopping him putting hotels on them? Will there be anything to stop Trimp taking whatever foreign military action he wants to achieve goals like this?
If there is a limit to his appetite we haven't approached it yet.
Another very worrying action is the bipartisan support for cryptocurrencies (the Genius Act), which will inevitably lead to hyper-inflation, as in the Weimar Republic.
I fear you are correct; however, I think you underestimate the influence of religion. The latter is in decline in the US and the religious are getting very concerned that their privilege and influence will eventually disappear and they will do anything to prevent that happening.
Very sadly John, your synopsis would appear on the face of existing evidence, to be at the very least, plausible. Wow, I mean fucking wow!
The problems with US democracy go far deeper than Trump or even the republican party.
People identify with their side of politics so much that if their side does something then it is good but if the other side does exactly the same thing its really really bad. Take protests for instance.
Both my parents were arrested (charged but not convicted) at an anti Vietnam war protest. I have been involved in protests against logging. The whole point of protesting is to get the government to change course.
Look at the so called "insurrection". This was simply a large peaceful protest trying to influence a congressional vote. During that protest some people managed to enter the capitol building. The fact that many people may disagree with their claims of electoral fraud (I think it was perfectly clear Biden won) shouldn't impact on their right to protest. The Biden administrations use of FBI and the "insurrection" claim to lock up many protesters, including people who didn't even enter the Capitol building sets a terrible precedent. This precedent can and will be used by future administrations to lock up people who protest about anything. The fact that so many people think it is ok to protest in support of their side but not the other is a far bigger problem than any specific protest.
More than twenty years ago George W Bush gave himself the power to order the killing of any non-US citizen anywhere in the world except the US. Obama, a democrat, then extended that power to let himself order the killing of any US citizen outside the US. Both Biden and Trump have continued to use that power. What if Trump now decides to start ordering US citizens to be killed in the US? Will we see predator drones circling US cities in the middle of the night blowing up people in their beds? Morally why would that be any worse that blowing up people outside the US?
US "democracy" has been dying for decades. To blame Trump is to miss the many real problems. I will make a prediction. Trump will be gone at the end of this presidential term, but the US will continue to get more repressive and more deeply divided and create more problems around the world. To change this something much bigger than just Trump going needs to happen.
You make some valid points.
However, it is crystal clear that Jan 6 was not simply a “large peaceful protest.” I find it very difficult to believe that you are not disingenuous in making this claim.
The evidence shows beyond any doubt that it was an attempted self-coup d’état by Donald Trump and a group of his supporters. For a detailed analysis with links to much of the evidence, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempts_to_overturn_the_2020_United_States_presidential_election
Hi Hugh, I don't for a minute support the Jan 6 protesters. I think the Congress did the right thing in endorsing the election of Biden. The point I was trying to make is that if the right to protest only applies to the "right" causes then it is not really a right at all.
Spot on OD, Trump is part of the state an oligarch. There is no opposition to anything he does from the Dems and they even voted for his bills.
Having only two parties is not a good sign for a vital democracy.
The reaction by racist Republicans and "centrist" Democrats toward the winner of the NYC Dem mayoral primary, Zohran Mamdani, is a case in point of an alternate politics that pushes back against American-style fascism drawing massive attacks from...well, that very pro-fascist element AND its enablers that Mr Quiggin has bemoaned. Remarkable how even a suggestion of reordering political alignments away from the ghoulish state of affairs ushered in by tRumpism by just a candidate for mayor has caused such blowback, and it vividly brings home the point how ingrained the authoritarian impulse is, even amongst those nominally charged with defending democratic values who passively accept Die neue Ordnung.
"tRumpism"! Hope you don't mind if I borrow that and write it like that from now on.
I can't really come to any different conclusion.
Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein identified the US Congress as The Broken Branch in 2006. Today all three branches are broken — along with the so-called Fourth Estate and much of the voluntary sector. The 5 million or so people who turned out to show their disapproval of MAGA governance (if you can call it that) gives me some small hope that the end can be averted. But the end is nigh.
Resentment and the lust for retribution was and is a driving force for MAGA voters. But I suspect an equally important driving factor for many 'reluctant' MAGA voters and many non-voters was and is an insatiable appetite for excitement and entertainment. As Neil Postman put it in 1985, we are Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Biden was the last gasp (sigh, at least) of the old order that governed from the death of FDR through the end of Barack Obama's second term. Since the election of Reagan, the Democrats have attempted to revive the New Deal just as the Republicans have longed to repeal it. For a brief moment it seemed that Harris and Walz were going to break free of that, but the poll- and focus-group-addicted consultants — and the big-money donors — quickly put an end to that apostasy.
And as you note you can't understand the tenuous commitment of the US to democracy without recognizing the role that race has played and continues to play in US history, culture, and politics. How many people do not understand — or reject outright — the answer that Frederick Douglass gave to the rhetorical question he posed to the “Ladies of the Rochester Anti-Slavery Sewing Society” in 1852: What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July?
MAGA's goal is to erase the 20th century. In this it has been largely successful. The calendar has been turned back to June 1914. Peter Theil's and Ross Douthat's pretentious musings in the interview published by the New York Times earlier this week recall Marinetti's Declaration of Futurism of 1909 and Wyndham Lewis's Vorticist Manifesto of 1914. It's impossible for me to forget the connections of both to Fascism.
Yep, that's the Trump agenda: replace democracy with autocracy. But if you want a ray of hope, the popular and elite resistance seems to be strengthening. The lower-level federal courts have not been corrupted. Trump does not seem to be a particularly popular autocrat.
Spot on, though I reckon there's two caveats:
That the Republican party is a threat to democracy surely has been evident a lot earlier than Trump. Even back to tactics in the 2000s and 2010s. Republicans were more interested in rigging the system than appealing to the public for votes - see the rampart jerrymandering, voter suppression, and disenchantment, all the way back to Al Gore and the hanging chad.
The second point is about the legitimacy of Trump's electoral win in 2024. Why would a man who explicitly solicited foreign interference and paid off people for electoral benefit without punishment or sanction in 2016 (see Mueller report and Stormy Daniels payments) and attempted a coup in 2020 (see Jan 6) have been content with simply competing on votes in 2024? He wouldn't. He cheated again in the 2024 election, like he did in 2016 and tried to do again in 2020.
Why does it matter? It means that the US people didn't vote to end the rule of law and their democracy. As you've said above, that would be absurd - the equivalent of a 150 year old party abandoning democracy and keeping the support of voters. Rather, I think the better interpretation is that the US people were unable to overcome all the systemic barriers to voting, so were unable to vote to maintain democracy. That's not the same as voting in Trump.
In my opinion, much of the populism that the world faces is because moderate parties can’t admit that many people (wrongly!) hate immigration, and will hold their noses and vote for whoever seems ‘tough’ on it. If you look at approval ratings for Trump’s policies, for instance, immigration was strongly positive (no longer, but only -3%) while his approval ratings on the economy, trade and inflation are very negative. https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-silver-bulletin
Anti-immigrant politics is a winner for the right almost everywhere, and has been for a long time, but only in the US has it produced such a catastrophic outcome.
They don't hate immigration, they hate economic precarity, growing inequality and a degrading of social cohesion, but the moderate parties can't acknowledge these effects, because neoliberalism offers no solution to them. So when populists blame immigration, people feel seen, because at least their problems are being seen, even if misdiagnosed.
No, they hate immigration.
I think Robertiton was trying to answer the question "but why do they hate immigration?" I agree, it's the precarity of their economic conditions. Neoliberalism didn't fix things, so when Trump told them 'the other" was to blame, they fell for it, as voters almost always do (see Australian offshore detention policy). A couple of phoney wars against brown people following 9/11 cemented their beliefs. (In a prescient circularity, 9/11 was predominantly punishment for the US meddling in the Middle East in general, and Palestine in particular.)
They thought the Republicans had all the answers with Reagan's neoliberalism, then the Bushes'. But each time, that belief turned out not to make things better - in fact things got worse. The duality of American politics meant that the other side had a go in between, but they didn't provide answers either. The Tea Party's successes in the early 2010s should have warned the Democrats what was coming, but they only averted their eyes when Trump walked down that gilded staircase.
It is not the economic precarity that motivates out-group antipathy. It is "status threat," which is multifaceted chauvinism -- meaning, antipathetic towards foreigners, women, minority groups of all types, etc -- and hinges on the idea that relative gains (of others) are currently more salient to the status quo ante dominant group than absolute gains (of themselves).
The research of Diana Mutz is critical here, eg she shows how retrospective economic voting has never been *less* prevalent, but it also shows up in the priorities of the Trump administration: they do nothing to help the precarious, quite the opposite! They increase precarity to focus public resources instead on mass deportations and kleptocracy. Moreover, they do not hide these things but do them as loudly as possible, as a dominance play.
This is not a Polyanian double movement away from the volatility of the market. That has been offered in many countries, and rejected: Corbyn lost repeatedly, socdem parties are losing everywhere, if "Labour" wins at all it is a version of Labour that is essentially neoliberal.
Biden/Harris offered a robust expansion to the welfare state, which Obama had also previously delivered. Biden/Harris were pursuing the most aggressive antitrust policy of my lifetime (I was born at the start of Reagan's first term). Biden/Harris also expanded public sector employment and was the most pro-labor admin possibly in the nation's history.
Voters responded to this by voting for Trump, the candidate they perceived as *more moderate*.
Didn't matter. It's not what people wanted. They wanted someone to put outgroups in their place.
What has happened in the US that separates the US from other OECD places is simple: the US is more diverse, and the US has a longer history of racial cleavages affecting the nation's politics.
I think that 'they' hated the largely uncontrolled flood of migrants crossing the southern border during the first half of the Biden term. This was, by any measure, an abysmal failure of governmental responsibility
No, they hate immigration, full stop.
Is there an important difference between hating immigration and hating immigration because you blame it for bad things? Or are you saying that populist voters realize that immigration doesn’t cause problems, but vote that way because they think populist politicians are trying, even though the populist voters know that the populist policies on immigration are misguided?
I think there is an important difference, because if people hate immigration there is only one solution - to cease immigration - but if they hate the symptoms attributed to it, there is still space for a competent government to act. Then again, in the age of Biden, Harris, Starmer and Albanese, maybe competent government is sufficiently unlikely as to make the distinction moot.
Regarding the second point, I think populist voters are genuinely deceived as to the impact of immigration, although they are probably not questing to determinedly for the truth.
Immigration is almost never a 'flood', and has negligible adverse - and very strong postive - economc effects in western countries with low replacement rates.
When the architecture of democratic systems becomes so complex and impenetrable that it gives way to power, the people will prefer totalitarianism because it gives them hope for a path out of oppression. When everyone is oppressed under a radical new and changing regime, the most marginalised people in a democracy see a chance to climb out of the cesspool.
Optimists (Panglossians?) like me are down to hoping for white swan events. Such as:
- Trump dies, of natural or unnatural causes. His successor, lacking Trump's strange demonic charisma, fails to hold the MAGA coalition of oligarchs and bigots together.
- Rupert Murdoch dies (highly probable), James or Elizabeth wins the succession struggle (conditional fifty-fifty) and return Fox News to a normal conservative news organisation like Sky (conditional odds-on).
- The US economy implodes, starting with MAGA base areas in the rural and industrial Midwest= which Trump's asinine policies weirdly target with some precision (farm labour, farm exports, steel and aluminium components in manufactures, Medicaid and food stamp cuts).
- Democrats grow a spine and launch continuous mass protests as in Eastern Europe's colour revolutions.
- Progressive intellectuals come up with a comprehensible six-point plan for thorough constitutional reform (the second Reconstruction). Fire SCOTUS and start again, parliamentary not presidential system with PR elections, etc.
- A general collapse in public order with widespread street fighting and sabotage. The Army refuses to intervene, Order restored by Canadian, Mexican, Japanese and Chinese troops called in by a subset of state governors. Carney imposed as temporary dictator to oversee reconstruction, on the MacArthur model in Japan. Country renamed Vinland, to remind populace that you don't mess witth Vikings. (Daydream I know)
I omit a global financial crisis from a collapse in trust in US government debt, as this would harm everybody without leading to a democratic counterrevolution in the USA.
I don't think it's realistic to talk about immigration in such stark terms as some people are doing.
Many Americans talk about their heritage in a way that we don't. They openly and proudly identify themselves as Irish American, Mexican American, Lebanese American, etc and are also what Americans call "patriots". They acknowledge that the US wouldn't have achieved much of the positive things it has without immigration. Something, in my experience, most Australians don't seem to do despite the fact that around 96% of us are descended from migrants or are recent immigrants.
Yes, the MAGAs make up a scarily significant proportion of the population and they love the bashings and kidnappings by gangs of masked, unidentified, armed men and the disappearing of fellow human beings to countries where they wont be safe or locatable. But, according to a number of recent polls, the majority of Americans don't support the Trump/Miller actions. It will be interesting to see what comes of Terry Moran's upcoming Substack report on his trip back to Springfield where nobody was eating the dawgs.
Enormous numbers of US voters weren't paying attention and thought that he was going after violent criminals who were in the country illegally. Anyone who actually listened to Trump for any length of time, knew that was not what he was proposing and things would get incredibly bad (as they are doing). But, people voted without paying any real attention and just believed in the Trump brand.
And, let's face it, if it wasn't for Trump doing such extreme things that have gotten attention here over a significant period of time, Dutton's 'ME Oz Trump' routine could very well have played better here than it did, especially if the majority of Australians hadn't found him such an odious individual.
I wonder whether Trump will allow the mid-terms to be held, and if he does, will they be 'fair'. On the other hand, Heather Cox-Richardson talks about the US of the mid 19th Century and how it came back from its precarious situation not unlike this point in time (with racism and oligarchy taking control of politics) - https://youtu.be/UHK7YTsLt2A?feature=shared
Well said on every single point - thanks John. The concerning thing is the same forces are at work around the world and it’s a force that never sleeps. Here in NZ there’s a similar but lighter playbook
If fascism is militarised, mobilised nationalism, then Trumpism has the first & third part. How would Trump's supporters organise for direct action?