ENEMY WITHIN

Correspondence

David Goodman

I have been travelling in the United States since mid-August and caught up in observing this can’t-look-away-from-it, disturbing and fascinating election. Each day brings something new – most of it initiated somehow by Donald Trump. In some ways it is a miracle there is anything fresh to say about the election, but Watson’s essay succeeds – it was a joy to read, both for its larger arguments and for its abundance of astute passing observations. This on the Tea Party, for example – “It’s useless to tell them that people are free in many other countries as well, and free from worrying about freedom so much, many of them” – came back to me the other night, hearing CNN’s London correspondent explaining how difficult the Trump fiasco has been for her to explain in Europe, where people, she said, look up to the US as the home of freedom. 

The presidency arguably gets too much attention: both inside and outside the US, the media focuses on the presidency and the presidential race to the exclusion of most other forms of American politics and government. That is most true of the febrile US cable news channels, on which there has been almost no other story since the primaries began in February. This reflects the weakening of local news everywhere. In the political economy of contemporary media, stories about global celebrities have the highest value because they are saleable worldwide, while local coverage has become an expensive luxury; the Washington Post reported in 2014 that “the economics of the digital age work strongly against reporting about schools, cops and the folks down the street.” That is only going to get worse. Stories about Donald and Hillary fill so much media space – MSNBC this morning, for example, reporting each tweet Trump sent off as it happened. This presidential race has been so absorbing, so impossible to turn off, such great theatre, that it will only increase attention on the presidency, which will in the end produce more frustration. The power of the United States derives from its size, but its size and diversity make the choice of a generally admired leader an almost impossible task. This time around, so many hours of attention and thought and analysis have produced, as so many comment, the most unpopular candidates ever. The increasingly overwhelming stress on the presidency makes for exasperation and disappointment all round – presidents who don’t control Congress (and that is most of them) can only do so much. 

Importantly, Watson sets this depressing, entrancing presidential race in the context of American government more broadly. His portrait of Hillary’s Planned Parenthood speech evokes some of the best aspects of the US democratic culture: “Organising around an idea or a cause, networking, lobbying, educating, publicising, protesting and pushing into representative politics to change the world from within – these are American democratic traditions.” He journeys to Wisconsin and appreciatively explicates the progressive “Wisconsin Idea” of education and government in service of the state and its industries. There is something almost Australian about Wisconsin progressivism – that optimistic and experimental sense of the state as a social laboratory. Remembering that tradition, talking as Watson does to successful mayors and state legislators, is one important antidote to the political ennui induced by too great a fixation on the presidency.

There have been few policies debated in this presidential election, particularly since the primaries, unless you count the wall. So much of the coverage (even, or perhaps especially, on the specialist political news channels) has been about personality and morality – are these good people? Sometimes, despite everything, that turns into a discussion of policy and principle. The pursuit of Trump’s tax record, for example, began as a political tactic, but ended in something of a national debate about public and private wealth – an issue that has preoccupied Americans since the beginnings of the republic.

Of course, the presidency still matters a great deal. Watson’s question is about what makes Trump possible. He gives an excellent account of the frustrations that have fuelled Trumpism: the increasing wealth divide, the sense of loss of status and entitlement. When Watson says of globalisation that “what enriches one tribe impoverishes and threatens another,” he is perhaps conceding some truth at the heart of this political movement. It is the mere evocation of the problems that works politically – Trump’s proposed solutions remain almost entirely vague. Still, the willingness to believe in him astonishes. An otherwise observant, well-informed taxi driver in Virginia cautiously edged around to telling me she was for Trump because of Hillary’s active support for terrorism. A sixty-something waitress in North Carolina, the morning after the release of Trump’s lewd 2005 bus discussions, glanced at the TV and sighed, “Poor Donald.”

Watson carefully identifies Trump’s following as in general white (his support among African Americans currently hovering between 0 and 1 per cent). But Sanders’ ardent support was also identified by analysts as “too white to win.” Another reason the most enthralling theatre of this campaign might not be a glimpse of the future is that the 2016 race has failed to throw up either compelling inheritors of the Obama coalition or skilled shapers of other multiracial alliances.

Maybe I would disagree that “Americans are divided on party lines as never before.” Party conflict has often been fierce, most of all when the party alignments coincided with racial and other divides. Was there once a more civilised partisanship? On the one hand, some – maybe many – Americans believed the story that Franklin Roosevelt was not a real American, but rather a Jew called Rosenfeldt. Earlier in the Trump candidacy, commentators pointed to his probably unconscious evocations of 1930s/40s isolationism. But on the other hand, the key isolationist figures of that period look substantial, knowledgeable and principled compared to Trump. Charles Lindbergh said in 1941, “We believe in an independent destiny for America,” but immediately added: “Such a destiny does not mean that we will build a wall around our country and isolate ourselves from contact with the rest of the world.” Lindbergh made his racial views explicit, rather than relying on innuendo.

There is a body of explanation going back to the 1980s about working-class conservatism and there is perhaps a danger of subsuming Trumpism into these more familiar paradoxes. Trump is not Thatcher or Reagan; he is not a conservative in their mould at all. He has, to be sure, gone along with tax cuts for the wealthy, but that is not the most energising issue for him or his supporters. He seems, in fact, to be a big-government man, judging by the number of “magic wand” promises he makes. All the problems that will vanish when he is elected (urban crime, unemployment, economic competition with other nations) will do so because he will use the powers of government to fix them. He does not like free-trade agreements, threatening Ford with punitive tariffs if it moves more manufacturing to Mexico: “We’re gonna charge them a 35 per cent tax. And you know what’s gonna happen, they’re never going to leave.” No wonder Rush Limbaugh lamented in September, “I wish conservatism was on the ballot.”

David Goodman

David Goodman teaches American history at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Radio’s Civic Ambition: American Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s, and is working on a grassroots history of the debate in the United States about US entry into World War II.