What do Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Joe Lieberman, Howard Dean and Pat Buchanan have in common? If you answer by telling they are all white men who have contested for the nomination of their political party for the U.S. presidency, you would be correct in a pedantic sense. It is more important to note that all the seven men led their nearest rival by considerable margins, in almost every case by double digits, in polls and surveys held around 400 days before the actual election. If you look at the media coverage for all of them at the time they were leading, in particular for Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Buchanan, you might well believe/have believed that they have had the nomination secured.
In reality, six out of these seven men never even came close to becoming their party’s nominee, let alone becoming President of the U.S. Barring a miracle of stupendous proportions, the seventh, Donald Trump, will also be consigned to the same ash heap of electoral trivia in due course.
Sankaran Krishna A cat amongst the pigeons
Yet, Mr. Trump evokes strong negative reactions from a significant section of the population, with his support amongst a constituency of rising importance — Hispanics — being as low as 15 per cent. He has no standing even within the Republican party, also known as the Grand Old Party (GOP), and even if he doesn’t need their money, the absence of political endorsements and the lack of party support bode ill for his campaign in the longer run.
Mr. Trump has, nevertheless, been a cat amongst the pigeons as far as the Republicans are concerned. By calling for the construction of a giant wall to seal the U.S.-Mexico border; describing Mexican immigrants as drug peddlers and rapists; and demanding the repatriation of 11 million undocumented migrants in the U.S. “back to where they came from,” Mr. Trump has upped the ante on xenophobia for other aspirants. Like lemmings, with the partial exception of Jeb Bush, they have either toed Mr. Trump’s line or tried to outdo him. Mr. Trump’s comments on women have been equally obnoxious.
But it is his views on the economy that could have implications for the presidential race, irrespective of whether or not he wins the nomination. Since Ronald Reagan, the GOP has hewed to a set of supply-side policies that may be charitably summarised as ‘banking on the rich and screwing the poor’.
The idea that economic growth can only be ensured by slashing taxes on the rich; further dismantling the welfare state; full-scale deregulation; and steeper reductions in state spending has left the U.S. in a shambles. The polarisation of society in terms of wealth has reached levels not seen since the 1920s; real wages for working class Americans have flatlined; a shrinking middle class is faced with bleaker prospects than ever; and the nation’s infrastructure — bridges, airports, highways, Amtrak, environmental and other regulatory agencies, national parks, you name it — has deteriorated to the point that the United States looks positively shabby in contrast with Europe or the rising East Asian economies of China, South Korea, and Singapore. The disconnect between economic growth numbers and the everyday well-being of the vast majority of American citizens has never been wider than it is now.
“ His views on the economy could have implications for the presidential race, irrespective of whether or not he wins the nomination. ”
In another departure from GOP orthodoxy, he has favoured protectionism (though this is packaged in his usual racist ranting against China). None of the other GOP aspirants dare join him in calling for higher taxes on the top one per cent as they depend on raising money from the very class. Mr. Trump is, of course, bankrolling his own campaign and is free of that constraint.
The surprise has been that Mr. Trump’s call for higher taxes, support for Obamacare, and a measure of economic nationalism has not cost him in the polls but only bolstered his standing. Thanks to the extremism of the Tea Party fringe on any tax increase, the conventional wisdom was that Republicans who mooted such an idea would be swiftly discredited — yet not only has Mr. Trump survived, his message seems to resonate with many in the GOP’s rank and file. With Bernie Sanders anchoring himself around a social-democratic ideology of state spending, higher taxes, and the reconstruction of a welfare state to revive the middle-class, Mr. Trump’s economic views hold out the promise of shifting the debate in the U.S. a few welcome degrees to the Left.
Stepping back from these details, one cannot help but despair at the poverty of political choice in the United States. With the partial exception of Mr. Sanders, all other contenders hew to a depressingly narrow range of views when it comes to public policy. There is a touching faith in the market and privatisation despite many catastrophic failures. There is also a limited spectrum of views on fields like public education; criminal justice; prisons; financial markets; environmental sustainability; and gun control.
In the realm of foreign policy, there is a Messianic belief in the exceptional status of the United States. In the area of defence production, there is tremendous support for arms exports — the U.S. exports more armaments than all the other leading countries combined.
It merits remembering that Hillary Clinton supported George W. Bush in the rush to war in Iraq based on dubious claims about weapons of mass destruction and, today, assiduously dispels any idea that she is less macho than others when it comes to foreign policy or on being “tough” on crime. Not one candidate, not even Mr. Sanders, dares to argue for a position favourable to Palestine in a manner that would be considered routine or ordinary in much of Europe or the rest of the world.
Pepsi-vs.-Coke nature of the contest
American liberals, especially those smug about their progressive ideology and beliefs, need to ask themselves some questions that comes hard to the citizens of any country but perhaps especially to those of a superpower. One of them should be: does the election of a Democrat or a Republican to the White House make any difference to people like, someone living in the Swat valley in Pakistan? Or in Fallujah in Iraq? The incapacity to even pose such a question demonstrates the Pepsi-versus-Coke character of its presidential contests and the limits of the American political imagination.
“ In the realm of foreign policy, there is a Messianic belief in the exceptional status of the United States. ”
If the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is correct in saying that “every established order tends to produce the naturalization of its own arbitrariness,” Donald Trump may well be the instrument of such naturalisation at this point in time. One ought then to beware both of those vehemently critical and those manically supportive of the man — both constituencies make you forget the madness that occupies the allegedly desirable and normal middle ground in the United States.
(Sankaran Krishna is professor of political science at the University of Hawaii. He can be reached at krishna@hawaii.edu.)
