The rise of Donald Trump surprised many not only in the U.S. but across the world. Few took him seriously when he contested the presidential elections, no one predicted he would win, and no one seriously opposed him. There has been a lot of debate since his victory on what prompted Americans to vote for him. The answer is multi-layered, and it is useful to study the historical landscape that may have yielded this outcome.
Arlie Russell Hochschild went to rural Louisiana for five years and interacted with Tea Party supporters. She found that people had not been tricked into voting for someone against their interests. They were poor, and the famous American dream eluded them. Her 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land , answers the question: why do the people who would seem to benefit most from ‘liberal’ governments vote against them?
To understand America’s position in the global order, it is useful to read Paul Kennedy’s predictions in his 1988 book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 . Using a strategic-economic approach, Kennedy explained how certain nations prospered while other didn’t and how the great powers squandered away the gains of decades of hardships. The U.S. must invest in arms, he said, but that the same investment would “erode the commercial competitiveness of the American economy”. He said: “The task facing American statesmen over the next decades is... a need to ‘manage’ affairs so that the relative erosion of the United States’ position takes place slowly and smoothly, and is not accelerated by policies which bring merely short-term advantage but longer-term disadvantage.” This is a remark to bear in mind now.
Another book of the late ’80s, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, spoke of the changes on American campuses. Bloom mistrusted modernity and capitalism. From moral relativism to the growing number of divorces and the popularity of German academic traditions in American campuses, Bloom pointed to a sense of growing intellectual vacuum in the U.S. that disgruntled elements had space to fit into.
Bruce Riedel’s 2010 Deadly Embrace studied closely the problem of Islamic fundamentalism growing out of the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. It is essential in understanding the U.S.’s inability for long in dealing with al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
