CHAPTER TWELVE

Them and us

Throughout the second decade of the 20th century, the centrifugal forces unleashed by the neoliberal shift continued to pull ordinary people away from traditional sources of authority, leading to an increase in the power of outsider rather than insider anti-elitism.

The evolution of the Tea Party — an organisation named after a key moment in the American revolution — reflected this. The Tea Partiers came together over a shared hostility to liberalism. But, right from the start, they harboured a suspicion of the Republican Party’s leaders — and that suspicion continued to build.

Initially, mainstream Republicans had concluded that the anti-establishment rhetoric from the Tea Party — and from the media outlets that serviced them — was tolerable. After all, outsider anti-elitism pushed the political discourse to the right, and motivated activists to campaign for conservative candidates. In this sense, GOP strategists saw the new anti-elitism as a spigot that could be turned on and off. Right-wing politicians assumed that they could attend Tea Party rallies and receive sympathetic coverage from Glenn Beck — and then, once they were safely in office, they could forget the conspiracies and knuckle down to governing in the more or less traditional way.

Yet as the political authority of the mainstream weakened, the virtuous culture-war circle became markedly less stable.

In his 2001 book Them, a collection of essays about political and religious extremism, Jon Ronson wrote about meeting the broadcaster Alex Jones during research into the militia movement of the far right. Back then, Jones was ‘hollering his powerful apocalyptic vision down an ISDN line from a child’s bedroom in his house, with choo-choo train wallpaper and an Empire Strikes Back poster pinned to the wall’.1

Later, Ronson travelled with Jones to Bohemian Grove in California, where Jones claimed to have seen high-profile politicians performing weird occult ceremonies. ‘They were burning a human in effigy in deference to their great owl god,’ Jones told Ronson. ‘This was a simulated human sacrifice complete with the person begging and pleading for his life. This was bizarre Luciferian garbage.’

Back in 2001, Jones was one of ‘them’: a fringe figure broadcasting to other extremists.

Fourteen years later, Ronson again met with Jones. By 2015, Jones claimed to be more popular than Rush Limbaugh, with five million daily radio listeners and 80 million video views each month. He told Ronson of a discussion with Trump, in which The Donald said admiringly, ‘You have one of the greatest influences I’ve ever seen.’2

Subsequently, on 2 December 2015, Trump appeared on Jones’ program and said publicly: ‘Your reputation’s amazing. I will not let you down.’

The rise of Jones’ Infowars empire exemplified a broader phenomenon. The cumulative weight of all that rhetoric about liberal treason, national destruction, and imminent race war had produced a new kind of conservative activist. As David Frum put it, establishment Republicans were kidding themselves when they assumed that the Tea Party was ‘a mass movement in favor of the agenda of the Wall Street Journal editorial page’ — that is, the traditional Republican program.3 Increasingly, Tea Partiers were listening to people like Jones, rather than conventional political influencers.

In 2008, John McCain, a career politician, had offered a sop to outsider anti-elitists by adopting as his running mate the relatively unknown Sarah Palin, a woman very much shaped by the Fox News/Tea Party milieu. But the unlikely pairing pleased no one. Mainstream pundits were appalled by Palin’s folksy incompetence, while outsider anti-elitists blamed the defeat on McCain’s refusal to ‘let Palin be Palin’.

In 2012, Mitt Romney obtained Tea Party backing and then campaigned more or less as an establishment conservative. In a different era, empty promises to the base about anti-elitism had served politicians like John Howard well. Romney, however, managed neither to motivate populist activists nor to sway undecided voters, and was comprehensively defeated by Obama.

In 2015, the Republican leaders had planned a similar approach. They wanted Jeb Bush as their candidate. He came from an established political dynasty; he was an experienced governor with significant support from big business. On paper, he was ideal. But in the campaign for the Republican nomination, Bush could get almost no traction at all — and neither could any of the other ‘serious’ options.

Trump’s victory — and the constant displays of his distinctive obnoxiousness — obscured the extent to which his main challengers for the Republican nomination also espoused extreme positions, in some cases to the right of Trump himself.

The celebrity surgeon Ben Carson, who enjoyed a brief but unexpected surge of popularity, believed that Darwin’s theory of evolution was encouraged by the devil, that Joseph built the Egyptian pyramids to store grain, that Americans were living under the Gestapo, and that homosexuality was a choice ‘[b]ecause a lot of people who go into prison go into prison straight — and when they come out, they’re gay’.4

Mike Huckabee, a practising Southern Baptist minister and the author of God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy, explained during one of the debates that ‘it’s time that we recognise the Supreme Court is not the supreme being, and we change the policy to be pro-life and protect children instead of rip up their body parts and sell them like they’re parts to a Buick’.5

Rick Santorum denied that climate change was caused by humans, described contraception as ‘a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be’,6 had proposed a full Mexican border wall as far back as 2011, and thought that legalising homosexual acts would legitimise polygamy and incest.

Most importantly, Ted Cruz, the only candidate who came close to defeating Trump, positioned himself as the candidate of the far right. In 2015, Cruz had spoken at a conference headed and organised by Pastor Kevin Swanson, who wanted homosexuals exterminated and who urged his followers to attend same-sex marriages with signs threatening the participants with execution.7 In the primaries, Cruz endorsed Trump’s proposals for Muslim bans and mass deportations — and then denounced Trump as soft on immigration. ‘He’s advocated allowing folks to come back in and become citizens,’ Cruz said. ‘I oppose that.’8

Cruz was an ideologue, philosophically committed to a particular strand of religious conservatism. Trump, however, was not. Until 2008, he’d most often identified as a Democrat, at one stage proposing that he’d stand for president alongside the famously liberal Oprah Winfrey. Even when he adopted far-right positions on immigration and other issues, he still bucked the conservative consensus on taxation and the reform of social security, while boasting repeatedly (and falsely) that he’d opposed the war in Iraq.

Other politicians understood the Tea Party (and the culture wars more generally) in terms of policy. Trump, whether consciously or not, recognised it, first and foremost, as a revolt, a protest against the status quo. This was why Trump’s own idiosyncratic career wasn’t the weakness that some of his conservative opponents supposed. His ‘New York sensibilities’ weren’t liabilities but assets, since they differentiated him from all the Bible-thumping ideologues. Even theocratic voters didn’t want another theocrat to represent them. Trump was simultaneously sufficiently familiar to be a recognisable culture-war candidate and sufficiently different to be an agent of change.

During, and immediately after, the election, much was made of Trump’s supposedly ‘white working-class base’. Sharon Smith collated an array of headlines to that effect: articles such as ‘How Trump Won: The Revenge of Working Class Whites’; ‘The Revenge of the White Man’; ‘Revenge of the Forgotten Class’; ‘Revenge of the Rural Voter’; ‘Why Trump Won: Working-Class Whites’; and so on.9

But because most media discussions reflected new-class theory, journalists often assumed that voters who embraced the tropes of culture war belonged to the working class, irrespective of what those people actually did for a living.

If the ‘working class’ was understood to mean people who sold their labour power for a wage, matters were quite different. The American working class was, after all, increasingly brown rather than white, with American industry dependent on the labour of the very ethnic groups systematically demonised by Trump. Smith said flatly:

People of color will very soon become the majority in the US population, and are already close to 50 per cent among younger generations. Moreover, people of color have always been disproportionately represented within the working class and the poor, due to the economic consequences of racism … Today’s working class is multiracial, made up of multiple genders and nationalities, and many people with a variety of disabilities.10

In the American context (even more so than in the Australian one), media references to workers were implicitly racialised and geographically specific, with pundits invariably deploying ‘working class’ as a synonym for older white men from rural areas. Thomas Frank, for instance, wrote a moving account of visiting the town of Marceline in Missouri. Walt Disney, who was born there, once used Marceline as the archetype of small-town USA. Frank described a place in steep decline: a former Democratic stronghold now gripped by unemployment and infrastructural decay. When he sat down with members of the Lions Club in the back room of the Apple Basket Cafe, he discovered most of the men there had voted for Trump:

Few of them seemed to really support him in the full sense of the word. They were apprehensive about his presidency, they didn’t know what to expect from it, but many of them had made the choice anyway … Another described it with a variant on Trump’s famous proposition to black voters, which these white people clearly felt applied to them, too: ‘Whaddaya got to lose by making a change?’11

Yet Frank’s description of the town as ‘heartlanders’ obscured the fact that the men were mostly farmers. Farming involves exhausting physical labour — but it also entails running a small business, generally under intense competition from the giant agricorporations. For this reason, farmers have long provided, both in Australia and the US, a base for right-wing populism, and their support for Trump didn’t seem quite as surprising as if they were imagined as archetypical workers.

In any case, while foreign observers judged Clinton as a liberal reformer and, as such, a far more appealing candidate than Trump for voters at the sharp end of deregulated capitalism, the election looked very different for many working-class Americans. Clinton was a representative of the Democratic establishment, with close ties to corporate America. She was a lifetime politician, in the public arena since her husband’s presidency in the 1990s. For many people, she was indelibly associated with the structural changes wrought in American society over 30 years. Privatisation of utilities, the systematic rollback of welfare, constant war: voters saw Clinton as representing the status quo rather than any reprieve.

Despite the hope and change promised by Obama, the 2016 election took place in a country that hadn’t recovered from the Great Recession. In 2015, the median household income remained lower than it had been in 2007 — which was also lower than its high of 1999. The talk of economic recovery rang particularly hollow in rural areas, where median incomes had continued to sink.

That hardship fed into a widely held sense of decay. American workers, the highest-paid in the world during the post-war boom, had seen their wages steadily decline since the mid-1970s until they’d become the lowest-paid among OECD countries. A huge proportion held low-wage jobs, far more than in most developed nations.

Yet low-paid workers didn’t necessarily vote against Trump. In a system of non-compulsory elections, many simply didn’t vote at all. In her book Hand to Mouth: the truth about being poor in a wealthy world, Linda Tirado explained that, for many American workers, voting wasn’t a priority since they’d never ‘been given a whole lot of proof that [their] vote will matter anyway’.12

‘Upper-income groups were overrepresented in the voting electorate as a whole,’ noted Kim Moody, ‘and both candidates drew a disproportionate part of their vote from the well-to-do, with Trump a bit more reliant on high-income voters.’13

In any case, liberals’ own enthusiasm for the Democrats often blinded them to the extent to which Trump pitched his rhetoric to the poor more effectively than Clinton did.

The journalist Christian Parenti wrote of sitting through a large number of Trump speeches and realising that Trump spent much less time discussing immigration, deportations, and walls than he expected. Rather, Trump’s rambling addresses tended to circle back, again and again, to the need for jobs. ‘A typical Trump speech,’ Parenti noted, ‘would tee-up with reference to “the wall” but then quickly pivot to economic questions: trade, jobs, descriptions of economic suffering, critiques of deindustrialization.’14

By contrast, Clinton infamously announced in West Virginia her desire ‘to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business’ — a laudable ambition in respect of climate change, but, when presented without any pledge of alternatives for displaced workers, an ominous promise for those already struggling to feed their families. The two-party system forced voters to opt for the least-worst option, and so lower-income Americans who voted Trump weren’t necessarily committed to Trumpism as a whole.

The unexpected dynamism of Bernie Sanders’ push for the Democratic nomination hinted at how such a constituency might have been mobilised. Sanders’ rhetoric touched on themes associated with direct politics. He targeted the massive income gap in the US; he denounced the political weight of corporate power; and he spoke explicitly of the need for a different kind of economic order.

But his eventual defeat merely highlighted the absence of anything similar in the Clinton campaign. Clinton polled around three million more votes than Trump, whose victory was dependant on the vagaries of the electoral system — a mechanism foisted on the American people to assuage former slave states.

Nevertheless, Trump could win on a smaller proportion of the vote than Mitt Romney attracted in 2012 because Clinton performed substantially worse than Obama, and a significant proportion of voters either didn’t vote or opted for third-party candidates. Hence Matthew Yglesias’s summation of the election: ‘If you don’t like Trump and never did and find yourself baffled as to how the voters could have possibly disagreed with you, the answer is simple: They didn’t. He was able to win not just because of the Electoral College, but because most voters also didn’t like his opponent.’15

Donald Trump was the least-liked major-party candidate in history — but Hillary Clinton was the second-least-liked Framed like this, the result became less anomalous. Trump triumphed, despite his personal unpopularity, because he was the endorsed Republican candidate fortunate enough to run against a weak Democrat.

But this bald statement of fact doesn’t capture the extraordinary flavour of the Trump victory and the way it exemplified the potential of culture war for the right more generally.

Very close to Election Day, a tape of Trump discussing his behaviour towards women surfaced:

You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.16

Conventional wisdom decreed that the contest was essentially over. In the past, allegations of adultery were assumed to be damaging — perhaps even fatal — for aspirants to the White House. Famously, in 1988, accusations about an affair had forced Gary Hart to drop out of the race for the Democratic nomination. Besides, the conduct about which Trump spoke wasn’t just ethically questionable. If he really had done what he claimed, the man running for the most important elected office in the world was a self-confessed criminal. Someone who joked about his propensity for sexual assault could never be president — could he?

The answer to this question revealed itself at the polls. Trump’s ability to flout the established norms of American politics was, in many ways, the most striking aspect of the election. ‘Time and again, Trump poured gasoline on himself and lit a match,’ noted Politico’s Michael Kruse and Taylor Gee. ‘Time and again, pundits predicted fatal self-immolation. Instead, Trump often rode the ensuing firestorm like an Atlas rocket.’17

Though Trump’s polling was far less stratospheric than that description suggested, Kruse and Gee were identifying something real: Trump’s ability to tap into the culture-war rage felt by a particular constituency and, by so doing, defy the expectations of insider pundits. Conservative columnist David Frum identified Trump’s appeal to those he called ‘the angriest and most pessimistic people in America’ as being to those ‘we used to call Middle Americans … Middle-class and middle-aged; not rich and not poor.’ They were, he said, not necessarily super-conservative but they were ‘irked when when asked to press 1 for English’ because it reminded them of how America had changed. ‘[T]hey … feel strongly that life in this country used to be better for people like them — and they want that older country back.’18

Frum’s description recalled the very similar constituency for anti-elitism in 1990s Australia. Trump was the perfect candidate for such people because he spoke openly — almost obsessively — about decline. ‘We got $18 trillion in debt,’ he said, launching his run. ‘We got nothing but problems … We’re dying. We’re dying. We need money … We have losers. We have people that don’t have it. We have people that are morally corrupt. We have people that are selling this country down the drain … The American dream is dead.’19

It was a remarkably bleak perspective — Corey Robin described a ‘note of wounded nationalism’ as running through Trump’s rhetoric — but it suited the grim mood of his core voters.20 The Economist’s reporter noted that Trump’s keenest supporters lived in depressed parts of America but weren’t necessarily struggling themselves. The description accords with the classic pattern of outsider anti-elitism, in which the cadre for populist movements came from the lower middle class: people fearful of the big end of town but terrified of falling further into the working class. The Economist continued:

At a rally in Delaware, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, a brief survey revealed a computer programmer, three teachers, a botanist, several small businessmen, and not a single working-class man … At over a dozen Trump rallies, in almost as many states, over the past year, your correspondent has met lawyers, estate agents and a horde of middle-class pensioners — and relatively few blue-collar workers.’21

‘When I was young, in high school and in college, everybody used to say we never lost a war. America never lost,’ Trump told his supporters. ‘Now, we never win a war.’22

The people most inclined to nod along with such words were akin to the ‘battlers’ that Pusey described, people who felt themselves in a situation similar to America itself — always harried, never winning, in an dog-eat-dog society with no pity for losers.

Charlie Post argued that:

The core of Trump’s support, like that of Tea Party since 2009, is the older, white, suburban/exurban middle classes. His success among non-college educated whites — he won 52 per cent of all voters without bachelor’s degrees — appears to be concentrated among traditional small-business people (construction contractors, small shop keepers, etc) and those supervisors (factory foreman, store and office managers, etc) and semi-professionals (technicians, etc) who do not require a college education. His success among househoulders earning over $75,000 a year reflects the support of the managerial and professional elite of this class … However, the politics of these groups have radicalised since the economic crisis of 2008.23

Trump’s racism gave that radicalisation its structure. His attacks on Muslims and immigrants evoked the vanished, whiter society of the past, and then provided a scapegoat to blame for its disappearance. Racial dog-whistling thus performed a peculiar double move central to his candidacy. On the one hand, for white Tea Partiers, it offered a reassuring reminder of what ‘everyone knew’; on the other, it constituted a revolutionary slogan that no one else was prepared to utter.

For instance, Trump launched his presidential bid by attacking Mexican immigrants. ‘They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,’ he said. ‘And some, I assume, are good people.’24

He made the construction of a border wall — for which, he said, Mexico would pay — a centrepiece of his campaign. The ‘big, beautiful wall’ was a distinctly Trump-like slogan — the kind of simplistic, offensive idea that had been voiced on Fox for years but not previously adopted by a presidential candidate. Trump’s willingness to campaign for it, despite the obvious objections about its cost, cruelty, and purpose, bolstered his appeal to outsider anti-elitists. The more the idea upset insiders, the more Trump’s base concluded that at last they’d found a candidate who would not betray them.

At the same time, Trump’s anti-immigration campaign built on a long, bipartisan commitment to ‘border protection’. As NBC noted in its analysis of the refugee policy, many of Trump’s policies were very similar to those implemented by Obama.

‘President Barack Obama has often been referred to by immigration groups as the “Deporter in Chief”,’ explained Serena Marshall. ‘… According to governmental data, the Obama administration has deported more people than any other president’s administration in history. In fact, they have deported more than the sum of all the presidents of the 20th century.’25

Even Trump’s wall was not without precedent. The legal authorisation for the Trump plan already existed because of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which legislated for a (smaller) barrier along the southern border. Clinton had voted for that proposal, as had Barack Obama, and so Trump could thus present his agitation against immigrants and refugees as the bold pursuit of a sentiment that was widely held but that remained unimplemented because of the cowardice of elites.26

His Islamophobia followed a similar pattern.

Throughout his campaign, Trump pandered to anti-Muslim racism. At one rally, a crowd member said to him, ‘We have a problem in this country; it’s called Muslims,’ before asking him, ‘When we can get rid of them?’

Trump responded: ‘You know, a lot of people are saying that, and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening out there. We’re going to be looking at that and plenty of other things.’27

During the election, he repeatedly pledged to ban ‘Muslim immigration’, and said he would contemplate closing down mosques and establishing a ‘Muslim registry’.

Again, the rhetoric was shocking; again, it appalled much of the commentariat — and, as a result, reinforced Trump’s outsider anti-elitist credibility.

Yet Trump’s deployment of Islamophobia took place in a certain context. As many Muslims pointed out, president Obama didn’t enter a mosque until the end of his two terms in office, despite frequent invitations by Islamic leaders. By contrast, in the immediate wake of 9/11, George Bush made a mosque visit as a deliberate statement. Fifteen years of the War on Terror had changed the tenor of the public discourse on Islam, normalising — almost to the point of invisibility — low levels of Islamophobia. Trump, of course, made his Islamophobia as visible as possible.

The early history of anti-PC showed why this mattered so much. The campaign against so-called political correctness began as an attack on the campus left. It seized upon the gulf between the activists of delegated politics and their supporters, presenting progressives as imposing their ideas upon ordinary people by force.

By 2016, the discourse of anti-PC was so well established as to be almost taken for granted. To denounce political correctness, Trump didn’t need to associate his opponents with state bans. It was quite sufficient merely to hint that they were in some way inhibiting him from saying what needed to be said. This was why Trump’s ‘gaffes’ played so well among his core supporters. He was, they concluded, saying what everyone thought — and he was doing so in defiance of the politically correct censors.

The Clinton campaign’s attempt to capitalise on Trump’s supposed mistakes merely confirmed that framing. In the second debate, Clinton, quite understandably, attacked Trump’s ‘grab them by the pussy’ remarks. But she did so by contrasting him with traditional politicians.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘with prior Republican nominees for president, I disagreed with them on politics, policies, principles, but I never questioned their fitness to serve. Donald Trump is different.’28

She ran through some of the slurs he’d used before concluding, ‘So this is who Donald Trump is … [T]he question our country must answer is that this is not who we are … I want to send a message … to the entire world that America already is great, but we are great because we are good, and we will respect one another, and we will work with one another, and we will celebrate our diversity.’

Unwittingly, the passage reinforced almost everything about Trump that appealed to his supporters. They liked him precisely because — as Clinton publicly confirmed — he seemed so different from previous Republican nominees and thus from the status quo. They liked him even more because he echoed their perception of decline, promising to make America great again.

By contrast, Clinton’s insistence that America was already great identified her with the status quo. America did not, after all, feel great to many people — and Clinton’s inability to grasp this only highlighted the gulf between her life and theirs. As former Clinton adviser Stanley Greenberg complained, ‘She ran on continued progress in a change election.’29

Her call for ‘respect’ — again, something that sounded perfectly rational to her supporters — was heard by those sympathetic to Trump as the usual smug political insistence on civility: a PC demand that they should cease complaining.

With his experience as a reality-TV star, Trump understood that by insulting an interviewer, or calling his opponents ‘Lyin’ Ted’ or ‘Crooked Hillary’, or racially slurring an entire ethnicity, he was producing great content. But he was also manoeuvring his opponents into calling for decorum, at a time when his supporters wanted to scream their rage.

Again, Trump’s base was not large. Yet, given the widespread alienation from mainstream politics, a small but vocal layer of activists made a huge difference, particularly as the older Tea Party types were supplemented by the younger, more dynamic enthusiasts of the alt-right, who helped shape the public discourse of Trumpism.