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Driving Towards Donald Trump
A year before the American election, I sat down in a succession of New York City taxis. The story was always the same. The drivers didn’t much like Donald Trump, and weren’t always comfortable with his approach. But they were all leaning towards voting for him against Joe Biden.
“He’s a businessman,” one said. Another: “I may not agree with him but he knows how to get things done.” One middle-class Punjabi Uber driver, who lived in a well-to-do community in Long Island, said he and his neighbours would all be opting for the Republican candidate.
The one exception, a Greek New Yorker – who shared how devastating it was that he had never seen his country’s Parthenon Marbles in Athens because he has never been to London (where they sit in our national museum as the Elgin Marbles) – tried to explain the phenomenon: “The thing about Trump is that he’s not a politician.”
When Trump was re-elected to a second term as President on 5 November, I was shocked but ultimately not surprised. I thought back to those cab drivers who made their living in one of the most liberal parts of the United States (where the Democrat vote share fell from 76% in 2020 to 68% this year).
They felt the city had deteriorated, that their material lives were in decline. More than that, though, I recalled how ordinary they all were. No MAGA hats or Trump rallies for these men. They were but a miniscule of a tiny sample of how life in America was no longer turning out the way they expected it to, and it bothered them. So much so that not even the prospect of Trump’s eventual criminal conviction seemed to matter.
The only candidate in this year’s race who was speaking to them was the millionaire reality TV real estate entrepreneur born with a silver spoon in his mouth. And the Democrats seemed to have no idea.
Politics Isn’t About Politics
Trump’s triumph puts beyond doubt that the events of 2016 – the US Presidential Election of that year (and, to a significant enough degree, the vote for Brexit in Britain) – were ‘freak’ events momentarily disrupting politics as we know it.
We don’t know politics. Not anymore.
The notion that it is fought and won, if it ever strictly was, on how the everyday lives of people can be improved through practical policies and traditional ideology is over.
In this new era, pragmatism is viewed primarily through the prism of emotionality, with more visceral instincts amplified by populist politicians capitalising on the deep anger born of gross inequality, and tech disinformation feeding the polarisation and the need for a sense of ‘psychic justice’.
Until progressives are willing to understand and confront this – that the lens through which they view what politics is for and about, and how and where they form such ideas, is significantly different to how others, particularly those they disagree with, do – these ‘shocks’ will continue. Because politics isn’t about politics anymore.
That significant numbers instead see it as a vehicle to channel their fears and resentment-driven emotional instincts – beyond facts – is the existential challenge facing democracy today.
The right, both in America and in the UK and across Europe, understands this. Well.
If those of more progressive politics cannot produce a response – which factors in this uncomfortable reality: that they must engage with the world as they find it, not as they hope it to be – democratic politics will continue to be left vulnerable to the kind of far-right oligarchical forces now gathering around the entire United States Government.
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As the UK-based American author, Brian Klaas, Associate Professor in Global Politics at University College London, told me in May: “My biggest insight into politics, which I got from working in political campaigning before I became a political scientist, is that the overwhelming majority of people do not think about policy at all. And this is something that people who work in politics, and especially on the political liberal left, have just completely missed.”
Beyond a hardcore group of Trump supporters who were never going to switch allegiance, much of the analysis of the scale of Kamala Harris’ defeat has focused on ‘the price of gas’ factor – that the economy (stupid) was the reason that fuelled so many Trump voters and that he alone offered any recognition of the reality of inflation felt by these people. Meanwhile, Harris spoke of needing to ‘save’ a system of democracy many people felt had utterly let them down.
But what Trump has also long understood is how people feel and experience their realities is key. This was an important feature of his 2016 r