Factors driving the Trump phenomenon
Factors driving the Trump phenomenon
The MAGA movement now looks to the future with hope
It was a solid electoral victory for Trump and the Republican Party. Trump won the Electoral College 292 to 224, with Arizona, Nevada, Alaska, and one congressional district in Maine yet to be counted. He is leading the popular vote 51.0% to 47.5%. The Republicans have recaptured control of the Senate with 52 seats, with five Senate races not yet tallied. The Republicans will likely maintain control of the House, leading 200 to 182. Of the presidential battleground states, Trump won Georgia by 2%, North Carolina by 3%, Florida by 13%, Pennsylvania by 2%, Wisconsin by <1%, and Michigan by 2%, and he is leading in Arizona by 5% and in Nevada by 5%.
How do we explain the Trump phenomenon? We ought to understand above all that the people have lost faith and trust in the established institutions of the nation, and that Trump is an anti-establishment figure.
Since 1980, the American political establishment has abandoned the nation and the people. It adopted economic policies that favored factory relocation to other countries and financial speculation, giving a low priority to investment in the productivity of American industry. At the same time, these policies constituted an attack on poor States and peoples, deepening the process of underdevelopment in the peripheral zones of the world-economy, which provoked a process of migration to the core zones of the world-system. The American political establishment made little effort to control and regulate immigration, taking advantage of its benefits in cheapening U.S. labor, and ignoring the strains placed by uncontrolled immigration on housing, medical services, and education.
No effort was made to address the cultural implications of the uncontrolled international migration for the nation. No one put forth, for example, a notion of cultural pluralism, through which unity and common values would be preserved, in spite of the nation’s growing cultural diversity. These dynamics were accompanied by a reduction of the role of the State in attending to the socioeconomic needs of the people, such that inequalities were not only preserved but increased, reversing decades of decreasing inequality. At the same time, large corporations exercised increasing influence over higher education, the media of communication, and opinion-making think tanks.
The sector of the people that in some way or other were associated with elite and large state universities were less threatened by these dynamics. They often adopted a liberal veneer, participating in superficial protests with respect to the global economic war on the world’s peoples and the national abandonment of the American working class and the poor. But they were not driven to improve the effectiveness of their protests, inasmuch as their own needs were not at stake, and their relatively privileged position was taken as given. However, the people of middle America and the lower middle and working classes, where patriotism was strongest, were increasingly losing faith in the institutions of the nation, seeing more clearly than ever that the political-economic structures are not designed to protect their interests and needs.
And then there are the cultural issues, one of which was the emergence of critical race theory. CRT ignored the insights of both the integrationist and nationalist strains of the African-American movement of 1917 to 1988, which had proposed equality of opportunity in employment and education; community control of the institutions of black society, as the basis for economic development; and an anti-imperialist foreign policy of North-South cooperation. CRT maintained that racism continued to exist, not in a residual form, but in a systemic form. It defended this false empirical claim through a post-modern strategy of selecting examples that were abstracted from time, with most illustrating racism prior to the civil rights reforms of 1964 and 1965. It also manipulated data with respect to race, ignoring the changing attitudes of white America after 1965, documented in empirical studies. With incivility, it accused Americans of European descent of living in a world of white privilege. It was a profound insult to white Americans who had made a sincere effort to adapt to a world defined by the declining significance of race. It was especially advocated by the black middle class, which was perhaps anxious that preferential treatment solely on the basis of race, one of the reforms of the 1960s, was soon to end, for it being no longer necessary. CRT was embraced by the big corporations and the media that they owned, seeing it as a way of dividing the people, preventing their common dialogue with respect to the implications of concentrated corporate power.
Meanwhile, the movement for tolerance toward homosexuals, a reasonable concern, morphed into a celebration of a bewildering variety of expressions of sexual liberty and gender-bending performances. Whereas in the early 1970s feminists were advocates of equality in women’s sports, now a confused nation found itself divided over the question of who qualified to be a woman. For the Christian folk of middle America, it was a bit much.
Into this scenario of elite betrayal and cultural confusion entered Donald Trump. He was a college graduate and a successful businessman, who had begun his career in his father’s business enterprise. He was never at home with the Ivy League. He possessed a desire to speak in the public sphere, and he attained a certain level of recognition in the superficial world of entertainment.
He entered the presidential primaries of 2016, displaying a stunning lack of sophistication that successful politicians usually possess. This, it turns out, helped his candidacy in an environment in which the people had lost trust in politicians. But beyond his style, he had the political intelligence to focus on particular issues of concern to the people that were unattended by the established political process. Two were central: the uncontrolled and unregulated international migration; and the inattention to the development of the national economy. He promised to Make American Great Again, launching a political movement, of which he has been the symbol, from 2016 to the present. In the aftermath of his political victory of 2024, he promises to save the nation from its confusions, and to lead the nation to a golden age of prosperity.
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What now?
In the period of 2020 to 2024, several key officials of the Trump Administration reflected on their experiences from Trump’s first presidency of 2016 to 2020. Many previously had limited experience in Washington politics, and they discovered when they assumed positions in the administration that the executive branch of government was actually governed by an autonomous bureaucracy, which consisted of self-perpetuating entities that serve their own interests rather than the president who had been elected by the people. Former Trump administration officials now say that they have learned from the experience, and they are today much more prepared to lead the presidential administration toward the reforms that have been promised by Trump the 2024 presidential candidate.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party is now much more under the political control of the MAGA movement, as is indicated by the 2024 Platform of the Republican Party. The Party Platform begins with an attack on the political establishment:
We are a Nation in SERIOUS DECLINE. . .. For decades, our politicians sold our jobs and livelihoods to the highest bidders overseas with unfair trade deals and a blind faith in the siren song of globalism. They insulated themselves from criticism and the consequences of their own bad actions, allowing our borders to be overrun, our cities to be overtaken by crime, our system of justice to be weaponized, and our young people to develop a sense of hopelessness and despair. [Emphasis in original].
The Platform calls for a sensible policy of immigration and border security, advocating increasing penalties for illegal entry and overstaying visas, and calling for the end of federal funding to sanctuary jurisdictions. It calls for the restoration of domestic manufacturing, and the elimination of restrictions that retard oil and natural gas production. It favors a strong military as necessary in a world that includes hostile nations, but it advocates the sparing use of military force.
Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as his running mate indicates Trump’s commitment to the MAGA movement. Disdaining the practice of selecting a running mate that would help a presidential candidate in the elections, Trump selected a younger more polished version of himself, thus creating possible continuity for the post-Trump MAGA movement. At Trump’s speech on election night, Vance received the strongest applause among the various MAGA personalities assembled, indicating that the forty-year-old Vice-President-elect is very popular among Trump’s followers.
As I wrote in my commentary of August 30, 2024, “The Senator from Ohio . . . formulates an anti-illegal immigration, anti-woke, patriotic, pro-family, economic nationalism that proposes decisive governmental action to expand American manufacturing and productivity and raise the wages of American workers. He promises to defend abandoned communities in middle America and to defend the interests of workers and the nation, and not the interests of big corporations. He formulates a partial reconceptualization of American ideology, by seeking to bring the Republican Party beyond Reaganism, neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and globalism.”
The presidential and congressional elections of 2024 constitute a rebuke by the people of the United States of the political establishment and the woke Left. Exhilarated by the results, the MAGA movement looks to the future with hope.
However, as I noted in my August 30 commentary, the MAGA project for the renewal of the American Republic is hampered by its limited anti-imperialist consciousness, preventing it from seeing that the key to the revitalization of the American economy is an enlightened turn toward cooperation with China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela and other vanguard nations of the Global South and East in the construction of a world-system characterized not by competing imperialisms but by mutually beneficial trade among nations.
“Kamala, candidate of the establishment: Trump, Vance, and RFK Jr. form an anti-establishment coalition,” August 30, 2024
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