Donald Trump, and the Divided States of America
The U.S is the latest in countries trending quickly toward right-wing politics, and with the world reeling — now what?
United we stand divided we fall?
We’re nearly a month removed from modern history’s most unparalleled political moment — and with it, it’s official. Donald Trump is set to become the 45th President of the United States of America.
I now write this, roughly 20-days after the result. You’d think the dust had settled, as a nation starts to come to terms with what’s happened, and the international community begins to help put the pieces back together. Business as usual, right?
Well, not so fast.
Some of us are stunned, and I get it. But, we must concede: Donald Trump ran a smarter campaign than Hillary Clinton, and managed to re-engage people that had previously sworn off politics altogether.
He capitalized on the collective fear of an already crumbling base, and did so believing, somewhat poignantly, that his opponent would be unable to enthuse Americans in the same way her predecessor had.
But, let’s make no mistake about it — Trump’s second political wind is a direct result of a racist lie. And with it, he’d proudly played into America’s deeply rooted indiscretionary history. A trend we’d see repeated.
His reinvigorated political career, that was left for dead by most, is owed almost solely to his propagated claim that Barack Obama, a man documented to have been born in Hawaii in 1961, was born outside of the United States of America.
And without him becoming the champion of this, we would’ve never made it to this point.
But bottom line, with politics, both sides give it their best go. And unfortunately, this time, democrats and every sensibility we’d ration to represent most reasonably spirited people, lost. It’s that simple.
That’s the bitter sting of democracy. Even when it seems to have blatantly failed, you must still believe in its potential.
Trump, after claiming that the President of the United States was an internationally born muslim, and the architect of ISIS, set the stage as the anti-Obama. Which lends itself to the painful irony in the fact he’d so masterfully managed to inspire his electorate in a way that almost mirrored Obama: just as the antithesis to everything he had eight years prior.
Managing to manipulate the contempt millions of Americans held in having to watch a black man they believed to be a terror leading muslim, sit as their unequivocal leader for eight long years.
In a weirdly dystopic way, Obama’s eight-years can be held directly responsible for the regretfully familiar place we’ve now found ourselves.
It’s a slap in the face to the legacy of America’s first black President.
Who do we blame?
The campaign, up until the announcement of Trump’s victory, stretched a whopping 598 days. And for nearly all of it Donald Trump maintained as the most famous man on earth.
It’s a time now considered an unequivocal failure of our mainstream media. Now, with lenience— we must acknowledge — that it’s also probably the first time most in the media have been faced with such a position.
Cover a presidential candidate too closely and run the risk of affirming his rhetoric; too actively disavow and run the risk of further alienating an electorate that’d already felt incredulous of the media.
And for a man made on TV, not only did he recognize this catch-22, he exploited it at every turn.
In the weeks and months leading to the election, many expected the white working class to make its mark on the vote. The thinking was that hardworking Americans, the “Average Joe”, were no longer represented in Washington.
In a liberal push to “inclusion”, rust-belt whites, ironically, felt they were being spoken down to — like they’d been frozen out of politics. And their position had been replaced instead by people that they’d for their whole lives been made to feel superior to.
On some level I can empathize with this. Even concede that pieces of it may be true. I guess we can’t deny that white male interest no longer socially dominates in the way it once did.
But to those of us outside these circles, it seemed white male superiority had enjoyed its final hurrah. There was no way it occupied the same influence it once had, right?
At a time where decency, fact, and intellectualism are believed to take precedent — what’s left of a time where the opposite rang true just doesn’t hold up so well historically.
But can we for a second recognize that pieces on both sides may indeed be true?
Yes, there may have been a push from the establishment to freeze the “working man” and his ideas from political process. But, let’s at the same time concede that many of these “ideas” are the very thing we’ve been looking to rid ourselves of this whole time.
For a country founded on a unique sort of white male superiority, I’d identify most of this as tough, to put it simply.
Cue it’s bold re-emergence.
White males came out in droves in support of Donald Trump. White women made a frighteningly considerable number of his electorate as well, while both black and latinos came out in unexpected numbers. For the latter, following a long-lined history of voters voting against their interest.
Women especially seemed to identify Clinton as a so glaringly untrustworthy pick, they chose a man so vocally against issues you’d assume them to champion.
As some have put it, instead of choosing the proverbial ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’, some just chose the wolf.
The scariest part of all of this is it’s far from a isolated incident — it’s a trend we’ve seen gain unbelievable popularity around the world.
In recent years we’ve seen the radical right gain a sort of international influence that it hadn’t seen in generations, as whispers of 1930’s politics grow louder and louder.
Countries like France, with Marie La Pen, Geert Wilders in The Netherlands, Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland; the first far-right party in German politics since WWII — Kellie Leitch in Canada, and Nigel Farage and Brexit in Britian are all examples of this.
Really, nearly every industrialized country has one. Donald Trump just happens to be America’s.
A small silver lining can be found though, in the hope that the election of a man so outwardly problematic may in turn inspire the masses to action, working as a rallying cry of sorts.
And as most things are, it’s something we’ve seen historically. Malcolm X in 1964 very publicly favoured the KKK backed, white-supremacist Republican incumbent, Barry Goldwater, over Democrat Lyndon B Johnson, a man who had passed America’s single most important piece of civil rights legislation.
Malcolm preferred a President that most could actively identify as an enemy, rather than an enemy dressed as an ally. He appreciated the way that the presidency of such a man could inspire a sort of social activity that America hadn’t enjoyed in decades.
The way he saw it, we were all systematically affected in the aggregate by century old institutions, and that wasn’t going to change. No matter if one option was to be considered more socially “acceptable” — they both represented an equal threat to the system’s uncanny ability to maintain.
And he thought that working from outside of this conventional framework, although a risk, may have been our only chance at change. A trend we’ve seen repeated half a century later with Trump.
Malcolm spoke at length on the topic, saying in part:
“ Well if Goldwater ever becomes president, one thing his presence in the White House will do, it will make black people in America have to face up the facts probably for the first time in many many years.
And this in itself is good in that Goldwater is a man who’s not capable of hiding his racist tendencies.
And at the same time he’s not even capable of pretending to Negroes that he’s their friend.
So this will have the tendency to make the Negro probably for the first time do something to stand on his own feet and solve his own problem instead of putting himself in a position to be misled, misused, exploited by the whites who pose as liberals only for the purpose of getting the support of the Negro.
So in one sense Goldwater’s coming in will awaken the Negro and will probably awaken the entire world more so than the world has been awakened since Hitler. “
And in 2016, Malcolm’s words hold especially true.
Trump’s election has the potential to open the eyes of people that previously enjoyed the privilege of remaining relatively unaffected by their countries deeply rooted day-to-day issues. Good people that wanted to sympathize with those that called racism, or empathize with the historically laden baggage of misogyny — we can only hope it to be clear enough for you now.
And it’s time to choose a side.
And, as we figure this whole thing out, be sure to call things what they are. Let’s call the Alt-right the Nazi-like, hate mongering movement that it is; let’s stop referring to “white-supremacists” as “white-nationalists”, and let’s never again excuse obviously offensive behaviour as “him being him”.
Let’s also not perceive Trump’s appointing of unfenced supremacists as anything but a sign of him standing firmly behind the convictions that got him elected in the first place.
As Trump’s Breitbart-leaning, disassociated, antiquated group of ill-educated old white misfits look to re-introduce the world to rhetoric we’d all thought died — thanks Giuliani.
Trump wanted this, right? Well let’s make him work for it. Let’s make sure we hold him as accountable as we were ready to hold Hillary — if not more.
Because even though he’s won, doesn’t mean we have to make it easy for him.
Now, admittedly, the Democratic party probably could’ve done a better job at presenting a winnable candidate. In hopes of finding the “once in a generation” type talent they had before in men like Obama, Bill Clinton or JFK — a sort of camera ready, smile-happy, intellectually imposing figure with a Hollywood-esque charm AND man-next-door personability.
Or as it’s also known, the impossible.
And yes, the DNC may indeed have cost themselves this election when they decided they’d systematically screw Bernie Sanders out of the nomination, or in the perceived mishandling of “those damn emails”. They probably could have done more to make Hillary a more empathetic character: a little more believable, a little more human. But still, what they did really should have been enough.
An unfortunate truth of our time though, is the role of ideological extremism on both sides of the intellectual spectrum, and it’s role in what’s become the blame-game in the wake of Trump’s win.
We need to recognize that those who howl needlessly for safe-spaces, trigger warnings, debate pronouns, and flood social media with extreme political correctness are pushing otherwise rationally minded disaffected voters further and further into what’s become an increasingly radical right.
In propagating fallacies and presenting each issue as pressing as the last, we’ve created a world where all issues now somehow seem equal. And where dialogue is expected to exist devoid of critical objectivity — this needs to change.
Frankly, Hillary Clinton just wasn’t what Americans were looking for. And instead of recognizing this, liberals thought that by creating an alternative driven narrative they’d force people from their better judgement, and back towards a woman many felt represented everything that’s wrong with what’s become of politics.
It’s an oversight they’d expected to work in their favour. The only way you get people to run toward the fire is to offer an alternative that’s supposed to be worse, right? Wrong.
Now, with the election of Trump, neighbour has been turned on neighbour with a ferocity we haven’t seen in decades. And a new sort of flame has been lit in the belly of America’s divided beast, as some of its most dangerous ideas have been emboldened.
It’s irrevocably more dangerous than even the most caricatured Syrian refugee or BLM protestor. As it seems like decades of progress have come to a rolling halt.
As Trumpistan comes to reckon with their Presidency, instead of feeling defeated, let’s remember to use this as fuel to drive his opposition.
But let’s also make room at the table for reasonable folk looking for a seat. As we recognize glaring issues, let’s look to identify the reasons it’s happened, and not sweepingly categorize all that sit opposite of us. Because we don’t exist on a monolith.
And the 62 plus million people that voted Trump aren’t all racist, they just overlooked it.
As we reconcile with the fact the GOP officially controls all three levels of government, it’s time to push to “Make America Great” — not “again”, but for the first time.
And a near month removed from America’s decision, as white minority resistance creeps further and further to the front door of our mainstream discourse; the madness to which this can lead, may seem frighteningly unavoidable to some.
It’s an outcome written in what’s unfortunately been left of America’s spangled stars.
So as America’s chickens come home to roost, let’s keep things in perspective, and identify that these are ideas we’ve seen and defeated before.
And this time will be no different. No matter how defeating it feels right now — for all of us.
