If Trump Wins, Why?
Published at 12:59 on 24 October 2024
Will He?
Over a month ago I wrote that the odds favoured Harris winning. I still think so, although not quite so much given how the polls have slipped some since then.
Despite that, however, I will point out that the polls are not infallible, particularly in this era of smart phones and generally unpublished numbers, which greatly complicates the job of polling. The past two presidential elections, the polls did underestimate the level of support for Trump. If that pattern holds, the USA is indeed f*cked. But it won’t necessarily hold. It is just as plausible that after two cycles of underestimating support for Trump, the pollsters have this time overcompensated for their past errors, and are now overestimating Trump support.
The long and short of it is that we don’t know for sure and it’s going to be close. But why so close?
The Nichols Theory
Anti-Trump conservative Tom Nichols has a theory. Tom Nichols is also wrong, or more accurately, incomplete. Some people are voting for Trump for exactly the reason Nichols stated, i.e. as an “act of social revenge.” Some, but not all.
Nichols retired from his job as a college professor and now spends a significant amount of time on X (formerly Twitter), where no small amount of fascist trolls exist. Those individuals are indeed explained by Nichols’ theory (and of course they show up commenting on his posts a lot, so he notices them).
However, there are a lot of people — not all of them necessarily even particularly right wing, at least not by domestic U.S. standards — who just think that, for whatever reason, the concerns about Trump that Nichols, myself, and many others have aired are simply overblown. I have run into quite a lot of these individuals. They don’t want to burn it all down. They just don’t believe Trump is that big a deal. Nichols’ theory does not explain these people. These individuals tend not to be enthusiastic about Trump either way, so they do not feel motivated to comment on Nichols’ tweets.
What might explain them? The most likely answer is not so easy for a conservative like Nichols to swallow (and it explains the trolls, too).
The Other, More Systemic Reason
There are, quite simply, a large number of Americans who entered the Trump era already pre-indoctrinated to accept fundamentally fascist political values. So when a fascist descends his golden escalator and appears on the political stage, his ideas just don’t seem that odd or threatening to them.
I first started getting truly concerned about this around 20 years ago, during the run-up to the Iraq War. There were just so many bald-faced lies getting thrown about. There was just so much disregard for the truth. There was just so much official malfeasance in pursuit of the goal of foreign intervention. And the media and the Democrats were so disgustingly milquetoast when it came to calling the Republicans on it.
It was at that moment that I realized the core problem of bourgeois democracy, particularly in a military superpower: because it’s still a procedural democracy, and the politics of the ruling elite do not serve the public interest, you must indoctrinate the voting public, else those voters will revoke your electoral mandate.
And it turns out that there really isn’t a whole lot of difference between the amount of indoctrination to needed get voters to support imperialism and class rule under procedural democracy, and the amount of indoctrination needed to get voters to support fascist politics. I saw the danger looming then, and I really see it now.
Rule by presidential fiat? What’s the big deal, that’s gone on for decades when it comes to presidentially-ordered military interventions. Nobody pays attention to the Constitution when it calls for Congress to approve declarations of war, so why should any of the other parts of it matter so much?
Massive domestic military deployments against illegal aliens? Why not, the military gets deployed against foreigners in foreign lands all the time, why not against foreigners who aren’t legally supposed to be here?
Suppress left protest movements? Hey, we back client states that do so all the time! If “stability” is good there, why not here as well?
Decades of bipartisan propaganda to get voters to support high military spending, oppressive imperialist politics, economic inequality, and class privilege are merely so many chickens that have now come home to roost.
And it gets even easier to happen if, as in the USA, your political culture is imbued with no small amount of exceptionalist rhetoric. Democratic decline becomes something that afflicts only other, lesser nations. It can’t happen here. We’re special.
Trump is no aberration; he is the logical conclusion of a system that was rotting from the inside for a long, long time.