Why Trump will win in November
In 1968 George Will, the conservative American commentator, wrote that “pessimism is as American as apple pie.”
It was America’s annus horribilis. Body bags were piling up in Vietnam. The unexpected Viet Cong Tet offensive had destroyed the myth of US military invulnerability. It was election year. White House incumbent Lyndon Baines Johnson had pulled out of the race, fearful of being held to account for his duplicity over the escalation of operations in Vietnam.
Senator Robert F. Kennedy, seeking the Democratic nomination, was assassinated on 5th June. Two months before, on 4th April, civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.
The economy was at risk of being ravaged by an international monetary crisis. The almighty dollar was routed as President Johnson tried to cling to the cliff edge of the gold standard, amidst a typhoon of international speculation against a deficit-ridden US economy.
Foreign governments were still allowed to convert dollars for gold at a fixed rate. US citizens had been deprived of that right by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 in a money supply boosting attempt to kickstart the economy, devastated by the Great Depression. The final link to fools’ gold was, paradoxically, dumped in 1971 by the conservative President Richard Nixon.
In 1968 the wolf of revolution was baying at the door. Civil unrest was a euphemism. The Democratic convention in Chicago became a war zone. William A. Galston, now a senior fellow at Washington’s Brookings Institution, then a Chicago student, recalls: “April 1968. Smoke was billowing in the distance — from the South Side — as I drove in Chicago, where I was a student at the time. I remember saying to myself: ‘It can’t get worse than this.’ For more than half a century it didn’t — until now.”
Then, pessimism was misplaced. America survived that crisis, moved on to the Reagan years of 7% annual GDP growth, became the global hegemon following the collapse of the Soviet Union and proved the doomsters wrong.
Will, reviewing no fewer than four 1968 books on American pessimism (by the liberal James S. Sundquist, conservative Professor Gottfried Dietze, E. P. Dutton, who produced a Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, and journalist Stewart Alsop) remained unfazed throughout.
After all, America was familiar with episodic crises, again and again successfully reinforcing the popular myth it was a confident, unworried, “happy republic”. Had it not come through a Civil War with 750,000 military dead?
Occasional pessimism was hard-wired into the American psyche. The dour puritan Founding Fathers had bleak views about man’s limitations as a social creature. Those founders, from Jefferson through to Adams, happily committed treason and waged war in pursuit of their own perception of the public interest. Been there, seen that, bought the pessimism tee-shirt. Get over it. We rise again. Always do.
In 2020, America is no longer so sure. Last year, a Pew Research Center Survey found for the first time that majorities across all America’s social divides and classes predict a weaker economy, a growing income divide, a degraded environment and a broken political system as they look ahead towards 2050.
Seven in ten Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the country, see a ballooning national debt made worse by the Covid-19 crisis, predict unaffordable health costs and fear their children will be jobless. The deep divisions along traditional fault lines of American life, of race, age and education, will intensify, leading to civil unrest along the lines currently seen in US cities following the murder of George Floyd.
Time for anecdotal evidence that the tectonic plates are moving. Many friends who have quit Manhattan during the pandemic are wondering about returning. Homes in Long Island, the Connecticut Metro North corridor and as far away as Vermont seem nirvana compared with the dystopian rioting and random lootings going on in town. Rural real estate prices, long stagnant, are on the rise. Who would want to rely on a doorman to keep out nihilists already trashing walk-up apartments without security? Whatever happens next, post-Covid America will be different.
I was introduced to and had a conversation with Vermont author, music enthusiast and all-round good guy Bill Schubart. On a Zoom screen Bill looks like dungareed Pa Walton from the long-running 70’s TV classic series The Waltons. His values are deeply rooted in Vermont, where he has been active in the community all his life.
Amongst his concerns he highlighted: a failure in education, now based on teaching “values” but ignoring knowledge; collapsing child care in traditional, disciplined home backgrounds; a tendency of states like Vermont – which adopted replicated models of the US Constitution as their legal system – to become less accepting of federal direction from Washington, moving irreversibly towards undermining the unity of the republic. Vermont’s constitution dates back to 1793, only six years after the signing of the Philadelphia National Constitution and two years after joining the Union.
Bill’s point is that as the federal nation is perceived to be deviating from its original governing principles, states like Vermont have a home-based constitutional bedrock and legal system upon which they may increasingly rely. California has already seen two campaigns – Sovereign California and Yes California – seeking a plebiscite for secession.
One look at a map of the last presidential election, where the red, Republican states of middle America are hemmed in by blue Democratic counterparts on the periphery, explains the tensions. Breaking point? Not yet, but the direction of travel is towards further fracturing, not the healing of divides.
Bill Schubart supports the Democrats but unusually has praise for Vermont Republican Governor Phil Scott. Bill is the reach-across-the-aisle, what’s-best-for-the-community, let’s-get-stuff-done sort of guy who drove Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act and the economic disaster-aversion package of 1968 through Congress in a hammered-out consensus. He is, in other words, a dying breed.
This is of course all idle and depressing speculation. After all, the Democrats are bound to select an inspiring candidate who will feed off the anarchy presided over by Trump, the collapsing Covid economy and America’s diminishing global credibility, and sweep Deranged Donald from his White House bunker in November.
Er……. not quite. Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate in November, is these days a poor parody of a politician – even of the man he used to be. He has been running for President since 1987. By now he might be expected to have perfected the knack. Donald Trump, probably the most incompetent president in history, presents him with an unending flow of open goals. Missed! On the President’s failure to mask up, stubborn non-observance of Covid restrictions, here is how Joe responds:
“Well, I tell you what I’m doing, I’m following the rules, man. Number 1, I’m keeping the rules. My governor says he doesn’t want us out. I haven’t been out. I wear my mask. I have a mask. I got Secret Service outside. I walk outside, I have it on. They get tested. And by the way, I’m beating them across the board. One hundred and sixty million people have watched me so far on shows like yours. All the stuff about ‘it’s hurting me’ is not hurting me. I’m winning at all those states. I’m ahead in all the national polls.”
Inchoate drivel. And it does not end there. There is now the mush on the mob violence that flared in the wake of the George Floyd murder.
“I want a national police oversight commission”, chirps the candidate. Hang on! Cities like Minneapolis, the scene of the George Floyd killing, are run by Democrats with progressive philosophies of criminal justice. The Kerner Commission in the 1960s endorsed the systemic racism diagnosis and the US has since made huge strides. Yet to hear Mr. Biden tell it, nothing has changed, even after eight years of a black president (with himself as vice) and two black attorneys-general. Joe simply can’t bring himself to condemn the gratuitous violence for what it is.
How has President Trump responded? Unusually, he resorted to church instead of his cell phone. Even more unusually he stood outside one, mostly silent, brandishing a bible. He was then blessed by the usual useful idiots who flocked to condemn him for … what?
The bonkers Episcopal bishop of Washington, Mariann Edgar Budde, quixotically blamed him for a breach of intellectual property rights. Standing outside St John’s church, then – alongside Melania in full schtum mode – a shrine commemorating a visit of Pope John Paul II and brandishing a bible without notice was an outrage. This was her business. What’s the President doing standing outside the church of presidents, without her say so?
The abiding image in the public mind is of the President, recently accused of being bunkered down in the White House, striding past graffiti-daubed buildings to “make a stand” against rioters who had hijacked the Floyd cause for their own anarchic ends. Bring on the base.
Donald Trump will win in November because he has found a meme that allows him to move on from the old playbook of a strong economy, low unemployment and growing prosperity, now all shredded by Covid. The game show host understands there is a new game in town, and he will play it. Part of that is to be ruthlessly brutal against any opponents, especially Joe Biden, a strategy which will result in an even more divided America in January 2021.
George Will is now calling for a vote against the Republican Party – he left it in 2016 – because it is in Donald Trump’s pocket. Only a cleansing will do. Fat chance. The Republican Party made its Faustian pact with Donald Trump, the non-Republican candidate they didn’t want, at the Cleveland Convention in 2016. They sink or swim together.
In 1952 American composer Aaron Copeland wrote an opera, The Tender Land. It was about social conflict in post-depression America but ended with the heroine’s sister, Beth, dancing – the hope of the whole family. The opera is rubbish; Copland’s music is much better. In 1958 he salvaged some of it for an anthem, The Promise of Living. Copland always saw promise in his country the Pew Survey implies is lost.
Today, America is no longer Copland’s tender land. Now the country is better represented by cheery misanthrope Bob Dylan’s 70’s hit, Slow Train Coming:
“Can’t help but wonder what’s happenin’ to my companions
Are they lost or are they found?
Have they counted the cost it’ll take to bring down
All their earthly principles they’re gonna have to abandon?
There’s a slow, slow train comin’ up around the bend.”
In the past week there has been one small voice of sanity. Speaking of violence Terrence Floyd, the late Gorge Floyd’s brother, said: “So, let’s do this another way, and let’s stop thinking our voice don’t matter and vote”. Good to know there is one optimist left.