Mukul Kesavan - Donald Trump and the global equalization of awfulness
One of the
consequences of the rise of Donald Trump is the global equalization of
awfulness. Time was when desis would lament the loneliness of
the long-distance liberal in India and gesture, by way of contrast, at the West
where liberal virtues were institutionalized and where political differences
were civilly expressed. If this was ever true, it isn't true any more.
I'm thinking about
that delicious moment in one of the Republican debates when Marco Rubio
suggested that Trump had abnormally small hands. Trump read this as a sexual
slur and assured the Republican faithful, on television, that nothing about him
was small. Reassured, they voted him to a landslide win in the Florida primary.
Who would have thought that a state made up of rich, sun-wrinkled retirees was
so invested in virility?
The idea that America
is a nation of laws while third-world republics like ours are governed by
overmighty States that are whimsical, corrupt and arbitrary, is, like most
stereotypes, based on a half-truth. It's true that the US Constitution is a
part of America's political culture in a way that the Indian Constitution isn't
a part of ours. The First and Second Amendments and the rights they enshrine -
the right to free speech and the weird right to own guns, especially
semi-automatic assault rifles - are an everyday part of American political
discourse. Thanks to novels, films and television, desis who
have never been to America know that 'taking the Fifth' means invoking the
Fifth Amendment to avoid incriminating yourself.
So when Nivedita
Menon, a professor in Jawaharlal Nehru University has police complaints filed
against her because of her views on Kashmir and Hinduism, or when Pushp Sharma,
a journalist and RTI activist, is picked up and questioned by the Delhi Police
for writing a sourced story on systematic sarkari discrimination
against Muslims, Indians can be forgiven for looking enviously Westwards at
free speech protections more robust than their own.
Then you hear Trump
threatening newspapers with consequences should he become president, you see
protesters at his rallies being manhandled and thrown out, and you watch his
triumphal progress through the Republican primaries despite these assaults on
ordinary liberal values and you begin to wonder how much protection
constitutionalist safeguards actually afford against popular prejudice.
Donald Trump, like
Narendra Modi, is important because his success is a symptom of widespread
bigotry. He embarrasses conservative commentators and the Republican
establishment because his success makes this darkness visible. Instead of
dog-whistling or talking about 'states rights' or the 'southern strategy',
euphemisms for the low tactics designed to consolidate the votes of disaffected
white voters, Trump has chosen to be openly bigoted and he has been rewarded
for it.
Trump's political
appeal is based on explicit racism. As Ben Mathis-Lilley writes at Slate,
"[as] a matter of accuracy, though, if someone who says Mexican immigrants
in America are disproportionately likely to be rapists, argues that Muslims should
not be allowed into the United States, and repeats sleazy urban legends about
the behaviour of American Muslims and black people is not a racist, then the
word has no meaning."
There is a reason why
Trump equivocated about rejecting David Duke's endorsement. Duke used to be the
Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist organization well beyond
the pale of political respectability. Trump doesn't think Duke's endorsement is
toxic because he recognizes that a substantial part of his support base
consists of older white men without a college education who, goaded beyond
endurance by Barack Obama's time as president, want a white Restoration. Put
plainly, racist whites are crucial to Trump's candidacy and he doesn't want to
alienate them by disavowing Duke.
Actually, the truth is
that racist working class whites and racist older white people are crucial to
the electoral coalition of any viable Republican candidate.
And while this is true for the presidency, it is equally true for Congressional
elections. Despite a changing population and unfavourable demographics,
Republicans have succeeded in winning more states and more legislative contests
because they have been ruthless in gerrymandering electoral districts for the
sake of creating white majorities or pluralities. The whiteness of the
Republican base predates Trump's emergence by decades. It is important to point
out that the party's alignment with an angry white rump didn't just happen; it
was achieved by design.
Which is why the
consternation of conservative commentators at the prospect of a Trump
nomination is comical. It's funny because all ambushes are amusing from the
point of view of the disinterested spectator. The spectacle of a party
establishment and its tame ideologues being upended by a cheerful vulgarian is
irresistible. The republican establishment wanted to harness the rage and
anxiety of a resentful white rump for its own ends: neo-conservative
interventionism abroad, Wall Street welfare and ever lower taxes for the very
rich plus huge welfare cuts for the very poor at home, and an immigration
policy that would turn immigrants into temporary guest workers for America's
employers.
Trump saw that the
straight road to the heart of this constituency was to pander to its prejudices
explicitly. So he did. Immigrants, he declared, took both your jobs and your
women. He saw that working class whites had no interest in a rational
immigration policy so he promised them a brutally irrational one: he would
deport all 12 million illegal immigrants including their children, he would
build a border wall you could see from outer space and he would get the
Mexicans to pay for it.
He saw that they liked
Medicaid so he broke with conservative orthodoxy about welfare spending on
health. He recognized that white evangelicals were white first and evangelical
later and guessed, correctly, that his anti-immigrant, anti-free trade rhetoric
would win them over. Conservative pundits like George Will, Ross Douthat,
Charles Krauthammer and Jennifer Rubin felt robbed of their ideological
respectability by Trump's cheerful bigotry. They preferred the deniability of
dog-whistling to Trump's more 'direct' methods. Marco Rubio, the darling of
this class of 'respectable' Republican thinker, lost his home state, Florida,
by a landslide because the white Republican base never forgave his attempt to
broker a bi-partisan immigration bill in 2013.
Sections of this
Republican pundit class, blind-sided by the Trump phenomenon, are predicting a
brokered convention. According to them there will be a political coup where the
GOP's elders will name an establishment candidate not called Trump and edge
Donald out. This is a case of sore losers whistling in the wind. It is almost
certain Trump will win the nomination and when he does, the clients and
time-servers who make up the bulk of every political establishment, will, like
the governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, embrace him. Deep in their hearts
they recognize that the party's beating heart has been, for decades, its angry white
base.
Seen this way, Trump's
ascension represents not a rupture with the past, but the base coming into its
own and there will be no shortage of re-purposed intellectuals and born again
pundits to explain to everyone who cares to listen the Importance of being
Trump. We in India will look on knowingly, having been here before.
