Trump, Clinton, and the return of crony politics
What’s changed? A little less than a year ago, commentators the world over were already shaking their heads at the American presidential election. Back then, embarrassment centered on the idea of Bush versus Clinton, the ultimate embodiment of oligarchic US politics and the primaries’ most likely outcome. Nobody at the time thought it could possibly get any worse. And yet it did. Mild-mannered Bush was replaced by a candidate who makes his policies seem just as mild, and does so with a brand of demagoguery presidential politics had not seen since Ross Perot in the 1990’s. Except of course for the fact that Mr. Perot ran as an independent, never dreamed of censoring speech, and wasn’t openly racist (even delivering, to the amusement of many, an address to the NAACP)…
So let this be a lesson to those who believe unpleasantness is endowed with the miraculous tendency to plateau: If things in general can always get better, they can also always get worse — and most of the time they indeed will, if no one does anything about them.
The return of crony politics
Moments like these present one with newfound fondness for lesser villains. What kind of accusations could ever really be leveled at Barack Obama? Innocence, if we choose to define it the way Thomas Fowler does in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American — “like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm” — could perhaps fit: The president’s constant willingness to find common ground with his political opponents, even when such tactics were neither useful nor necessary, was certainly harmful, and turned his presidency away from its initial promise of ‘change’ (no general negative trend, whether it be inequality, institutional racism, or international cock-ups, was ever reversed).
Yet this innocence, along perhaps with a certain arrogance, isn’t very far from the worse one can attack Obama with. No political subversion resembling those found under Nixon and Reagan, no corruption of the kind that dogged the Johnson, Kennedy, and, well, Clinton administrations, could be said to have infected his presidency. Can anyone seriously claim the same will be said about Hillary Clinton, a candidate currently under federal investigation (lest we forget), whose entire political life has been plagued by very real corruption scandals, the most important of which involved foreign governments?
Reducing these accusations to misogyny, the preferred treatment of lazy journalists everywhere, simply will not do: Mrs. Clinton was never just playing the game, she was gaming it, and the existence of a few illustrious predecessors with similar dispositions does not, in any way, excuse her. Pray remember then, that with Hillary the first woman president is also likely to become the first impeached woman president.
As for that other bloated mass, con-man extraordinaire Donald Drumpf, what’s there to be said that hasn’t been said before? It should be fairly obvious by now that no attack on the strangeness of this debilitated personage can truly hurt his campaign. But perhaps commentators eager to point out his and his movement’s idiocy ought yet again to be faulted for not doing their work? Ignorance and stupidity aren’t the same thing, and the mere idea that this electorate is both looking for alternatives and unwilling, at least, to be fooled again by a sold-out establishment, is testament to more intelligence than often credited. Trump supporters have, despite the quality of their answers, very legitimate grievances. If, as always, rising inequality does hit the least well-off worse than everyone else, one must remember that working class whites, concentrated in poorer states, necessarily also bear the blows. Unfortunately this distinction is one that can only be understood under the light of class politics, something that still remains well beyond the sight of many would-be experts. Its consequences are clear, however: One cannot fully fault the socially abandoned from following ignorant, populist appeal… and yes, the combined sneering of East/West coasters and establishment media at poorer Middle America does in fact reek of — dare I say it? — elitism. More importantly, perhaps, this reaction also fails to address the real issues (blaming it all conveniently on the masses), including the fact that the culprit is first and foremost economic… In case you forgot, it was the housing crash — not Obama’s election — which led to the Tea Party’s creation, and Trump is that popular movement’s latest iteration.
That said, the ravages of violent ignorance, as always throughout history the natural ally of the most terrible factions, should never be dismissed. In that regard Trump reminds of Auden’s ogre — the bovine, brutal embodiment of the Red Army’s crushing of the Czechoslovak democratic experiment in 1968. And while the situation is nowhere as drastic nor as fundamentally dangerous, it is worth remembering what tradition he represents:
The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The Ogre cannot master Speech:
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.
— W. H. Auden, ‘August 1968’
