A Referendum on Trumpism
Caught Between Hope and Dread
by Professor John Kane
Both Democrats and Republicans know that turnout is almost the whole game in the present US election. Each have urged their followers to vote by calling it ‘the most important election of our lifetimes’. Their reasons for believing it so are, of course, very different. Democrats have cast it as an election for the very ‘soul of America’, for the survival of American democracy as such. For Republicans it is rather about the survival of the Republican Party itself after an abject four-year surrender to ‘the worst president in US history’.
For many lifelong Republicans of previously high standing, the Grand Old Party of treasured memory is already defunct, having become solely the Party of Trump. Former Republican strategist Stuart Stevens has claimed there is no alternative but to ‘burn it to the ground and start over’.
The current sad condition of the party was made plain at the Republican National Convention in late August. Lacking any positive program, it merely recycled the platform of 2016 and elevated Trump under a bizarre contemporary version of the Führerprinzip. Party members and the Trump family created an alternate universe in which the Dear Leader was transformed into a competent and caring empath whose four years of exemplary governance should be rewarded by another term to achieve… what? No one really knew, but implicitly it was to keep the whole crazy show on the road for another four years and thus maintain the political power of a steadily diminishing minority.
But what, realistically, are the chances?
Certainly, the usual predictors do not promise well for Trump’s team. He has been stuck in a polling hole for almost an entire year, even as normally safe red states ― Arizona, Texas, North Carolina, even Georgia ― have come significantly into play. Biden has maintained a persistent lead in ‘battleground’ states which, thanks to the skewed electoral college voting system, will determine the presidential outcome. Meanwhile Republicans are under unusual pressure in a dozen of the fifteen most competitive Senatorial contests, and no one except Donald Trump in his most vainglorious moments thinks Republicans have any chance of taking back the lower chamber. Democrats have also consistently outraised and outspent Republicans across all contests.
The scene seems set, in other words, for a ‘blue wave’ akin to that of the 2018 mid-terms that gave the Democrats the House, or even a ‘blue tsunami’ that comprehensively flushes Republicans from office and gives the Democrats as much power as the American system can ever deliver. To be sure, the Supreme Court has been controversially stitched up for conservatives for generations thanks to ruthless Republican power-plays. But even that might be corrected by an overwhelming Democratic electoral victory that provides levers to ‘rebalance’ (in Democrat parlance) or ‘stack’ (in Republican) the judicial branch to make it more responsive to liberal sensibilities.
And yet, and yet!
Even at the eleventh hour few if any observers have been willing to call ‘game over’ (though Hillary came perilously close to tempting fate a second time in a recent New York Times article). The ghost of 2016 is still a-haunting, whispering that polls can mislead. And even if they show Biden ahead in the crucial battleground states it has never been far enough ahead to foster full confidence. Though the metaphor of lightning never striking twice is often deployed, the myth of Trump remains potent. He is the cheater-in-chief who has survived impossible Republican primaries, a daunting presidential election, an extended Russia inquiry, an impeachment trial, and scandals and outrages too numerous to mention. Can he pull it off again with nothing but bluster and a fanatic base to puff his sails?
With a dismal record on COVID 19 management and nothing new to offer ― apart from a ‘wonderful, perfect health care plan’ which, like his tax returns, is forever just two weeks away from revelation ― it seems unlikely. Even Trump’s final flurry of neo-fascist, COVID 19-be-damned rallies exuded a whiff of desperation.
He has performed like a rock-star whose great period has passed but who survives on a cloud of nostalgia by performing the old hits.
Great but, well … old. There were telling moments in which Trump seemed to reveal that even he thought the game was up, and wished he were anywhere else but in this presidential race. But of course, being Trump, he’d go on fighting till the bitter end. And fighting dirty, naturally, with lies and threats of intimidation and the help of Republican governors employing various methods of voter suppression in the belief that a large turnout meant a Democrat victory.
And turnout promises in fact be the highest of recent times. Early voting, prompted by a combination of COVID 19 concerns and Trump’s scare campaign against mail-in ballots, has been massive and, according to party registration, heavily favourable to Democrats. On the other hand, polls showed that more Trump than Biden supporters intended to vote on November 3, election day, but would this be enough to counter the Democratic head start?
We will see. In the meantime, the nation — and indeed the world — waits suspended between hope and dread. Democratic hopes like Republican fears are fully justified, given the numbers, but Republican hope in Trump’s magical powers of survival correlates to Democrat dread of history repeating. And the fear is abroad, thanks to Trump’s own rhetoric, that even if Democrats prevail they will have to prevail overwhelmingly to avoid legal challenge and a biased Supreme Court settlement, or otherwise a president who simply refuses to concede defeat and may even incite armed thugs to back his cause on the streets.
No doubt this extraordinary period of history will provide material for political and historical analysis for decades to come. I suspect it will feature, eventually if not immediately, the final implosion of the GOP into a political black hole, with the rebirth of a principled centre-right party as a respectable alternative to liberal Democrats a possibility to be wished for rather than assured.
For Trumpism, though a singular phenomenon, is also a logical terminus of modern Republicanism, revealing deep and enduring cleavages and tensions within American society.
Had 2016 been a ‘normal’ electoral year and a traditional candidate like Jeb Bush been nominated, the Republican rank-and-file would naturally have fallen into line behind him. What has been surprising is the extent to which rank-and-file Republicans have fallen consistently into line behind such a very non-traditional candidate as Trump. (Whatever Trump has said or done; Republican support has seldom fallen below 90 percent.) Trumpism is thus not just a matter of a few disillusioned mid-Western, blue collar, formerly Democratic white voters responding to Trump’s stick-it-to-‘em siren call and providing the sliver of support he needed to capture the electoral college. It implies a revelation of the reactionary core of mainstream Republicanism hitherto veiled by the conventional pieties and ‘principles’ of a hypocritical Republican ‘establishment’.
Establishment Republicans have effectively ceded control to Trump’s angry and stubbornly resistant ‘base’, the MAGA contingent that novelist Stephen King perfectly describes as ‘an apolitical rock packed into a Republican snowball.’ To be sure, clever and determined Republican politicians like Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell have been able to play this revised structural situation to short-term advantage ― tax cuts for the rich, a conservative Supreme Court ― making Trump seem little more than a useful idiot in their ideological project. But Trump has unlocked the Republican Pandora’s box, and the ugliness and evils unleashed will not be easily again corralled.
Trumpism has exposed an enduring and uncompleted civil war in American society and propelled it toward its next phase.
That is why this election has real historical import. It is not just a referendum on Trump (though it is that) but on Trumpism, which has resonances and implications beyond the imperfect vessel that is the man himself.
Prediction?
I’ll invoke cowardly prudence and decline to name a winner. But I will predict — as I have before — that if Trump wins against all odds it will be with a loss of the popular vote even larger than against Hillary Clinton. If that happens the reaction among a majority of Americans is likely to be wide and strong, provoking a democratic revolution that will shake the republic to its foundations.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN KANE
John Kane is Professor in the School of Government and International Relations and Researcher in Griffith’s Centre for Governance and Public Policy at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.
John attained his PhD at the London School of Economics and and teaches in political theory, political leadership and US foreign policy.
He has published widely, been awarded numerous research grants, and five times been Visiting Professor to Yale University. He is the author of The Politics of Moral Capital (Cambridge UP) and Between Virtue and Power: The Persistent Moral Dilemma of US Foreign Policy (Yale UP). He is also co-author (with Haig Patapan) of The Democratic Leader: How Democracy Defines, Empowers and Limits its Leaders (Oxford UP).
