Trump's return not just about the economy….
Donald Trump dances off stage at the conclusion of a campaign rally at the J.S. Dorton Arena in Raleigh, North Carolina, on the day before the 2024 US presidential election; Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Looking forward to the impending general election of 1918, the 16 November edition of the Connaught Telegraph delivered a sharp burn of the Sinn Féin candidate for North Mayo, Dr John Crowley, stating ‘from what we know of North Mayo, Dr Crowley will be glad to return to his dispensary after the election’. His Irish Party opponent — the incumbent Daniel Boyle M.P. — received the emphatic support of the newspaper, with the Western People, also giving him their warm endorsement. Yet, the actual election of 14 December 1918 saw Dr Crowley elected in a landslide of 7,429 to 1,761 votes, with only a 43.3 per cent voter turnout, which compared poorly with other west of Ireland constituencies – even as few of them barely broke the 50% turnout mark.
From this vantage, it seems incomprehensible that the local media could not see the surge of support for Republicans (a view not shared by the RIC, whose ability as police to see and hear inside every local community saw the swelling green wave in advance). But it is human default to only see what we want to see — especially if the alternative does not make sense to us. Both the Western People and Connaught Telegraph saw the impending granting of Home Rule after a wartime boom benefiting farmers, alongside the continuing wholescale breakup of landlord estates into farm holdings. By this logical reckoning, anybody supporting militant Republicans in their futile pursuit of a 32-county Irish republic seemed laughably wrongheaded, but the fact that so many ended up doing so, must have seen as beyond insane. Yet, for many reasons — including my own argument that those who did not vote would later emerge as the Free State government supporters — the voters chose to defy logic and follow the Sinn Féin politicians who were calling for a violent overthrow of British rule in Ireland.
In a similar way, the mainstream media failed to see Donald Trump’s win in this Presidential election, with polls again consistently undercounting his support by a few percentage points – but enough to make the difference in the swing states which mattered. The online liberal news channels in particular had drunk their own Kool-Aid, often featuring smirking presenters, gleefully documenting Trump’s missteps, daft lies, dangerous rhetoric and weird behaviour, versus the superbly professional campaign of Kamala Harris which featured airbrushed celebrities, born-again-Republicans and packed stadiums. This was all supported by a fawning left-wing media and poll-interpreters predicting her win, albeit in a tight race. As in 1918 Mayo, ‘experts’ quoted their own research, claiming enough people would vote the logical way for Harris, considering a roaring economy, low unemployment and a record stock market.[1]
In trying to understand why Harris lost enough of Biden’s supporters for Trump to win, I find it hard to listen to the election post-mortems, given that the same media experts, political pundits and polling companies who got the election wrong are now being relied upon to explain the election. Just as the Irish media missed the spirit of revolution among the 1918 voters, the 2024 US media did not (or chose not to) see the bullet-proof coalition supporting Trump — beyond caricaturing his MAGA base as stupid cultic racists. Several left-wing pundits have even lamented that Hispanic voters are now voting more like white people, rather than keeping to their own voter bloc. Incredibly, they would rather see distinct cultural groupings underpinning political parties, than a diversified demographic mix within each. In any case, the consensus ‘expert’ conclusion is now that most of Trump’s support came from those who believed the economy was bad and that Harris had failed to distance herself from the unpopular President Biden, who was assigned the blame for the long run of post-Covid high inflation. It maybe is true, but was it this really the overriding factor?
The Polish-Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, coined the term ‘genocide’ after World War Two and successfully campaigned to have it recognised as an international crime. He explained the entrenched opposition to his efforts as ‘if somebody does not like mustard, he will always find a reason why he doesn't like it’, irrespective of all efforts to answer his purported reasons. I doubt Lemkin would have accepted the exit-poll explanations of Trump’s victory at face value, as is now fast becoming gospel among the media, saying perhaps instead that ‘sometimes, people just didn’t like Harris’.[2] I see that many non-MAGA voters actually preferred Trump over her, but cannot or would not vocalise how exactly he appealed to their dissatisfaction with their own lives, to their own disillusionment with the status quo, instead plumping for ‘the bad economy’ answer or ‘immigrants’.
Significantly perhaps, there has been almost no mention of Covid-19 as a possible ingredient as to the demise of the Harris campaign. In fact, there has been little consideration in general of widescale and enduring effects of the world-wide lockdowns and repressive measures taken to curtail the spread of the fatal virus — or indeed how effective such measures were, much less the adverse side-effects which have bled into civil society’s evolving relationship to governments and state bureaucracy.
I personally know of several of my friends who are intelligent and worldly-wise people, curious of the world and not easily fooled by anyone (on a sidenote — I now recall the warning that if you have looked everywhere to find the village idiot, but in vain, there is just one last place to find him). During the Covid restrictions, each of them went through different experiences, many of them via online communities, to become radicalised against those in authority, which has not just persisted, but grown deeper. Each of them see Trump as the grenade who will shake the corrupt establishment, even if he himself is a narcistic and self-serving lout. To extend this idea out further, the general experience of the Covid-era has engendered or catalysed among many people, an ‘anti-state mentalité’ and a wish to disrupt the elites. Thus, to many who share this mindset of hostility toward state authority, it does not matter the reason to oppose the establishment candidate, it just matters to pick one to satisfy the pollster who needs an answer. To officially admit to an outsider to simply not liking Kamala Harris (or mustard) clearly won’t do.
Of course having a multi-party electoral system would solve many of these problems… but in the most powerful, capitalist country in the world, where everything is for sale in as many flavours as possible, democracy comes in only two tones… and we the worse for it.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2024/politics/2020-2016-exit-polls-2024-dg/; https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/06/voter-turnout-2024-by-state/; https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/05/us/elections/results-president.html
[2] Korey, W. (2001). An Epitaph for Raphael Lemkin. New York: Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, p.70.