Democracy Bites
Processing Trump 2.0
Like many people around the world, I watched in horror for the second time as Trump returned to power in the US. Theoretically I do not have a horse in that race, being an Indian citizen living in India. But let’s be honest: in the fading years of a unipolar world giving way to a multi-polar one, we all have vested interest in what happens in Washington DC.
I vividly remember feeling shocked, horrified, depressed, angry, and all of those other emotional things back in 2016 where my reservations about Clinton were muted in comparison to my reservations about Trump. This time, I am only depressed, because very clearly, the Elites have not learned any lessons from any events of the past twenty five years. It’s not about Trump — it was never about Trump. This is about the 99%.
How we got here — an oversimplified summary of 25 years of unrest
September 11, 2001 yielded for 7 years a war-mongering, hyper-capitalist government in the US that (to over-simplify) made the working class people who went ‘over there’ and died despise the Establishment. By the time you got to 2007, the rising income inequality that came from the ‘irrational exuberance’ in the synthetic markets set up a second crisis within the decade that would leave arguably a longer shadow over the world than even 9/11. Obama, with his message of Hope and Change, came to power by painting Hillary Clinton as the Establishment and in many ways a continuation of the war-mongering, cozying with Goldman Sachs ways of the Republican party. He won by a landslide.
In the 8 years that followed, despite reasonable crisis management, it dawned on the 99% that Obama had also gone native and cozied up to the Establishment. The bailouts, the continuation of the wars, and the various shapes of the alphabet ascribed to the economic recovery did not make a whit of a difference to the working class, the 99%. The Tea Party became a thing, and the Republican Party started down the witches road of radical libertarianism, religious zealotry, and rank racism. That turn explains the rise of Trump. What’s this you say? He wants to burn it all down? Godspeed…
When Obama’s turn ended, there were two possibilities on the Democratic side — Bernie Sanders and Clinton (again). The Establishment, deciding it was ‘Hillary’s turn’ worked actively against the Sanders candidacy and the marginally popular Clinton, with all her baggage, was swept into the Democratic nomination. Later evidence would show the game was, to use a Trumpism, rigged folks.
Of course Hillary lost! Trump was a buffoon, but he was Change now, while Hillary represented the tycoons and the technocrats who were exploiting the working class and getting fat from it.
The four years of Trump ended up being sobering, but of course before any significant lessons could be learnt, the campaign year was taken over by a little thing called COVID-19 and turned into another change election. The Democrats, to their credit, had an open primary — until the South Carolina primary where the Establishment, this time led by the likes of James Clapburn and the donor class, afraid of Sanders’ consistent and continuing populism, pushed him aside a second time and anointed Biden.
Biden won — but only because at that point the people would’ve happily voted Richard Nixon in again posthumously if it meant an end to the Trump drama. Back then, Biden made quiet comments about being a one-term President and ushering in a new generation, and went on to have a hugely consequential presidency. And yes, somewhere in then the rage — the same rage arguably that had existed in the American system since the War on Terror, the Financial Crisis, the Tea Party and Occupy movements, and COVID — was deployed tactically by Trump to try to take the Capitol and hang poor Mike Pence on January 6th.
The truth is, Biden got a lot done by most metrics, except the thing that would have got him extra credit. He did not step away in a timely manner to allow for an open primary.
He knew he was deeply unpopular — whether justified or not — and we all knew he was old (though perhaps we underestimated his frailty, especially after his strong State of the Union performance in Jan 2023). It all finally caught up to him at the first debate. Pressured from all sides, he stepped back, leaving ~120 days for his successor to be picked, campaign, and possibly win.
The Establishment stepped up again and laid out a red carpet for the sitting VP to become the Democratic nominee. Kamala Harris ran as well as she could’ve — made fewer unforced errors in her short campaign than most candidates do, but she did do two things wrong. She did not step away far enough from Biden’s shadow (couldn’t think of a single thing that would set her apart from him in a consequential interview recently, as example), and she did not denounce the war Israel is waging against the Palestinian people in Gaza (and soon perhaps, elsewhere in their occupied territory or indeed outside of Israel). These were not the only reasons she lost — and of course given the abortion issue, the Jan 6 riots (poorly understood as an anti-democracy move in my view — it was an anti-Establishment riot), and the sentiment about the Economy, there were larger forces contending.
Get Hrishikesh Diwan’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
But here we are — she lost. Trump 2.0 is coming. Given the context set above, let’s talk about why.
Why Harris (inevitably) Lost
- Democratic but not democratic: It is not clear Harris would have been the nominee for the Democratic Party if they had spent the usual 2 years picking one. She had stalled when she tried in 2019. Maybe a messy primary with Biden as neutral arbiter would’ve yielded the same eventual result, but I suspect the nominee would’ve better represented where the electorate was and would have had the time to make their case.
- Identity politics and the taking for granted that chases it: Frankly the Democratic Party assumes unions, LGBTQ+ folks, people of color, Latinx communities, women, the ‘working class’, the ‘college/ non-college educated white voter’ and all such labels are big determinants of how actual people vote. I think the data this year will make clear they are not as big a factor as all the Democratic candidates assumed. You take these people for granted at your peril. They were deeply unhappy, and denied any choice once again by the Establishment, voted for the only candidate that was clearly anti-Establishment, and for Change.
- It’s the economy stupid — just not how you think: Chasing economic metrics, the GDP/ the rate of inflation/ the PMI indices or whatnot just makes you look more like the Establishment. The past three decades have been the story of rising income inequality, unaffordable housing, and inflated corporate profits at the cost of exploited workers. Of course the United Auto Worker cadres refused to endorse Harris! To them, if I can borrow a phrase from 2008 Matt Taibi, Harris represented the ‘vampire squid’ class sucking on humanity’s face. The answer to a feeling of economic malaise, of hopeless job markets, low salaries, high prices, and extortionist rents is NOT to say “but the other guy is worse”. It is not to say “burn it all down with tariffs” either, to be fair. It might be more on the lines of “I’m with you; let’s Change things” but to say that you cannot be in power as a sitting veep!
- War-weariness (and yes, Gaza): I play a lot of Civilization VI and there’s a parameter in it called war-weariness that unless it is carefully managed, cripples your economy and reduces loyalty and happiness in your empire. The American Empire has been at war almost constantly for a quarter century, after a brief and arguable respite following the Cold War. I don’t think the average American is insensitive to the plight of Ukrainians or even Palestinians in the face of genocidal forces, but the 99% ARE very tired of doing all the dying while the 1% reap all the profits. To stand with Israel so staunchly (and incorrectly in my view) may have cost Harris on the margins, but the bigger price she paid was for not promising an end to War. This also ties in to #3 above by the way — the people who volunteer in the Armed Forces know they will be paid a pittance to die while the defense contractors and cognoscenti and the Elites all MAKE BANK from the war!
- A Big Tent has no philosophy: Cozying up to Liz Cheney might have convinced the Democrats and the Media that this was some sort of unity campaign, but who are we kidding? The Anti-Trump alliance is merely papering over the fact that these are the same Cheneys, the same Republicans that have been pro-war, anti-abortion, and part of the Elites themselves for the past 5 decades — since the Barry Goldwater era at least! They never had any pull on the 99% — which is why they were run out of their party once the Orange Demagogue took over.
- Anti-incumbency: Yes, there’s a global trend where in the year when a majority of humanity went to the polls, they roundly voted against the incumbent. Even in places like India where the incumbent won a majority, they were humbled and given a smaller vote share. These are macro forces that cannot be denied and are a much bigger story than any one nation, election, or candidate can counter by themselves. Modi did in India, sure — but at a cost.
- Broken Capitalism: The lessons of 2007/ 8 have been largely forgotten. People have no memory of Obama’s ‘shellacking’ in 2010 any more. There is something rotten at the heart of Capitalism, where the 99% are realizing it does not work very well for them. The Liberal Consensus that the world operated under from roughly the first Bretton Woods conference to the 2008 Financial Crisis has broken down. People don’t even think fiat currencies are the only way, look at what’s happening with crypto! There needs to be a realignment, and questions the politicians need to ask run very deep indeed. “What is a good metric for the economy if GDP is leading us astray?”, “What is a corporation for? Are we focused too much on shareholder interest? Should buybacks be disincentivized?” and other questions like this lead to deeply uncomfortable answers and the Establishment will fight them tooth and nail. This is what Trump appears to do, but of course we all know he’s just a hustler. He wins nonetheless.
So what next?
Lots of copium and gin, for me personally. Cannot wait for the weekend :)
But seriously folks — if you are reading this and have got this far into it, you probably are the Elite, the cognoscenti, the Establishment. Think for a minute about what a true voice of the 99% would sound like. It would NOT sound like me and you. To our ears, it will be coarse, uninformed perhaps against our standards, but it would be honest, and in anguished pain. For democracy or Democracy to work, that voice needs to be heard and elevated.
I don’t know if the American polity will ever find itself in a place where there is a viable Left again, instead of the Center-Right vs Right argument represented by the Democratic vs Republican dynamic. It certainly looks bad for them — in the post Citizens United world, where corporations are people too and can donate vast sums of money, where oligarchic billionaires can own candidates, and the media that write about candidates — bringing real Change is going to require extreme disruption. Maybe Trump will cause it — maybe that was the wisdom of the crowd that gave him the reins of power.
One thing is for sure. The vast sweep of history has no patience for the likes of you, or me, or Trump. It sweeps on. Inevitable. Living in Modi’s India, and having seen the world survive Trump 1.0, I choose to hope that we will survive Trump 2.0 as well. I cry for the Ukrainians and the Palestinians, and perhaps more peoples who will now face uncertainty, war, famine, climate change, authoritarianism and oligarchic whim. Let’s be honest though — they were always going to face that, even if Harris was in power.
I hope instead because the story of humanity has for the past 5000 years been about the empowerment of the individual, and the empowerment of each small voice.
In the end, the 99% shall be heard.
