Hindsight is not to be scorned, especially when interpreting the result of a US presidential election dubbed the nastiest in living memory. But there is one issue, about which the US media is wringing their hands, for which hindsight is useless.
After this election, will the US manage to come together as a united nation or will it remain a deeply divided country?
On this point, hindsight may even be an unhelpful distraction since it will be tempting to measure the answer depending on who’s won. (Fortunately, that temptation eluded me altogether as my deadline fell before the polls closed.)
It won’t help to know Tuesday’s victor because presidents do not unite divided societies. Nor do they heal polarised politics. Eight years of Barack Obama should have taught us that much.
His first electoral victory, in 2008, was experienced as a catharsis by many people, including a large segment of those who didn’t vote for him. For a brief while, it really did feel as though the country’s racist history had finally been exorcised.
That didn’t last long. Ordinary politics was restored. Obama lost the 2010 midterm elections. He soon found that his fine oratory, once he became President, never persuaded the unpersuaded. His popularity rose the more he stayed out of the limelight. And, alas, racial politics have dominated this electoral cycle.
On their own, presidents can’t unite a divided country. Fortunately, however, that’s not the precise problem the US faces. There are real divisions, which raise hard challenges, but it’s a mistake to think of them as evidence of a nation divided against itself.
Anyone who tells you otherwise will probably rely on one or more of the following four arguments.
First, that this election has shown up an electorate divided into different echo chambers, each hearing what it wants to hear, ignoring the facts. You know, the post-fact society.
Yet, if there is one thing that this election has proven, it’s that facts do matter. Donald Trump, previously a Teflon candidate, saw his support suffer when the accusations of sexual harassment and assault surfaced, and when his own behaviour suggested the accusations were well-founded.
Likewise, Hillary Clinton’s support took a big hit when the FBI director, James Comey, announced that his agency had reopened the email case. She recovered momentum when Comey announced nothing significant was found in the new set of emails.
Just because ordinary voters don’t pay attention to the same facts that the experts do, doesn’t mean they don’t care about the facts at all. It’s that they don’t find experts credible or reassuring. The facts of their experience and their priorities do matter to them. Why should ordinary people be expected to distrust their own experience if it doesn’t match expert facts, figures and priorities?
The second argument you might hear is that Trump and Clinton voters feel very strongly about the sheer danger posed by the candidate they voted against.
True, but together Trump and Clinton united the nation. Eight out of 10 voters according to a CBS/New York Times poll held last week described their feelings about the election in terms of disgust. Consistently, two-thirds have viewed both politicians unfavourably.
Even Evangelical Christians, often touted to vote on different criteria than other groups, came round to voting (for Trump) on their assessment of their self-interest. Up till a short while ago, only a third of Evangelicals thought that upright moral character in private life wasn’t important in assessing a politician. Now, as a result of entertaining a vote for Trump, two-thirds of Evangelicals grant that moral character isn’t that important. Who said Trump couldn’t make minority groups feel part of the larger nation?
Third, you’ll hear that this election was the most polarising in living memory. Well, if you’re a teenager. Commentators were saying the same thing in 2000 (after the election which turned on 500 votes in Florida, with the national difference between the two main candidates being a matter of a mere half a million votes). They again said the same thing in 2004.
Then Barack Obama came along a mere four years later and everyone was talking about a healed united nation, which voted for its first African-American President in a landslide: the largest percentage of the popular vote for a Democrat since 1964.
Either inexorable divisions can heal really fast – in the middle of a disastrous war abroad and an economic catastrophe at home, to boot.
Or, maybe the divisions were wrongly diagnosed in the first place.
A close, hard-fought election doesn’t necessarily mean a country is divided. It can be hard-fought because the voters are in two minds – whether it’s because they find the candidates equally attractive or repellent or unstimulating.
This year it was equal repulsion. Both sides also had their share of committed militants but they are unrepresentative.
Fourth, you’ll hear about the nastiness, divisions and low blows during the whole electoral cycle, from the primaries to the general election. The conservative pundits and elected politicians who refused to support Trump. The Trump-supporting academics ostracised by the large majority of the Clinton-leaning professoriate. All true. But these facts identify a different problem, not a permanently divided nation.
To begin with, the media and academe are temples of a secular priesthood. Orthodoxy and anathema, iconoclasts and heresiarchs, these go with the territory.
Allegiance to doctrine and principles carries here an importance that is not generally to be found elsewhere in society.
As for the Republican and Democratic parties, yes, they are each deeply divided. This electoral cycle has underlined a cracking up of both that has long been in the making.
For the Republicans, the dominant conservative identity imprinted by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s seems in deep crisis; for the Democrats, likewise the dominance of the centrist compromise, forged in the 1990s by politicians like Bill Clinton, seems to have come to an end.
Both parties have seen an insurgency led by a politician – Trump in one, Bernie Sanders in the other – who wasn’t even a party member until shortly before running for the nomination. Yet each attracted a core base dissatisfied with each party’s establishment and orthodoxy.
Each party’s crisis reflects, as the strategist Edward Luttwak pointed out two decades ago, the changing nature of the economy: its knowledge base is fracturing political parties on the basis of educational attainment. This election has seen the established leaders of both parties lose control of their respective working-class base.
Such a division is real but it is driven a special kind of polarisation: that between the top one per cent and the rest. It’s not a partisan polarisation but an economic one.
People misdiagnose it at their peril. Blaming it on a dirty election campaign is a sure way of letting it fester.
ranierfsadni@europe.com