Donald Trump win a postmodern take on folksy tales

The Trump ascendancy is a crass remake of Hollywood director Frank Capra’s glorious World War II-era films.

In a media and political sense the Trump ascendancy is a crass, postmodern social media world remake of great Hollywood director Frank Capra’s glorious World War II-era films of praise to the values of small-town America, particularly Mr Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life.

But rather than starring a naive, youthful Jimmy Stewart who embodies all that is good about hard work, family life, civic charity and social harmony, our hero, Trump, is more an out of control John Belushi meets Adam Sandler in a parody of the great movies of middle American values.

Yet US voters do crave a return to the past: “Make America great again.” Trump voters have rejected the political and media establishments and the Clinton and Bush dynasties. They want a return to a time when the arrival of a young GI in Europe in 1945 meant salvation and liberation. Americans were universally respected and the US led the world.

Rather than defeating Nazism, fascism and communism, the modern “ism” voters rebel against is globalism — the spread of US capitalism, and jobs and security, overseas to cheaper labour.

Wayne Swan, Labor treasurer under Rudd and Gillard, tweeted soon after the Trump election win on Wednesday night: “We ignore the distributional outcomes of globalisation and unfettered market capitalism at our peril.”

Canadian activist Naomi Klein tweeted two hours later: “Whatever happens, it’s time to bury neo-liberalism.”

Many media commentators on the Right noted Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” quote from New York in early September, but missed the real significance. Clinton’s sledge was replete with the full gamut of identity politics that Trump has been rejecting all year.

Said Clinton of voters who all too often in the rust-bucket states of the Midwest have voted Democrat: “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic ... Unfortunately there are people like that ... and he has lifted them up.” It was a gift to a skilled populist and a kick in the teeth to working-class white Americans.

Last Monday and on October 17 this column argued Trump could win, partly because polling was failing to identify voters with unfashionable opinions, as it had done in the surprisingly strong Tory win in the British election last year, the Brexit vote last June and the One Nation vote in Australia on July 2.

I also argued the media was missing the two big issues: immigration and slow income growth among the losers of globalisation, the workers in the Midwest rust-belt states. For these mainstream, small-town white Americans, Clinton represented everything that was wrong with modern America.

The more multi-millionaire music stars who turned out for her the more alienated this old core Democrat constituency became.

Trump succeeded where Swan and Gillard failed and where Shorten tried to till the soil at this year’s election: in the politics of discontent. Just as in Australia, people struggling to make ends meet do not want immigrants arriving and taking jobs or — worse — in this country taking welfare. And while globalisation has lifted billions of people around the world out of the most dire poverty, the jobs offshored by businesses from the US and Europe have come at the cost of dignified work for traditional unionised labour in the US and Europe.

Look at the closure of the car industry in Australia and reflect on the $50 billion submarine boondoggle designed to buy off discontented voters in South Australia.

French economist Thomas Piketty created worldwide frisson in the Left of politics when he released his influential book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, on income and wealth distribution, in 2013. The irony of last week’s Trump vote is that a billionaire property developer who has offshored tens of thousands of jobs has been the world’s biggest beneficiary of Piketty’s Marxist second coming.

But ironies abound. People on the Right of politics should understand Trump’s economics has more than a little in common with that of failed Democrat rival Bernie Sanders and disastrous British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, both old-fashioned socialists. They might also reflect it was their own populist hero Tony Abbott who shut the car industry here.

It is hilarious to hear multi-millionaire media demagogues who in the main also did not pick the Trump win now hailing a revolution against the elites that may soon swamp Australia, as if they themselves were working-class stiffs rather than elites from the conservative side.

People on the Left should at least be as honest as filmmaker Michael Moore who predicted the Trump win and was almost gleeful in his post-election media discussions of it. The progressive Left might also reflect that after predicting violence from defeated Trump voters it was indeed the scorned Clinton voters who took to the streets.

All this is part of the biggest issue in the world and the most important economic debate since the Great Depression. If mishandled, it could turn the sluggish growth of the Western world after the global financial crisis into another depression of far greater magnitude. The present decline in the growth of international trade looks eerily like the trade wars of the early 1930s, and talk of global tariff rises will only damage the poor in the West.

How do workers think they get their cheap, giant flatscreen TVs and petrol-miser Asian cars?

The tectonic plates of world’s economy are shifting in a new industrial revolution. As incomes and exports rise in China and India standards of living are rising there and falling in comparison in first world countries among low skilled groups.

All this is being made worse by enormous central bank debts accumulated at the behest of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank as the international economy tried to reflate after the GFC.

These debts have largely fed into booming asset prices — shares and houses — and exacerbated the inequalities being driven by globalisation.

The rich on Wall Street have indeed got richer and around the Western world people need to start looking at policies to stimulate growth and ensure taxation and welfare systems bring the less skilled along for the ride.

A good place to start for media professionals who don’t understand what is happening would be the magistrate’s court in any provincial Australian town where the losers of globalisation parade through in thongs and with drug addled eyes most mornings. In the world of Capra’s films the “haves” gave such people a hand up.