The man who predicted the rise of Donald Trump
Samuel Huntington’s 1981 book American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony is remarkably prescient about events in the US right now.
The Americans are in the throes of “creedal passion”. The best explanation of the turmoil in America is set out in a 1981 book by political scientist and historian Samuel Huntington.
The intense convulsions involve a furious reckoning with Americans’ identity as a nation, and a struggle between the ideals that define this unique nation and the institutions that are supposed to embody those ideals.
The dissonance between the ideals held by Americans and their institutions is at the heart of this confliction.
American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony is the most prescient book you are likely to read on American history and what is going on right now. This 45-year-old book is an extraordinary work of big-picture explication of history displaying the incomparable power of Huntington, a Harvard University academic from 1950 to 2008. There is revelation on near every page.
Huntington showed that periods of creedal passion in American history occurred in 60-year cycles, and he made a strong prediction: “If the periodicity of the past prevails, a major sustained creedal passion period will occur in the second and third decades of the 21st century.”
Donald Trump came right on schedule.
This Trump passion period was presaged by a religious awakening: the rise of the evangelicals and Christian nationalism. A new form of mass communication accompanied it: social media and specifically Twitter, of which Trump became the undisputed master.
This creedal passion period kicked off in 2014 when Black Lives Matter emerged in the wake of the killing of Trayvon Martin. A collateral movement was #MeToo which, while first conceived by African-American activist Tarana Burke in 2006, really took off with the exposure of Harvey Weinstein in 2017.
Race and gender movements for “social justice” joined movements for same-sex marriage, asylum-seekers and the long-building powder keg of uncontrolled migration – all of which generally fell under what the right called agendas of “the woke”.
The backlash to these agendas fomented by the right gained much ground and with Trump’s second term have taken the commanding heights.
The framing of the race and gender movements of BLM and #MeToo were unfortunate. Black Lives Matter was immediately susceptible to Trump’s easy riposte: All Lives Matter. #MeToo’s just agenda of exposing the sexual harassment and abuse of women fell into error when it abandoned a cornerstone principle of the rule of law: the right to the presumption of innocence.
The reformers made themselves vulnerable to being seen as violating the American creed, rather than upholding it and carefully extending its application to all.
But the MAGA right has not been content to defend the creed. It is actively pushing for a reinterpretation of the creed in service of its claims to power. Some of the dissonance is brain-splitting: how could January 6 insurrectionists become heroes pardoned for their crimes? How could Confederate generals who were rebels against the US be disinterred from public memory and valorised?
Unlike almost every nation on earth, the United States is an idea. It is an ideological nation, just as the former Soviet Union was a nation formed by ideology, the embodiment of a set of political ideas that coalesced at the time Americans broke from Britain and created their republic.
These ideas were expressed in the Declaration of Independence and a host of other documents that distilled the principles of the new republic: equality, individualism, liberty and democracy – government by the consent of the governed. The formulation varies, often including commitment to the rule of law, private property and human rights. These foundational ideas define the liberal democracy of America.
Huntington’s first point is that this American creed is universally shared: owned by the left and the right, by the old and the young, by liberals and conservatives. It is the one thing Americans all believe in. In a sense they were pre-partisan and have been remarkably durable over the nearly 250 years of the American republic.
Enduring, but not stable. The instability comes from the fact these elements of the American creed are not entirely consistent with each other. They can amount to contradiction, depending on how they are interpreted from time to time and how their enactment in the political, social and economic institutions of America changes from time to time.
Take the tension between equality and liberty. America is indeed committed to the formal equality that “all men are created equal” but is leavened by the even more powerful commitment to “liberty” and “freedom” that essentially means “all men are created equal, and from then on have the perfect liberty to become unequal according to their individual deserving”. These are my words, not Huntington’s, but Huntington is all too cognisant of the tensions within the American creed.
My thought is that the flex in its founding ideas, while giving rise to inherent instability, also explains its endurance.
No set of interacting principles could perfectly capture the ideals of a nation without leaving room for divergent emphases and interpretations, and without being affected by the tidal movements of the country’s political and economic institutions through time.
The central tension that Huntington identifies is between American ideals and American institutions. Who Americans see themselves to be and who they are. What ideals they hold dear and the less than ideal reflection of them in the institutions of American life. This Huntington calls the “I v I gap”: ideals versus institutions.
This gap between what America professes and believes itself to be and the reality of its political, economic, social and cultural institutions widens and narrows throughout history. Never the twain are in complete synch. How could they be? No nations ever get this right. It could be argued America represents the best endeavour to bring ideals and institutions into a best alignment.
Huntington invokes the psychological idea of cognitive dissonance. He says the gap between ideals and institutions is troubling to the minds of Americans, and they make four basic responses to this dissonance.
One is complacency: Americans become complacent and they go through periods where the gap does not trouble them. Whatever their shortcomings, they think America does better at living its ideals than other nations. The existence of the gap is inevitable and no great problem.
Another response is cynicism: Americans may be well aware of its failings but they become cynical and accepting of the improper behaviour of leaders or governments, or they may feel that though others may suffer, at least Americans are not affected and may indeed benefit from that suffering.
Another response is hypocrisy: Americans tolerate hypocrisy because the gap may be seen as the realpolitik. This one might be called the Henry Kissinger justification for American realism.
The fourth response is moralism: when Americans are not content to be complacent, cynical or hypocritical, and fight for their ideals. They erupt into “creedal passion” and seek reforms to bring their institutions into alignment with their ideals. These periods of creedal passion are intense and do not subside easily.
Reform and change, it seems to me, is either forward looking – seeking as in Barack Obama’s oft-repeated and little-delivered aspiration “to perfect the union”, to make America better than it was – or backward looking, seeking to return the country to the founding ideals of the past.
It may be that the conservative impulse to preserve the past is more powerful than the impulse to make America anew. There is only so much reform possible in America, and Huntington says these periods of moralistic fervour always fall short.
Before setting out Huntington’s four episodes of creedal passion, let me highlight some other salient observations he makes about this most peculiar people, homo Americanus.
They are a paranoid people, highly susceptible to conspiracy theories. If you think this is a recent development among Americans as a result of social media, the rise of anti-rationalism and anti-science among modern Americans, you’d be wrong.
The paranoid style in American politics, as Richard Hofstadter called his 1964 book, is an old style. Before Bill Gates, 5G, George Soros and others, there were the Illuminati, Masons, Catholics, Mormons, bankers, Jews, communists – threatening America. Americans are paranoid about secret power.
Four decades before 4Chan, Huntington writes amusingly: “If the effective exercise of power involves the cover-up of its existence, then it is only a small logical jump to the ultimate conclusion, the reductio ad absurdum of conspiracy theory, that the most persuasive evidence for the existence of secret power is the total absence of any such evidence.”
Deep state or the usual sclerotic bureaucracy?
Americans are untroubled by conspicuous wealth. Liberty and individualism underpin this American ideal. Americans will tolerate egregious social and economic inequality because they believe the wealthy have accumulated their gains through individual endeavour and enterprise. This is the American way.
Huntington devotes a lot of discussion to the American ambivalence towards governmental power. Americans are prone to suspicion about public power and its conspicuous display. Trump’s presidency is therefore befuddling. He is the closest thing to a tyrant as there has ever been, certainly the most authoritarian American president, but contrary to Huntington seems not to be troubled by his conspicuous power.
It may be that the complete transparency of his anti-democratic presidency explains why he is an exception. There is no attempt to hold this power secret from the public. His deployment of power, its motivations and its effects, are plain to see.
Huntington describes four periods of creedal passion in American history by the time of his writing in 1981.
The first period centred on the American Revolution from the 1760s to the 1790s, when the American creed was first formulated.
The second period centred on the presidency of Andrew Jackson from the 1820s to the 1840s.
The third period centred on the progressive era from 1900 to the 1920s.
The fourth period centred on the 1960s and 70s.
Huntington was looking back one decade to discern the common dynamics of what had taken place in the US during the 60s and early 70s, and these earlier periods. He identifies that a religious awakening preceded each of these waves of creedal passion, the last of which was the moral crusade led by Billy Graham in the 50s. He identifies that a new form of mass media carried the arguments of the moralists seeking reforms, from the pamphleteers of the American revolution to television in the 60s and 70s.
What is roiling the soul of America and straining its sinews to the very bone is creedal passion about the ideals that constitute the meaning and identity of America and how far its institutions are considered to have fallen out of alignment with it.
This is not to say the protagonists in this cultural war are all and at all times properly motivated to close the gap between American ideals and institutions – there is much chicanery, propaganda, disfiguration and manipulation of those ideals in service of the contest for power between Trump and his opponents.
But this is what this internal American conflict is about. This is an internal fight in the riven American family. Passions are at an all-time high.
And it is far from over. Huntington says such periods never last indefinitely. They are too exhausting. It will subside at some point.
We Australians are not a creedal people: we have no national creed. As much as we cannot escape the reverberations of American culture and politics, we do not understand liberty and individualism in the way Americans do.
Whenever our politicians use the word “freedom”, it sounds hollow and we know it’s just a pathetic attempt to mimic the Americans.
Australian commentators of the right talk as if ours is a liberal democracy when in fact social democracy of the British and European kind is what we might more accurately be: we believe far too much in mutuality and government to be American.
We are a derivative nation. First derivative of Britain, which lasted until the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941. And then derivative of Americans, to whom we have aspired to be their most earnest and special friend, even if their sitting presidents cannot recall the names of our sitting prime ministers. From Hollywood to AUKUS, our sycophancy is outstanding.
We Australians are quick to assimilate the creedal passions of the Americans because their passions affect the whole world. We see ourselves as second-class Americans, living in a dormitory nation, with no creed of our own.
Noel Pearson is founder of the Cape York Partnership, director of Good to Great Schools Australia and a director of Fortescue
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout