American nightmare: Republican Donald Trump spells trouble

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump smiles as he speaks during a campaign rally on Thursday, Jan. 21, 2016, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Isaac Brekken)

Hearing Donald Trump, Groucho Marx’s comment springs to mind: he may look like an idiot and speak like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you — he really is an idiot. Yet with the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary only days away, Trump’s standing in the polls is similar to that Barack Obama had at this point in 2008, and is stronger than Mitt Romney’s was four years later.

That is not to suggest that The Donald is poised to win the Republican nomination, much less conquer the White House.

After all, Republican primary voters make up 16 per cent of the American voting population, so his 25 per cent support equates to just 4 per cent of the electorate.

And to prevail in November’s presidential contest, he would not only have to gain solid backing from the rest of the Republican base but secure the votes of 20 to 30 per cent of the voters who ­consider themselves to be independents. With 51 per cent of independents telling the internet polling organisation YouGov last month that they would “never” vote for Trump, he is unlikely to be occupying the Oval Office any time soon.

But the fact that the man John McCain recently described as “a mean-spirited, lying jerk” attracts so much support is telling, as is his support’s resilience. This is an angry time in America: and with that anger sweeping the country’s political life, the “world’s indispensable nation”, as Bill Clinton famously called the US in his second inaugural address, seems increasingly unable to bear the weight of its citizens’ expectations.

Of course, a burning sense of anger is hardly a novelty in American life. Already in the 1830s, ­disappointed hope struck Tocqueville as a dominant note in the popular mood, with the fate of Americans being to “struggle, tire and grow bitter” as the promise of success led them to “passionately seek a good that is all the more precious because it is close enough to be familiar yet far enough away that it cannot be savoured.”

Haunted by nightmares of loss and failure, Tocqueville predicted, the nation’s politics would acquire a tone of exasperation, fuelling what Richard Hofstadter later described as American politics’ “paranoid style”.

There is, however, nothing delusional about the resentments that have engulfed the Republicans and propelled Bernie Sanders’ challenge to Hillary Clinton. According to the US Census Bureau, male median income — the income of a man with a full-time job paying an amount smack at the middle of the earnings distribution — was actually 6 per cent lower in ­inflation-adjusted terms in 2014 than it had been in 1973. And as black incomes rose strongly over the period, it was the earnings of white men that were most hard hit.

The depressing result, highlighted in a recent study by Anne Case and the economics Nobel laureate Angus Deaton, is that after declining for decades, death rates for white, non-college-educated men aged 45 to 54 are rising, thanks mainly to a quadrupling in the incidence of drug overdoses and alcohol abuse, and a near doubling in the suicide rate.

Nor are the disappointments solely economic. Perhaps because its ambitions were so unrealistic, the Obama presidency has seen a collapse of faith in American institutions. The latest Pew Research survey shows that only 19 per cent of Americans expect government to mostly or always do what is right, down from more than 40 per cent in the Reagan era. So pervasive is the distrust that the disapproval ratings of even the Supreme Court, which until recently was viewed favourably by the vast majority of Americans, have soared from 17 per cent in 2006 to 42 per cent last year.

And with 74 per cent of the public believing elected officials do not care what people like themselves think, over half now say that ordinary Americans would do a better job of solving the nation’s problems than their elected representatives.

More immediate factors then add to the angst. Despite strong jobs growth, the proportion of Americans who think their country is on the right track has dropped from 40 per cent in 2009 to 25 per cent last month. And with surveys by both Pew and Fox News finding that terrorism and national security have displaced economic issues as voters’ top concern, for the first time since 9/11 a majority of Americans lack confidence in their government’s ability to protect the country.

As 47 per cent believe their own family could fall victim to terrorism, the fear of attack adds to the perception that the nation’s leaders are failing at even their most basic responsibility.

That the repercussions of the deteriorating public mood would be especially acute for the Republicans is unsurprising. Some 60 per cent of non-college-educated white males vote Republican; as a result, it is in the Republican heartland that the economic and social pain has been concentrated.

Moreover, the legacy of Obama’s presidency, and of the Republican congress’s inability to repeal initiatives such as the Affordable Care Act, is a depth of fury in the GOP that greatly exceeds the frustration felt in Democratic ranks: 42 per cent of politically engaged Republicans, as compared to just 11 per cent of politically engaged Democrats, describe themselves as “angry” at Washington.

In turn, that more intense reaction reflects a fundamental difference between the parties: while the Democrats are a coalition of social groups who are less motivated by an abstract cause than by the quest for particularised benefits, the GOP is infused by a commitment to conservative values that has become more pronounced over time.

Given that sharper ideological colouring, the tension between aspirations and outcomes inherent in a system of government based on accommodating competing interests is much more readily cast as a betrayal, reconnecting with the charges of corruption — in its deepest sense of deceit and immorality — that since the American Revolution have periodically shaken the country’s political ­system.

No one channels that charge more effectively than Trump, who, like most populists, postures as the decisive, truth-telling outsider. And it is a fact that he has been willing to voice — albeit with an extraordinary mixture of vulgarity, exaggeration and naivety — the concerns other candidates prefer to leave unsaid, such as the role immigration has played in causing the living standards of less educated Americans to stagnate.

Little wonder then that 55 per cent of his support comes from white working-class voters (as compared to 35 per cent for his Republican rivals), of whom nearly 80 per cent feel the US is still in a recession, while 70 per cent say that immigration is a critical issue for them personally.

In an earlier time, the GOP might have ridden out the storm, with the party’s establishment seeking to impose a relatively centrist candidate who could appeal to voters in swing states such as Florida and Ohio. That is all the more the case as this should be the Republicans’ election to lose: only once in the past 60 years has a party won three consecutive presidential elections, placing the Democrats at a disadvantage.

Moreover, studies show that the longer a party has been out of the presidency, the more likely it is to nominate a candidate who is close to the ideological centre. Challengers never reach or even approach that centre; but electoral defeat impels the party to move in its direction.

Yet whatever the historical experience may have been, it is now virtually impossible for the GOP establishment to impose its will.

To begin with, the party no longer has an establishment focused on winning presidential elections. Rather, after George HW Bush’s loss in 1992, the GOP — which won seven of the 10 presidential elections held between 1952 and 1988 — switched from being a party whose stronghold lies in the presidency to one whose power rests on its supremacy in the House of Representatives, just as the Democrats, who until then had enjoyed virtually uninterrupted control over congress, morphed into a party centred on capturing the White House.

While the causes of that reversal are complex and contentious, what is certain is that it has weakened the GOP’s moderates, whose major asset was their ability to assemble the very broad coalitions on which successful presidential bids must be based.

Instead of sitting on top of the factions, as it traditionally did, the establishment has therefore declined into being one, rather small, faction among others.

To make matters worse, the structures the establishment once dominated have lost their grip on fundraising.

That is largely due to the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in the Citizens United case, which essentially allowed unlimited spending in political campaigns.

Building on that decision, the 2012 election saw the emergence of what came to be known as “Super PACs” (political action committees), independent committees aligned with a particular presidential candidate.

As those Super PACs flourished, parties no longer mediated the flow of resources from donors to campaigns, further weakening what little role there was for a national party machine.

That means the Republican establishment, however great its discomfort, has few tools it can use to bring the process under control. And the rules governing the Republican primaries may aggravate the mayhem.

In effect, while the Democrats rely on proportional representation — so that all the candidates who exceed a threshold in a primary receive a share of the state’s delegates to the party’s national convention — the later Republican primaries are determined on a “winner takes all” basis. In theory, that should narrow the field, as the leader can more rapidly accumulate the required number of delegates. However, in practice, if deep pockets allow the field to remain badly divided, as is currently likely, even a candidate who appeals to a very narrow base could, by securing a string of pluralities, gain a blocking position.

It is true that the past nine Republican conventions began with a presumptive nominee. But even assuming they came close to securing a plurality of the 2472 delegates, it is difficult to see the GOP accepting either Trump or Ted Cruz as that nominee, especially given the threat that a voter backlash would pose to the Senate ­Republicans who are up for ­re-election. While Republican conventions have at times involved bitter conflicts, such as that between Reagan and Gerald Ford in 1976, this would be uncharted waters; the risk of chaos consequently seems greater than at any time in living memory.

That would not only be bad for the Republicans; it would also transform Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House into an effortless assault that she cannot possibly deserve. And with a substantial majority of Americans thinking she is neither honest nor trustworthy, a Clinton victory by default would leave the country bitterly divided.

Ultimately, the problems the US faces arise from the fading, for so large a share of its population, of the American Dream. It may be many years since the “be liked and you will never want” ethos that Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman proclaimed gave way to the philosophy of “It’s kick-ass or kiss-ass, Don: I’d be lying if I told you any different” that Teach expounds in David Mamet’s American Buffalo; yet it is Death of a Salesman, with all of its heartache, that has been playing itself out in a growing number of American homes.

Merely promising to “make America great again”, as Trump does, will not cure the hurt, any more than it will reverse the falling off of confidence that diminishes national possibility; but nor will ­ignoring the issues make them go away. In a world which already seems at wits’ end, America’s year of anger can only add to the dangers we face.