Clinton vs Trump is Washington vs the forgotten

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

Who frightens Americans less? The deplorable sleazebag with machine-washable hair or the finger-wagging fright bat in the stay-pressed pants suit?

Seldom have such raw, negative emotions played so strongly in a presidential campaign. If the dominant sentiment in the 2008 campaign was hope, this time it’s loathing. Few Americans will vote for Hillary Clinton but plenty will vote against Donald Trump, a candidate who embodies everything sophisticates detest.

Trump, meanwhile, stays in contention not because of who he is but who he is not. He’s the antithesis of Clinton and repudiates the political class she represents. When his critics describe him as politically inexperienced they inadvertently describe what is, in the his supporters’ eyes, Trump’s most appealing trait.

Opinion polls were not designed to withstand an event such as this. It is a contest fought on tribal lines that barely correspond to the lines on the conventional political map.

It is not so much a contest between Left and Right or even Democrats and Republicans but between two sides of a republic divided more profoundly than at any time since the civil war.

Trump’s implosion in the past seven days — if that is indeed what has happened — may signal the end of his presidential aspirations but will not kill the sentiment he harnessed. The chance of a reconciliation between the forgotten Americans and the political class is even more remote than it was before this extraordinary campaign began.

Support for Trump has been more stable than may be imagined given the volatility of his temperament. Four out of 10 Americans appear to have made up their mind in favour of Trump — or perhaps against Clinton — from the start of the campaign.

It is hard to imagine what he could do to shake them. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” Trump pronounced in January.

Exceptionally, neither candidate has moved towards the centre ground, the time-honoured formula in most presidential elections. Trump doesn’t do nuance and he wasn’t going to try.

In today’s polarised US, one is for the political class or against it; to seek refuge in the middle of the road, as Margaret Thatcher once said, is to risk being run over.

Clinton conspicuously failed to reach out to Trump’s “basket of deplorables”. Instead, she has sown disdain, confirming the forgotten Americans’ worst fears about the political class: that their interests have not been overlooked by accident but by design.

They are right. Clinton’s pitch for power is less a vision for perfecting the Union than a statement of personal virtue; it’s not what you do but how you think that matters, and results be damned. One votes for the respectable candidate because one is not among the low-life who vote for Trump.

That the campaign should be reduced to a contest of personalities rather than policies or ­vision should not be a surprise. Clinton and Trump represent two sides of a divided republic.

Postwar politics in the US brought the Republicans and Democrats closer together. This contest is being fought between people who appear to live on different planets, revolving in separate orbits.

They shop in different stores, eat different food and drive different cars. They learn about the world through separate Facebook streams; the development of digital silos means they are barely conscious of how the other half thinks.

Every superhero needs a ­supervillain which is why, if Trump did not exist, the Clinton camp would have to invent him. Trump is to Clinton what the Green Goblin is to Spider-Man, an archetype of evil against whom she must triumph.

Clinton appeals to moral narcissism, a sentiment that defines the world view of the modern Left and more than a few on the Right. “It is a narcissism that emanates from a supposed personal virtue augmented by a supposed intellectual clarity,” screenwriter Roger L. Simon writes in his recent book I Know Best. Moral narcissism, he says, took Clinton from an undergraduate social campaigner to Chappaqua plutocrat with a net worth in the tens of millions without missing a beat.

“If your intentions are good, if they conform to the general received values of your friends, family and co-workers, what a person of your class and social milieu is supposed to think, everything is fine. You are that ‘good’ person.”

If Simon is right, it augurs badly for a Clinton presidency. A country led by good intentions rather than good policy is a troubling place, particularly if those intentions are informed by the progressive fashions of the day. When The New York Times describes Clinton’s economic policy as “optimistic” and “wide-ranging”, it is time to start worrying.

She has swallowed the mumbo jumbo of “inclusive capitalism” that dictates that the state ­addresses wealth inequality before wealth creation. Capitalism itself, she says, “needs to be re­invented, it needs to be put back into balance”.

“Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs,” she told an aud­ience in 2014. “You know that old theory, trickle-down economics. That has been tried; that has failed.”

On education she intends to roll back the charter schools reforms supported by Barack Obama that have led to measurable improvements in standards in some low socioeconomic suburbs. Social policy purity, rather than pragmatism, drives her support for government schools. That and the financial backing her campaign has received from the teachers unions.

Her initiatives in higher education are equally dismal; she promises to address social inequality with free access to college, supported by federal government. Quite how this unfunded promise will address the chronic problem of graduate unemployment is anybody’s guess.

Whether Trump’s policies would make for a stronger US economy is a moot point. Protectionism would be harmful for the US’s forgotten people and for the rest of the world, particularly smaller, open economies such as Australia. But since Clinton has adopted his stance, there is little to choose between the two on that score. Every trading nation has a material interest in the future of the world’s leading economy, not to mention its strategic strength as the predominant geopolitical power.

We can only trust Americans to pick the least worst option on November 8. Assuming that there is one.

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.