Disunited States: ‘The division of Americans into two separate worlds is almost complete’
DEMOCRACY AT A CROSSROADS: The path Americans take in a few days time will affect us all
The Accidental Diplomat, a column by Paul Knott
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After visiting the crucial American swing state of Pennsylvania last week, I would love to be able to predict the winner of the US Presidential election on November 5. But witnessing the weirdness of the current political situation there only confirmed to me that nobody really knows what will happen.
What is certain is the outcome of this election between two very different candidates will impact the whole world because of the US’s economic and military importance. As the old saying goes, if America sneezes, we all catch a cold. And that metaphor is magnified when one of the candidates, Trump, is a plague, not a sniffle.
Visiting does at least help you to understand why it is so hard to predict the election result. The division of Americans into two separate worlds, with different information sources and outlooks on life, has been happening for decades and is now almost complete. Most big cities and university towns, even those in Republican-run states, now lean heavily towards the Democrats. These islands are surrounded by a sea of small towns and rural areas dominated by the Republicans and currently awash with “Vote Trump” signs. Consequently, it often feels like one side is going to win easily – but which side that is depends upon where you are at the time.
Some aspects of this mess defy political analysis. One contradiction that strikes me with increasing force every time I am in the US is that it is still a place full of remarkably friendly, polite and community-spirited people. This niceness jars with the knowledge that roughly half of these people support someone as selfish and obnoxious as Trump – a liar, career conman and serial sex offender. The hold he has over so many Americans really does feel like the sort of collective madness that gripped parts of Europe under fascism in the 1930s.
In so far as it can be understood, the situation is one Republican operatives have been working towards for years. They have sought to stir up hatred in order to secure support for what are often, when taken in isolation, unpopular policies and to maintain their grip on power and privilege.
One of the main tools they have used to build this position is partisan media. In 1987, the US foolishly abolished its “Fairness Doctrine”, which previously required broadcasters to report the news objectively. Rupert Murdoch and Republican extremists soon seized on this opportunity. Since the mid-1990s, their Fox News TV channel has been steadily radicalising otherwise decent people with a non-stop 24/7 bombardment of lies and extremism.
From about 2007, another channel, MSNBC, made a belated attempt to match Fox on the left. Whilst its content is less poisonous than that of Fox News, it fails to balance the scales as intended and instead merely contributes to the polarising effect. Non-partisan and less politically engaged people, meanwhile, are left with the unhelpful and incorrect impression that the political parties “are all the same”.
The impact of this broadcasting environment is substantial in a country where the TV is constantly left switched on in many peoples’ homes and public places. It has been turbo-charged further in recent years by the rise of social media.
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The rest of the press has largely failed to work out how to cover the dangerous challenges Trump presents. Far too often their political coverage timidly gropes for “balance” and ends up making a misleading false equivalence between him and his opponents. Trump frequently fires up his followers into a frenzy by making bone-chilling threats of violence against the many people he dislikes. Typically, the reporting of this is then toned down to read something like “Donald Trump spoke about immigration today” and given equal weight to some mild policy proposal by Kamala Harris on, say, agricultural subsidies.
The impact of this normalisation (or “sane-washing” as some have started to call it) of Trump’s horrific behaviour is evident on everyday Americans. Many have got used to his actions and now see them as standard, rather than as the serious threats to their society they actually are. Indeed, the insanity of Trump being in serious contention again for the presidency after all that he has said and done often seems clearer when seen from a distance. Up close in America, the impact can be diluted by the superficial normality of everyday life.
Disregarding Trump’s regular incitements to violence, racism and rampant dishonesty, enables some people to claim they are voting based on policies alone. And, in normal circumstances, there would be some grounds for political disgruntlement. As a regular visitor, I have certainly noticed how much more expensive America has become over recent years. Previously, at least outside of big cities such as New York, the US was generally a bit cheaper than most places in Europe. Now, when paying restaurant bills or buying groceries, I often find myself inwardly exclaiming “blimey, that’s as bad as Switzerland” (the notoriously expensive country where we live at the moment).
Although the official statistics show the US economy is in good shape, many people do not personally feel that is the case. One reason is that, since Covid, inflation has exceeded wage growth in all except five of the 3,144 counties into which the 50 US states are divided.
This cost-of-living rise comes on top of the long decline of the old industrial heartlands, which are disproportionately concentrated in swing states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. Many people in such places have been struggling in the face of job losses and a decaying social fabric for years. In some respects, it is understandable that some of them feel desperate enough to take a chance on someone like Trump, who promises to tear down the whole system on their behalf. Unfortunately for them, there is a big difference between what Trump says and his actual actions, which only benefit the ultra-rich like himself.
Either way, the focus on the “left-behind” being Trump’s biggest backers is misplaced. For starters, few black or other ethnic minority Americans in that socio-economic situation vote for Trump. Even amongst the whites, the split is fairly even. Nor are there anywhere near enough people in that category to explain the 74 million votes Trump received in losing the 2020 election and will probably match again this time.
Rather, from my observations when visiting the US, including an unscientific sampling of bumper stickers, hats, flags and front lawn signs in Pennsylvania this time, the bulk of Trump’s support comes from, mostly white, Americans who are living lives, by any global standards, of enviable comfort and prosperity. Yet these people are barely mentioned when the “blame” for Trump’s ongoing political presence is apportioned.
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It is hard to see what respectable reasons they have for supporting him. Some say they are voting on “policies rather than personality”, as if receiving a few cents off their taxes somehow renders putting a maniac in charge of the nuclear button irrelevant. Others seem to have been lulled into complacency by their comfortable lives and to have no concept that things in their country could ever go badly wrong. This frees them up, egged on by the Republicans, to indulge in their worst prejudices; a mindset worsened by the separated spaces in which many people live, work and socialise in today’s America. It is easier to be vicious towards some faceless “other” when you rarely ever interact with someone who is not like you or thinks differently.
This attitude, of course, goes hand in hand with the eternal dark side of America. The US has been blighted by brutal racism from its very beginning and has not yet fully overcome it. Sexism is still a problem too. It is bizarre, then, to see how many white men have somehow convinced themselves that they are the oppressed ones now. Their supposed justification for this is based on the measures taken to undo the deep inequalities faced for over two centuries by women and black Americans. Inevitably and cynically, Trump ramps these concocted grievances up to the max, even though, in reality, the struggle for equality still has some way to go. With grim irony, you can see this in the way Kamala Harris, as a black woman, is being held to wildly higher standards than him.
Like many people, I dread the global consequences of the dangerously unstable Trump being returned to the most powerful job in the world. As someone with many close family members and friends living in the US (most of whom are black or mixed race), my concerns are personal too. The mass delusion and regression into aggressive nastiness that has taken hold there is deeply disturbing.
My hope is that Harris eases these worries by winning the election. My fear, having seen his apparent level of support first-hand, is that Trump will triumph. But, in truth, I haven’t a clue who actually will win and guess we will all be hanging on until Wednesday to find out.