Towards a disunified theory of Trump

To the Trump steak, the Trump Tower, Trump University and a dozen other tawdry innovations associated with the man we can rather unexpectedly add a whole new genre of literature. The liberal hand-wringing Trump thinkpiece has been a boom industry not seen since the invention of the printing press led to everyone suddenly wanting to write a pamphlet. The spectacle of metropolitan liberal elites desperately trying to work out what has happened in America’s heartlands to make his nomination possible is only surpassed in entertainment value by the scolding of all the other liberal elites for being more out-of-touch than the writer in question.

The genre of the Trump-piece has gotten so out of hand that even the return of Andrew Sullivan from semi-retirement to give his hot take prompted boredom from me, something I never thought would happen given the Dish-shaped hole in my life and his exact fit for this subject. There are simply too many contradictory narratives, too much speculation, too much self-flagellation, too little experience of the lived lives of the people who vote for Trump. The kind of Americans who write for newspapers are finally coming to grips with their isolation from their countrymen, and they are panicking.

There seem to be two basic theories competing, with roughly equal numbers of adherents on both sides. The first reaction, probably the gut reaction for most liberals, is that this is an outburst of nativism and racism, pure and simple. The wall and the deportations were what launched his candidacy in the first place, goes the thinking, and so Occam’s razor suggests that it is simply a latent xenophobia given voice that explains the whole thing. This is quickly countered by a more lenient interpretation powered by liberal guilt: the white working class providing Trump’s support are frustrated by stagnant wages, declining industries, corrupt elites, a hollowed-out American dream, globalisation – take your pick, but these are not bad people, but rather the people losing out against historical trends and kicking out. This is the “Empathy” theory, and its chastisement of “people like us” is addictive.

Barely has the dust settled, however, when another counter narrative appears: it really is just racism, or at least a new incarnation of the Tea Party populism that dominated the first half of the decade.  This view was summed up by Matt Yglesias, who said that if America was in as much of a crisis as the Republican Party had said it was for the last eight years then a reaction as extreme as Trump would be necessary.

This is the “Frankenstein” theory, that the embrace of populist anger by the Republican Party in the Obama years created a monster it couldn't control, a talk radio logic-driven mob ranting against lost privilege that ended not as intended supporting a pro-corporate establishment candidate nor even a genuine small government constitutionalist like Rand Paul. Instead it embraced what had had been presented as the face of the movement: something authentically angry, unapologetically male and resolutely a-modern. For the proponents of this theory, Trump’s supporters couldn't give a damn about trade policy and stagnating living standards – they’re doing what they've been told.

John Harris, who has done so much to contribute to our idea of what ails Britain’s socio-political order, today published a piece from America where he has been doing something unfashionable in the hip data-driven US journalism scene: he’s been talking to people. Unsurprisingly given his previous work he fell directly in the Empathy camp, although his experience with the British working class means his writing lacks the kind of smug castigation of the left from New York-based journalists who have apparently only just discovered this story.

His article brought me back into the Empathy camp myself, though it also reminds me that I seem to be veering from one to the other from day to day – only two days ago Jonathan Chait’s argument, that perhaps it the liberal unwillingness to simply call a segment of the Republican base stupid that explains their confusion, had me swayed. Harris is an explicit rebuke to that sentiment. Any argument will sway me while I still haven't met any Trump supporters.

Maybe both are correct. The way in which this phenomenon seems to have come out of nowhere and knocked everyone for six has left us scrabbling to come up with a single explanation, one that we can decide on while we still have time and solve. Understandable. But wrong. Instead of coming up with a unified theory of Trump we should accept a disunified one, where different segments of his supporters want different things from him. Otherwise we have the unedifying spectacle of respectable liberals at dinner parties delivering speeches about the motivations of people they have never met nor intend to meet, and would not much like if they did. I appreciate they are trying to understand their fellow citizen, but it may be a bit late for that now.

There are two problems of macrohistorical importance here: what the working class is for in an era of automation and globalisation, and how to manage the expectations of citizens in their own media bubbles reinforced and hyped into fury with ease. Each of them correlates with one of the theories, but both will have to be addressed at some point. Sadly, it seems unlikely Hillary Clinton is going to be the one to deliver a start on either.