Life after Donald Trump

Once Donald Trump’s populist reign comes to an end, most Americans – Republicans, Democrats and independents – expect that the United States will return to the traditional “politics as usual”… old world “friendly” battle lines between and among conservatives, moderates and liberals. The loyal opposition doing what’s best for America… once again. We’ve watched as Europeans have tried their best to find ways to embrace Donald Trump and keep a traditional US-European connection alive, perhaps hoping for that future “business as usual.”

But the chatter back home, within the halls of European governments, is leading to a very different conclusion, one that not only sees Trump’s America as a lost cause but slowly coming to a belief that the schisms and wounds his presidency has opened, polarization that seems to have redefined America well beyond a single populist presidency, will keep pushing the United States and Europe farther apart long after Donald Trump is relegated to the history books.

“Trump may not be an aberration that can be waited out, with his successor likely to push reset after four or eight years of fraught ties. Instead, the blend of unilateralism, nationalism and protectionism Trump embodies may be the new American normal.

“‘It is dawning on a number of European players that Trump may not be an outlier,’ said Josef Janning, head of the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. ‘More and more people are seeing it as a larger change in the United States.’ 

“Even before Trump was elected, Europeans sensed that Washington’s traditional role as guarantor of the continent’s security and stability was slipping away, and that post-World War II ties were fading along with the generations that forged them.” The Washington Post, May 19^th.

Between taking the limitations off of corporate and organizational political advertising under Citizens United and the heavily gerrymandered Congressional districts forcing Republicans to “out-right-wing” each other in the primaries, the notion of an American political system that can reach compromises and deal with issues on a pragmatic and rational basis seems to have died.

To make matters even worse, history seems to say that once populism takes over any nation, even after the relevant populist leader is replaced, that country continues on a polarized and totally dysfunctional track. The folks who bought into the false populist economic promises will still be excluded from that elusive financial future; a return to a time when those now excluded were the mainstay of that nation will never happen. They will still hate the power elites and “not our kind” ethnic and racial scapegoats they blame for their reduced-to-second-level status… and continue to distrust a society that has not purged these elements entirely.

The fact that promises go unfulfilled or that populism ever took root in the first place tend to erode everyone’s faith in the entire political system, a faith that seems almost impossible to restore. And without faith (respect) in a nation’s form of government, including the officials elected to run it, most governments simply begin to unravel and lose their power to govern effectively. Instability and a loss of hope in the future makes genuine governance virtually impossible.

This is pretty much the story of Latin America, where no country that embraced populism has ever returned to a time of sustained stability and relative prosperity. Add the Philippines to this mix. OK, you say, that is a story of a post-colonial society, established well after the American democracy was founded, where middle classes were a distinct minority and polarized elites from the impoverished masses the norm. Nice try, but even in Europe, there is strong evidence that even where middles classes were pronounced, once populist leadership has taken root, absent the complete devastation of the nation itself (read: Hitler’s Germany which was virtually razed to the ground), populism tends to leave a weakened and dysfunctional state even after populist leaders are long gone.

The most salient European example has to be Italy. Anne Applebaum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, member of The Washington Post editorial board and a professor of practice at the London School of Economics, explains this Italian experience: “The Northern League started out as a secessionist party, advocating the breakup of Italy and independence for the northern provinces. The Five Star Movement started out as a joke — it was invented by a comedian — and then became a social media operation. Both evolved: The Northern League turned itself into a far-right party, using aggressive language about immigrants, while the Five Star Movement adopted some classic left-wing policies, calling for a universal income and high public spending. Together, they are now set to run the Italian government.

“Unsurprisingly, they’ve had difficulty writing a joint program. Most of the things they agree on — conspiracy theories about vaccines; opposition to Russian sanctions; a strong rejection of austerity policies — risk creating a backlash. Still, it’s becoming clear that if they don’t share policies, they do share an attitude. They are both incoherent, angry, unrealistic and often anti-science; they are also clever users of information technology.

“Between them, in other words, the Northern League and the Five Star Movement represent every powerful emotion, resentment, suspicion and anxiety that can be mobilized and weaponized by modern political parties. Above all, they reflect the disillusionment with politics — the disillusionment with everything — that inevitably sets in when populism fails.

“For, despite the widespread belief that ‘anti-elite’ rhetoric in Italy is a new phenomenon, populism has failed in Italy already. As not everybody now remembers, the Italians lived through a major anti-elite revolution not so long ago, albeit one led first by lawyers and judges. In the 1990s, they uncovered a vast corruption scandal: Tangentopoli — the name translates into something like ‘bribesville’ — eventually engulfed the entire political class. One former prime minister, Bettino Craxi, fled to Tunisia to escape prison; about half of the members of parliament were indicted. The old party system (Christian Democrats, Socialists, Communists) eventually disappeared.

“The main beneficiary of this turmoil was Silvio Berlusconi [left above], the billionaire with surgically enhanced skin who entered politics partly to evade prosecution himself. He won the prime ministership on a cloud of jokes and promises, and he held it, on and off for nine years, with the help of a new party, Forza Italia. He had a Trump-like way of offending, and a Latin American strongman’s lack of interest in anything resembling real reform. During his years in office he fought the courts that tried to indict him, held elaborate parties in Sardinia, and failed to tackle the bureaucratic and legal tangle that chokes Italian commerce.

“A series of technocratic governments, as well as a center-left government that tried to blame the European Union for Italy’s local problems, followed. But the failure of populism did not, in Italy, lead the public to beg for the return of sober centrists. Reeling from the flood of broken promises, electorates did not turn back to honest realists who told them hard truths or laid out the hard choices. On the contrary: In Italy, as in so many Latin American countries in the past, the failure of populism has led to greater dislike of ‘elites,’ both real and imaginary; a greater demand for radical and impossible change; and a greater sense of alienation from politics and politicians than ever before.” The Post.

Here in the United States, we’re watching progressives on the left and the Tea Party evangelicals on the right pushing out traditional Democrats and Republicans. These de facto “new parties” will not compromise, do not care what the other wants and are willing to let the whole country shut down unless the relevant faction gets its way. And they are slowly taking over the political parties where their seeds were initially planted. The best interests of the majority or the United States a whole? Anyone advocating such middle ground is very unlikely even to make it out of the primaries these days.

White protestant evangelicals with strong rural values are rapidly aging and shrinking as a percentage of the general population. But they represent the angriest bulk of the populist movement. Trump’s promises and scapegoats are their legacy, even though very little of Trump’s populist agenda will ever be implemented to their benefit. As with Italy, where Berlusconi’s cronies prospered, America’s elites have never made so much money. The disenfranchised Trump-base desperately want to reverse time itself, an impossibility.

These socially conservative traditionalists have fought with all their might to limit the political power of their “diverse” opponents, managed to get federal judicial appointments who have set justice aside to cater to political agendas (hence Citizens United), and their efforts have been dramatically successful. They control the majority of state governorships, state legislatures, the presidency and both houses of Congress… even though they represent a distinct minority that was even unable to muster a popular majority vote to support their presidential choice. Win or lose come mid-terms, they will continue to battle to impose their minority will on the majority of America, a majority that is growing more urban and more diverse by the hour.

What happens as the tsunami of demographic change eventually overwhelms, when all these right wing political machinations finally cannot stop the election of a majority of diverse urbanites to American dominance? Unlike all those other nations struggling in the ugly aftermath of populism, there are well over 300 million guns, including 15 million AR-15s, in this country… most of them in the hands of those with strong traditional rural values. What will happen when their political voices are drowned out and their political agendas marginalized?

Unless the younger generations push their elders out the door, shove uncompromising and impractical extremism agendas off the platform as they embrace tolerance, science and commonality… the great American unraveling will simply accelerate… until… I hear China and Russia laughing. Don’t think Americans will ever get that violent otherwise? Really? Then please explain the Civil War to me, where many of the same issues led brother to kill brother.

I’m Peter Dekom, and when will patriotism return and purge nationalism from our palate?