Quo vadis, America? The age of hegemony is over.
Donald Trump becoming President-elect of the United States of America came as he rode the back of a protest vote. It was a protest vote the likes of which has not been seen for the best part of a century, but which appears to be finding an increasingly loud voice, in many places.
This vote was, for a number of sections of the US community, a big middle finger to the establishment. And that is ironic because, populist and self-identifying outsider though he is, Trump is, financially, ‘establishment’ to his boot-straps.
Trump’s victory carried a die-hard core of old-fashioned Republican supporters who saw in him something less easy to despise than Hillary Clinton. And then there was the Tea Party Right who, frothing at the mouth, saw in Trump, a right-wing libertarian tearing up the rule book.
That’s all a little ironic, really, given that Trump has used and abused the system to build his wealth. But Trump is such an iconoclast that even ‘the establishment’ – including the wiser elders and power-brokers of the Republican Party – rejected Trump’s crass appeal.
Trump’s win was always there, of course, lurking in the shadows. The polls in the swing states were largely operating within the margins of statistical error. But they could not measure the visceral hatred of ‘the system’, or the number of people who stayed home, that fueled his victory.
The ‘system’, and ‘the establishment’ that runs it, has been content with the status quo of the neo-liberal paradigm. The insecure workers, however, on six dollars an hour, or living on tips, or the post Global Financial Crisis unemployed, are not.
The growing gap between rich and poor and the diminution of America’s middle class, pushed past tipping point by the GFC, all fueled a ‘nothing to lose’, FTW sense of what could possibly be worse than where we are now. It fueled a ‘maybe if we shake things up then “they” – the establishment – will start to listen’. Well, guys, you’ve got their ears now, so what is it precisely that you want to say?
The American social contract had been broken for years and that the American political system followed was simply its electoral reflection. Rejecting free trade, internationalism and relatively open immigration, America’s (often recently) working poor have, in tandem with the radical Right, said liberalism thus far and no further.
Florida’s ethnic Cubans joined them, rejecting rapprochement, tipping the vote in that critical state. Under-employed in America’s northern rust-belt states joined them. The rednecks of the Old South joined them.
There were those who do not like what has happened to the verities of white male privilege and those who rejected the speed and even the idea of globalization. This was a coalition of the Republicans, the radical right, the ragged poor and the really pissed off.
Those who voted Democrat and for Hillary Clinton were among the better educated, the more financially secure, those whose lives had remained aloof from the turmoil that affected so many. And there was maybe a handful of hopefuls, who really believed that Clinton was at least a pale shadow of Bernie Sanders, if with greater political nouse. For many Clinton voters, the status quo, though less than perfect, worked pretty well. Up until now.
This is an era in which everything spins ever faster, certainties are malleable, truth and meme coalesce, political leaders change as does fashion, governments are tenuous and paradigms uncertain. An empire can now rise, prevail and fall within the space of generations rather than centuries; first the USSR, now the USA?
Voting to reject the world has sounded the formal retreat, lifting the draw-bridge and manning (political incorrectness intended) the defensive ramparts. The age of hegemony is over, by Trump’s own policy, and the world is returned to multi-polarity. Quo vadis, pax Americana?
Donald Trump is the President-elect of the United States of America and we are entering a brave, new and uncertain world.