It might even seem harmless, politics as professional wrestling or pantomime, if it wasn’t for the race-baiting and the nauseating level of excitement that accompany it. Not long before, Hillary Clinton had made this charge against Trump’s hard core of ‘irredeemable’ supporters. This ‘basket of deplorables’ was ‘racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it’. She subsequently walked back from the comment, but it had already become a badge of pride. There are dozens of ‘Deplorable for Trump’ shirts, and women wearing ‘Adorable Deplorable’ versions, and when one reporter hears the crowd has an effigy of Hillary Clinton she says, ‘Oh, you mean a sex doll?’ – like seeing a Clinton-themed sex doll at this stage would just be a matter of routine.
Trump crowds are always described as ‘angry’, but that’s not the first thing apparent in a humid auditorium filled with self-proclaimed ‘deplorables’. They don’t look livid; they look sick. This time around, America’s malaise has become a literal malady. It’s not just pallid, marbled, middle-aged people making their way with canes, either; sometimes it’s inexplicably young men. There is a long rank of wheelchairs by the wall, full of people who shouldn’t be in them. You see these tentatively moving individuals outside the rallies as well, anywhere where private wealth borders on public squalor (a phrase first used about America fifty years ago, and still biting afresh). There’s something almost medieval about it, this physical indicator of decline, as though the crops are blighted outside the imperial capital, and the afflicted aggregate to have their scrofula attended to. The phenomenon, when lethal, even has a name: ‘deaths of despair’. These are the white suicides and opioid overdoses and cirrhosis cases, seen en masse before only in places like post-Soviet Russia and post-industrial Glasgow, and never on this scale. The Washington Post ran a story called ‘Death predicts whether people vote for Donald Trump’, noting an ‘eerie correlation’ between this kind of mortality and primary votes for Trump by county.
The obnoxiousness is masking pain, real pain. Trump isn’t exactly hiding the fact that he is a braggart and a liar and an asshole. As a child he punched his music teacher because he thought the man didn’t know anything about music, and we know this because he included the story in his autobiography: ‘I’m not proud of that, but it’s clear evidence that even early on I had a tendency to stand up and make my opinions known in a very forceful way.’ The list of policies outlined at the rally wouldn’t fill a Post-it note, and might change without notice. But for Trump’s supporters, all of this is a plus.
They have decided the system is a circus, so they are sending in a clown. Trump marks the point at which many Americans decided their politics was so corrupt that they would elect a man already so corrupt he would be incorruptible. No charge the media throws at him will break his candidacy, any more than pointing out that the Dirty Dozen had criminal charges would be germane. He also knows how to run interference – his time inside the popular media means his language solders right onto the brain stem. In Campaignland you start to find yourself thinking in Trumpisms. Sad!
If polling is accurate, most people cheering the big beautiful wall don’t believe he’ll ever build it, and they don’t care. They see it as a negotiating tactic and a symbol. It was mooted at a time when terrorism was the number one concern for Republican voters, and few other politicians seemed capable of meeting that with any kind of determination. In July this year, Islamic State–linked attacks reached a frequency of one every eighty-four hours, not including those in the war zones of Iraq and Syria. There was also an embarrassing sense that mainstream governance had absolutely no idea what to do about this. Trump’s wall is questionable as a policy. But as a statement? It is unmistakable.
Some of those here in Pennsylvania are quite open about misgivings. They cheerily admit they have no idea what Trump will actually do if he’s elected, just that he must be elected. I speak with a man called Harry Dugan. He has a greying five-day growth and is wearing a T-shirt that says ‘Crooked Hillary for Prison’. It is his fifty-eighth birthday today, and he is attending the rally with his son. Dugan is the kind of voter pundits are drawn to: a former registered Democrat in an important swing state, who switched sides the moment Trump began his run through the primaries. Why? ‘ISIS and the borders and the economy. And [Clinton is] just going to make both of those things worse.’ Two of those things are so closely linked as to be one, but which two it’s hard to say. Dugan is not stupid. He does not seem especially motivated by racial animosity. He seems to be someone in somewhat reduced circumstances, willing to bear that personally, but unwilling to see his country humiliated as well. ‘A lot of people don’t even know what’s going to happen with Trump. They just want a change from business as usual. It’s a gamble. They don’t even know where it’s going.’ Trump is an unknown – a dangerous unknown, even for many of his supporters. But they have given up on the status quo changing any other way.
It’s exactly the hollowness of the Trump campaign, the lightness on detail, the shoddy composition, that makes this hope possible. It’s a melange that can’t be unified by logic, but can be unified by style. Trumpies talk about World War Two, and the flag, and how important Trump is, sometimes while clutching my hand. Special hatred is reserved for the media, at least the American media. Soon, CNN and MSNBC will give their anchors security guards at these events.
One young man, a navy veteran, yells ‘You’re liars’ at the press pen, and a city reporter tries a handshake to cool things off, but it’s refused. On leaving, a phalanx of Trumpies gives the assembled reporters the finger, almost ceremonially. Afterwards, I speak with the navy man. What was all that about? He talks to me passionately, lucidly, articulately, but in his argument the stakes and the bedrock beliefs are all wrong, and his pupils are getting pinny. His views have that graduate-of-bong-university feel, where someone has self-educated online too deeply, starting with the wrong set of premises. Why would the media want to destroy society? I ask him. Freemasons.
The persistent thread linking those I speak to is humiliation. Where are their meagre pieces of patriotism now? They can’t even get pride by proxy. An honest day’s manual work, community self-reliance, the meaning of America, military service, belief, strength – it was all supposed to pay off, and it has turned out to be just another bum pension plan, being shorted the whole time. Belief in their country has turned out to be a kind of scam, just like everything else has turned out to be a scam, and that belief has curdled into a crisis of faith. Overwhelmingly, they want some sort of revenge. On those who told them otherwise. On those who should know their place. On those who don’t belong here. And they have chosen a bully to enact that revenge.
Imagine, for a moment, being on Ted Cruz’s campaign staff. Preparing for Trump in the Republican primaries. Carefully war-gaming your team positions, strategies, tactics. And then a few short months later, having to prepare a statement in which the senator denies his dad assassinated J.F.K. I mean, no-one believed, genuinely believed, that Ted Cruz was the Zodiac Killer when that claim did the rounds. But didn’t people get a kick out of seeing that cardboard man up there, humiliated, sweating, human? I mean, what’s inexplicable, in current conditions, about the appeal of a Disney-villain cartoon boss turning his catch-phrase – ‘You’re fired’ – on his fellow elites?
Those elites are different from their forerunners as well. At least the robber barons built Carnegie Hall and garnered the Frick Collection, even if it was the threat of pitchforks that prompted them. Today tech billionaires are not just occupying different strata from the rest of us, they are trying to occupy a whole other world. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel (himself a Trump supporter, because ‘disruption’) has invested in immortality, and wants to be given blood transfusions from the young. He once investigated building a lawless, artificial micronation off the coast of San Francisco. Elon Musk (PayPal, Tesla Motors, Hyperloop) wants to die on Mars. There is an unnamed consortium of billionaires trying to prove that we are living in a simul
ation, and they’re paying scientists to break us out of it. Or some of us out.
In a sense, trying to understand Trumpism at a Trump rally is looking in the wrong place. The rallies are familiar, but not because they supposedly resemble Nazi rallies or lynch mobs, or any of the other retrofits people try on. These events are manifestations of the comments section, the anonymous Twitter egg, the hate email and ‘shit-post’ made flesh. The Swedish police recently did a study about the kind of people who make death threats against the media (often the same ones who make death threats against women). They are usually marginalised men, unsuccessful in school and work, who enjoy poor relationships with women. Here in the United States, these men are now more numerous than ever before. If the vote were restricted to white men only, as it used to be, Trump would win in a landslide. It is not a coincidence that in the first year a woman contends for the presidency the GOP base has nominated a class-A misogynist to oppose her.
This political reality was gestated within digital confines, but has now broken loose. We are living in a simulation, in a way. Only it’s not simulation anymore.
*
Like everyone else, Thomas Edison got most of his predictions about the future wrong. In 1911, he tried to describe the world of 2011 to Cosmopolitan magazine. It would be full of pneumatic tubes and free gold, and machines that could make everything except hats. But Edison was accidentally prescient about one thing. He believed writing would be distributed on vast compendia of extremely thin slices of nickel, 40,000 leaves thick. ‘What a library might be placed between two steel covers and sold for, perhaps, two dollars! History, science, fiction, poetry – everything.’ Distracted by the lure of knowledge, the great inventor didn’t realise he was describing books made out of razor blades.
We have Edison’s promised library now, all that history, science, fiction, poetry, along with everything else, just about universally accessible and for free. This dawn of knowledge didn’t arrive accompanied by any great sense of optimism. But who would have anticipated, less than a generation later, an American election contested between two of the most widely despised politicians in the land? And one of those politicians not being a politician at all but a casino mogul, real-estate tycoon, one-time professional wrestler, beauty-pageant impresario and reality-TV show host, whose own runner-up for the nomination called him a narcissist and a pathological liar; also an adulterer and a bill-skipper and a draft dodger (this list can keep going), who simply walked into the 162-year-old Republican Party and broke it to pieces in a few months.
That’s a single-layer irony – the president is supposed to be good, and Donald Trump is not good. Politics, especially American politics, is replete with these ironies. We can give some of them significance: for example, if you go to the September 11 memorial in New York, and visit its adjacent shopping mall, it’s the mall that feels like the sacral space, and the queue for the iPhone 7 is longer than the one for the memorial museum. A kind of resilience or an accidental show of human priorities, depending on how you look at it.
The scenario outside the first presidential debate, at Hofstra University in New York, is a single-layer irony. There is an area called Broadcast Alley, where media set up their desks in front of students waving signs, and do pieces to camera with a bad brass band. It is modelled on a sideshow, complete with a jumping castle and balloons. There is a virtual-reality booth where voters, either GOP or Dem, must try to solve ‘extreme poverty’. Voters are ushered into this bogus little environment through two carefully demarcated doors, to ‘see’ extreme poverty they could see in analogue reality just a few blocks away.
Nearby is a Black Lives Matter protest, where college students link arms in silent tribute to yet another man killed by police. Other students, not part of the protest, have signs saying ‘Killer Bees 2016’ and ‘Trump for Harambe’ (a then-trending reference to the Cincinnati Zoo gorilla, shot dead when a child fell into its enclosure).
‘They think it’s a joke,’ says one of the Black Lives Matter protesters. ‘That’s the epitome of white privilege, to be going around with a “Trump for Harambe” sign, when our lives are on the line.’ Only one of the Black Lives Matter protesters has been admitted to the debate hall; the others, who have more African American–sounding names, seem to have been weeded out in case of protest. Another asks me about Australia, already planning an escape route if Trump is elected.
Conservative figures routinely describe Black Lives Matter as a terrorist organisation, even though it has been an almost exclusively peaceful movement. Another single-layer irony: inside the debate area, known as Spin Alley, where the media interview campaign surrogates (they have their names on giant sticks so they’re easy to find), is Peter King, a Republican congressman from New York. King has been a leading critic of Black Lives Matter. He was also described by a judge in Northern Ireland as an ‘obvious collaborator with the IRA’. But he doesn’t see the contradiction in condemning one organisation that criticises police, while supporting another that assassinated them. ‘Ask Tony Blair,’ he says, when I ask him about it. Who does what means a lot in American politics – perhaps everything, it turns out. Running down the country, attacking big business, denigrating military allies, bragging about sex crimes, killing police. It’s the difference between braggadocio and whining. ‘Better to Grab a Pussy than to Be One’, as one Trump rally sign put it.
These hypocrisies are what we are used to, and what satirists use for their work. But the influence of technology on reality is creating phenomena that aren’t so much contradictions, but tangled threads of competing narratives. Pull a thread, and the knot tightens instead of unravelling. For example, the world’s leading virtual-reality mogul is a man named Palmer Luckey. He is twenty-four years old, and often has black feet because he refuses to wear shoes, and his girlfriend dresses up as characters from video games, and he is worth $700 million. He has spent some of this money on an anonymous pro-Trump meme-creation group – hackers? teenagers? – who produce viral pictures, some of which feature a cartoon frog called Pepe.
Pepe has already enjoyed an expansive online life, but has now been repurposed as a neo-Nazi symbol. Luckey’s funding for this ‘shit-posting’ led him to semi-apologise. It also led to two anti-hate groups arguing about whether Pepe really was a Nazi symbol, and to the Clinton campaign denouncing Trump’s closeness to Pepe. Do you get a sense of the problem here? How do you interpret an event where a common sense of meaning, or even a structure in which that meaning can be demarcated and slowed down, has collapsed almost completely?
*
In a campaign about what America means, Hillary Clinton’s main argument is that it means ‘Not Trump’. It might even be a sign of sexism, some strain of marginalisation, that Clinton can feel like an observer to her own likely election. But if Trump is inexplicable, she is also something of a mystery. And for someone so emblematic of an era – the Third Way triumphalism of the 1990s – Clinton has a knack for getting her timing wrong. As the counterculture flourished in the 1960s, she was a young Republican, a Goldwater girl. It was the only time she did anything radical, and in the wrong direction, so she tacked. ‘True to my nature and upbringing, I advocated changing the system from within and decided to go to law school,’ she writes in her 2003 memoir Living History, a story of hedges, accommodations and measured political considerations that often occlude or overwhelm the personal impulse. She explains:
I could get away with ‘eccentricities’ as wife of the Attorney General, but as First Lady of Arkansas, I was thrown into the spotlight. For the first time, I came to realize the impact of my personal choices on my husband’s political future. Many Arkansas voters were offended when I kept my maiden name, Rodham. I later added Clinton.
Even her name – Hillary Rodham Clinton – is a calculated political decision.
She is a seasoned campaigner, but not an especially effective one. In 2007, she began the primaries strongly favoured against Barack Obama, and lost. Bernie Sanders, a brigh
t-red Vermont socialist throwback who sounds like the dad from the TV series ALF, keelhauled her through the fight for this nomination. It was supposed to be easy, and instead she was reframed again, for anyone who had missed it, as an agent of the status quo.
Midway through the campaign, she even hit a patch of unexpected trouble. I caught up with her in New Hampshire, a place that should now be an easy Democratic win. But then, after a week of bad polling, it was in play. Clinton collapsing with pneumonia (remember that?) hadn’t helped. Her defenders tried to cast this as an omen of her fitness for the presidency: wasn’t working too hard a good thing? Still, even the candidate herself was asking the question: ‘Why aren’t I fifty points ahead?’ She was barely ahead by three, and in New Hampshire that margin had shrivelled to less than 1 per cent.
*
New Hampshire is one of those jarring contradictions America specialises in, a slow, forested state that retains the death penalty and the motto ‘Live free or die’. Here at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, Sanders and Clinton are appearing together, partly so Clinton can garner some extra enthusiasm from the student crowd. Not a good sign: the presumptive first female president has to turn to a seventy-five-year-old grandpa for youth appeal. There are queues of wellwishers here, but most will be turned away from the neatly ordered chairs and bleachers inside. This is really a speech, not a rally, and panicked volunteers have called in too many reserves. There are also a handful of protesters, supporters of Dr Jill Stein, a Green Party candidate who is shaving a point or two of support off the Democrats.
The Best Australian Essays 2017 Page 10
