How Did I “Predict” That Trump, Despite His Repulsive Personality and Politics, Would Prevail?
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Nearly a month before the November 5 elections, I anticipated that Donald Trump would win and wrote about it in a couple of articles. My “prediction” created some controversy, especially since the polls showed Harris and Trump in a dead heat. Not surprisingly, people have been asking me the last few days how I came out with a call that, to some, had at the time no empirical basis and, to others, was an assault on their political sensibilities.
It’s not really rocket science. Inflation was just running rampant, with over 20 percent cumulative inflation in four years. I went almost every spring to teach in New York for six weeks, and I was shocked to see how high prices had risen since the year before. One could gauge the popular mood in forays to the supermarket, where the joy had gone out of the great American pastime of shopping, and people trudged along the aisles with a grimace on their faces as they stared at food prices that seemed to be escalating weekly.
When one turned on the television, one was assailed with images of migrants coming in droves over the border with Mexico, with border patrol agents shaking their heads. Middle-class people in the Northeast were waking up in shock to find migrants suddenly in their midst, deposited there courtesy of border-state governors who went on televised harangues justifying their acts by saying they wanted to give “blue state people” a taste of of “uncontrolled migration” brought about by Democratic Party policies.
Then, especially since October 2023, there were very real fears about the United States being sucked into the expanding war in the Middle East, that the Biden administration had lost control of its Middle East policy to Israel, and that this was triggering domestic unrest that was brought to living rooms nightly by images of campus confrontations and massive arrests. Then in the last few weeks before the vote, with Israel bombing Lebanon and carrying out strategic assassinations in Iran and elsewhere, then bombing Iran itself, there was widespread alarm that Tel Aviv was intent on dragging the United States into active combat and the Biden administration was helplessly looking on.
The overall sense you got talking to ordinary people in the spring was one of loss of control–that the Biden administration had lost control of the economy, of the border, and foreign and defense policy. This sense of no reliable hand at the helm of the ship of state could only deepen in the summer and fall, with Biden’s horrible debate performance and his replacement as presidential candidate by Harris. By early October, it was clear to me that Trump would win not so much because he had a more attractive vision for the future, but because he was able to capitalize on people’s fears about the economy, the border, and war and turn that unease into an active negative force against the Democrats. The 2024 election was largely a vote against Democratic ineptitude, just as the 2020 election was a vote against the chaos of Trump’s first presidency.
If one agrees with this undoubtedly impressionistic analysis, then two things follow. First, the electoral outcome was determined mainly by a popular reaction to conjunctural factors—inflation, border chaos, and the threat of war. Second, this was not a vote for fascism or authoritarianism, contrary to the panicked reactions of some liberal pundits–though of course, there was a far-right component in the Trump vote.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that the far-right MAGA folks will try to translate this protest vote into an ultra-right program of governance that, if they succeed, will make American-style liberal democracy a thing of the past. Fortunately, the people of the United States, flawed though their democracy may be, have a democratic common sense. But that common sense needs good progressive leadership to be brought to the fore and converted into a vigorous political force. And, in this connection, there is another piece of good news: the discredited generation of Democratic Party leaders–the Clintons, Obama, Pelosi, Biden, Harris–with their advocacy of neoliberal policies coupled with promotion of liberal empire, will finally be jettisoned and the decks cleared for the emergence of a new generation of young progressive leaders unfettered by past ideological and policy paradigms.
The great Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci had a characterization of the early twentieth century that is also apt for our times: “The old world is dying, and the new is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” Opportunity and crisis are twins. You can’t get to the new world without overcoming monsters…and there is no guarantee of victory.
But perfect I am not, and while I anticipated a Trump victory, I did not foresee just how bloody sweeping it would be.
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