Cabbages & Kings: America's eccentric elephant in the room

“Countries which boast of a national dream
Should wake up!”
From Coffee Ki Kushboo by Bachchoo

I was going to write this week about Theresa May’s meeting with Narendraji and his approach to student visas to study in Britain. But as I began to consider this in the early morning of the election of the year, the elephant walked into the room. The old (Indian?) legend goes that the four blind men who examined the elephant came to different conclusions. One of them hitting its vast body said: “The elephant is a wall to keep immigrants out!” Another one grabbing its tail said: “Ah, the elephant is a long, thick fuse to light the nuclear deterrent!” The third one feeling its legs said: “The elephant is obviously the jail bars behind which my opponents should rot…” I can tell you what the fourth one said, but should really get on with the column! Donald Trump is the President-elect of the US and every commentator, blind, and with binoculars that look into the future, will venture an opinion, but the competition doesn’t frighten me off. Here’s mine: I don’t like anything that Mr Trump says and I agree with my friends and correspondents who say he has made statements which are misogynistic, racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-the-unfortunate-disabled, crude, violent, threatening, instigatory, etc.

All true — and there are enough recordings and published statements on which all these are provable. Now he is the President-elect. Very many messages to me this morning say, though not in those precise words, that this is America’s Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom which after they had taken power, began the move to mass persecution and death camps. I don’t believe it is. Mr Trump has throughout the campaign manifested every anti-liberal sentiment listed above. Did he win despite doing that or did he win because of it? Four main factors came together in his projected personality and in his speeches, attitudes and policies to win the decisive votes that will put him in the White House in January: The Republican Party is traditionally a party of corporate America, and consequently of “globalisation”, which means the transfer of capital to where labour is cheap. That’s not rocket science, that’s rocking-horse science. Though it doesn’t want to declare it as a policy, corporate America is also in favour of immigrant labour, which is cheaper than the homegrown variety. Capital shifts abroad when it can and has left what the Americans call the “rust belt” with factories out of production and people out of jobs. Mr Trump said he would end all that and “get our country back”. He garnered millions of votes.

Second, the attack on immigrants as criminals, rapists and the depressors of wages and his attack on Muslims as terrorists, with promises to build a wall against the first and prevent the entry of and selectively deport the second, seems to have worked. Mr Trump, perhaps mysteriously, even won 28 per cent of the Hispanic vote. Third, his open attack on every liberal value enshrined in the bibles of political correctness promised to give licence to a vast proportion of the electorate who had been forced, they felt, into resentful silence by the steady progress of the linguistic revolutionaries and the institutionalisation of positive discrimination. Mr Trump’s pronouncements seemed to make it permissible to be verbally racist, misogynist, homophobic and xenophobic. Loosening prejudiced tongues, the freedom to be bigoted or abusive, was part of “getting the country back”.

Fourth, Mr Trump’s boorish, uninhibited “locker-room talk” resonated with men and women who believe that natural sexuality entails such bragging and vulgarity. It’s natural, it’s what men do and translating the verbiage into practice never stopped John Kennedy or Bill Clinton from getting on with presidential tasks. Of course Presidents are not in charge of globalisation and can’t reverse the movement of capital without grievously damaging the American economy and projecting even more people into unemployment. Capital will go where skills and low wages suit it. Detroit will never have its motor industry back until the wages of workers in other parts of the world such as South Korea catch up with those that Detroit will need to pay. No wonder the first proposal that Mr Trump made in his acceptance speech was not the repatriation of these industries, but a promise to build roads, bridges and infrastructure with taxpayers’ money. Almost Keynesian, you might think.

The fool’s promise of a wall between the US and Mexico is for idiots who have never heard of ladders or helicopters. The ban on Muslims entering the country is unenforceable as any immigrant can pose as a Parsi or a Buddhist, however brown their skin. These are promises that will dissolve like antacid tablets in spit. His policy of reversing Barack Obama’s medicare initiatives and his schemes to abolish regulations to combat global warming and environmental dissipation are realisable with a Republican majority in the Senate and the Congress. This same majority may, through the pressures of the vast number of people, and the opinions of the press who were against a Trump presidency, resist the more eccentric measures he might want to take. It will be the final test of America as a democracy.

Mr Trump’s speeches have hitherto been full of rhetoric, championing “working people” and a firm campaign against Hillary Clinton even threatening to kill or jail her. I wonder if he was inspired by the following historical references: “No mercy for these enemies of the people, the enemies of the working people! War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals; war on the rogues, the idlers and the rowdies.” And perhaps this: Immigrants “are pests and disseminators of diseases… in former times sane leaders of the peoples made short shrift of enemies of the people. They had them either expelled or killed.” The first quote is from 1917 by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov — better known as Lenin. The second from an editorial by Julius Streicher, a Nazi propagandist writing in 1938 in their paper Der Stürmer.