"The Curious Attraction of Donald Trump"

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Thought of the Day

“The Curious Attraction of Donald Trump”

October 14, 2024

 

“‘But he hasn’t got anything on,’ a little child said.”

                                                                                                                The Emperor’s New Clothes, 1837

                                                                                                                Hans Christian Anderson

                                                                                                                Translated by Jean Hersholt, 1952

 

Despite the fact that he is coarse, rude and humorless, Donald Trump is attractive to millions of Americans. Most are religious and believe in their families and communities; they are patriotic, diligent, and endowed with an uncommon level of common sense. But what accounts for this attraction? While I don’t pretend to have all the reasons, simply addressing the question is instructional. He is despised by those who have made service in government their life’s work. He is despised by those who find vulgar his ravaging of the English language. He is despised by those who cannot stand his orange hair and red ties. On the other hand, he is loved by those who represent what Franklin Roosevelt once referred to as the “Forgotten Man” – America’s working men and women at the middle and lower end of the economic scale. His acolytes are those who do not neatly fit into an elitist identity – meaning they are largely white, working class people from fly-over states, those who Barack Obama once derided as clinging “to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” In other words, he is attractive to America’s broad middle class.

 

These people have watched as Democrat-led, Washington’s establishment divided people into identifiable sectors – women, people of color, proponents of LGBTQ, etc. – those seen as victims of white oppressors. His fans, the so-called oppressors regardless of social position or economic status, love that he is nemesis to progressive politicians; to administrative lawyers who feed off government; to university professors and administrators who rely on public grants; to private sector union leaders (but not union members); to school boards who protect predators and approve schools dispensing tampons in boy’s bathrooms; to spoiled college students who want their student loans paid off; to a media enriched by political ads, and to those enthralled with a sense of their own virtue; and to an entertainment industry that lacks any moral sense.

 

Using data from Statista and OpenTheBooks, spending on federal elections (President, Senate and House) compounded annually at roughly 14% between 2000 and 2020, while government spending compounded at about 7.5% over that same time. However, over those same twenty years median household income only compounded at two percent. The consequence is that lower and middle-income families have been left behind, as government bureaucrats, bankers, and media people have grown fat. Has this increased spending helped the middle classes? Last week, The Connecticut Mirror reported that United Way estimates that 40% of Connecticut’s households faced poverty in 2022. Keep in mind, Connecticut ranks eight when states are measured by median household income. Also donors, be they individuals, corporations or unions, expect a return on their investment. Remember Solyndra, the California-based solar panel company that in September 2009 received $535 Million from President Obama’s Energy Department and two years later filed for bankruptcy.

 

But I believe there is more to this. Political Parties are not static entities; they change over time, reflecting changing demographics and their own self-interests. For twenty years – 1932-1952 – the Democrat Party held the White House. Over the next forty years – 1952-1992 – roles were reversed, with Republicans holding the White House twenty-eight years and Democrats twelve. During those sixty years, only one election was close in terms of the popular vote – 1960. The elections of 1948, 1968 and 1992 were affected by third party candidates. But in most contests over those sixty years victors won overwhelmingly. However, in the past thirty-two years – 1992-2024 – Presidential elections, with the exception of 2008, have been close, reflecting a more divided (and less compromising) nation.

 

In the 1960s, Republicans were the Party of East Coast elites, big business and Wall Street. In 1968 they adopted a “Southern Strategy,” a term popularized by political strategist Kevin Phillips. Since 1932, the “Party of Lincoln” had been losing the Black vote to Democrats, so the Southern Strategy involved a plan to go after conservative white southern voters who, since the Civil War, had been Democrats. That, in my opinion, was a mistake – a short term fix to a long term problem. Today, once again the two political parties are undergoing another fundamental change, with Republicans pursuing working people, regardless of race, as Democrats implement a bar-bell approach – wealthy coastal elites, university professionals, media types, etc. on the one hand, offset with immigrants, students, and those who claim victimhood on the other.

 

I do not pretend to be able to predict the outcome of this election. Neither candidate would be my choice, though Mr. Trump’s actual Presidency (2017-2021) was better than his current campaign would suggest – and certainly better than the last four years of Biden-Harris, in terms of the economy, inflation, immigration, and foreign affairs. As for the Democrat alternative, what would we be getting? Ms. Harris’ performance on CBS’s 60 Minutes gave lie to her politics of “joy.” Like the child who viewed the Emperor’s new clothes in the epigraph above, there is little she has provided on which we can judge her. 

 

Donald Trump’s appeal reflects the fact that, even after almost ten years in the political limelight, he remains an outsider. He is an amateur politician in a coliseum of lions. It is as though a high school physics teacher and amateur tennis player stepped onto the courts at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center and won the U.S. Open. He is despised by the establishment because he is not one of them. He promised to “drain the swamp,” which he never did, but he is still seen by Washington insiders as a threat to their comfortable lives. He has been attacked relentlessly. The Mueller investigation (begun in May 2017) into possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia during the 2016 campaign found, two years and $30 million later, no evidence of coordination or cooperation with Russia during the campaign. That investigation, like the failed impeachment attempts and the more recent Fani Willis and Jack Smith prosecutions, have only increased his support. Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is real; its amplification by the media feeds his fans.  

 

The “progressive” Left is driven by a self-righteous sense of personal virtue. Think of President Obama telling Black men that if they do not vote for Kamala Harris they are misogynist. His sanctimony did not allow that they have minds of their own. In assuming this mantle, Democrats have abandoned the broad middle class of working voters – most of whom are white – those who once comprised their base. President Trump recognized that failure, which provided an opening. That, in my opinion, is at the heart of his attraction to so many Americans. 

"The Great Disruptor"

Sydney M. Williams

swtotd.blogspot.com

Thought of the Day

“The Great Disruptor”

January 20, 2019

“You need to get unhung up

And we can be the great disruptors.”

                                                                                    American Rock Band, Sweethead

                                                                                    July 2009

In Hans Christian Anderson’s tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a small boy calls attention to the fact that the Emperor is naked – that the clothes sold him by an unscrupulous merchant who appealed to his vanity were, in fact, nothing. None of the people who watched the Emperor as he paraded by said anything, as they didn’t want to admit they were too ignorant to see his fine suit of clothes. It took a small boy to call out the truth, that the Emperor was indeed naked. Today, it is Donald J. Trump who has called our attention to the corruption, stagnation and cronyism of political systems populated with elites who think they live beyond the boundaries of criticism. For doing so, he has been vilified. 

But disruption is natural to life. It is everywhere, and for that we should be thankful. Joseph Schumpeter popularized the concept of creative destruction – that progress requires destroying old technologies. It has always been so. Cars replaced horse-drawn carriages. The telegraph ended the Pony Express. Trains made obsolete the Erie Canal. Machine guns and tanks changed the way war was conducted on land, as submarines did on the seas. Wireless phones are eliminating the need for land-line phones. Amazon has changed the way we shop, and Netflix the way we are entertained. 401ks have replaced defined benefit retirement plans. Charter schools, facing pressure from unions and the politicians who rely on them, have competed against and made better traditional public schools. Norman Borlaug, in using plant pathology and genetics, dramatically increased crop supplies around the world. Without disruption, we would be poorer.

Political disruption has now come to the West. It can be seen in Italy, Greece, Austria and Germany. It was behind the Brexit vote in England.  But political disruption is trickier and bears watching. A political system that preserved global peace for seventy-four years and whose economic advances lifted billions from poverty should be treasured. But bad people spouting promises of ever-better lives are a risk to freedom-loving people. Success in the West has led to apathy. Today, we have become less democratic, less free. Universities will not abide the “politically incorrect.” We are segregated by our identities. Timothy Egan wrote in Sunday’s New York Times that “…progressive pragmatists remain open to enlightenedpeople of wealth.” The arrogant assumption being that wealthy people who disagree with him are unenlightened. There is, among Egan’s “enlightened” a sense that father knows best, that government should assume all obligations for the welfare of its people. Think of “The Life of Julia.” Its corollary, though, is a diminution in personal responsibility and a gradual abatement in personal independence. The void created by the absence of individual responsibility risks being filled by those who seek power; not the philosophers who Plato argued are best suited to rule, but the power seekers Barry Goldwater warned against, those who claim to do good, but who demand the right to “enforce their own version of heaven on earth.”  And enforced conformity leads to despotism, as writers like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell showed in their dystopian novels, Brave New Worldand Nineteen Eight-four.    

That is the risk the West faces. Over the past couple of decades, western democracies have evolved to a point where a governing elite of a small number of elected and non-elected patronizing bureaucrats have determined that they know best what it is the people want and need. There have been unintended consequences. We have mounting global debt and interest rates that encourage borrowing and discourage saving. With interest rates kept at exceptionally low levels following the credit crisis of 2008, wealth gaps have widened. We have economies that conform to the “new normal” of slow economic growth, and a fatalistic belief that the United States and Europe will be overtaken by China’s managed economic miracle and expanding military might. The United Nations has become a place that favors the authoritarianism of Islamists over a democratic Israel. Hypocrisy and political correctness have inundated our colleges and universities, fountains from which students should be drinking deeply of art, music and the classics. Identity politics has meant we value form over substance and ignore the world of ideas. We endorse feel good treaties like the Paris Treaty, with no means of enforcement, and we willfully spend millions of dollars to bring delegates to meetings with little or no effect. We disallow defensive missile shields in Europe, for fear of upsetting the nation they are supposed to guard against. 

It was into this environment that Mr. Trump appeared, elected by people who may not have clearly articulated the risks faced, but conscious that the path trod was leaving them isolated, and was neither free nor good for economic and personal growth. We are better, though, than what we have been made to believe. Peace can be preserved without losing our freedom to speak as we choose. The economy is not subject to the limitations of a “new normal.” The United Nations owes its founders a moral commitment, as does the EU and the U.S. Bad people will always try to undo what freedom has accomplished. But it is the “do-gooders” on the Left that Senator Goldwater warned against that is the greater danger, not the mythical and improbable reappearance of Huns on the Right, as the media would have us believe. 

Like Hans Christian Anderson’s little boy, Mr. Trump called out the politically arrogant and the pompous. He angered those who for so long have fed off the fatted calf that has become government. He has upset the status quo in law, media, academia, business and finance – those who have learned to navigate the system to their advantage. Mr. Trump has been the “Great Disruptor.” He may not be the man to lead us forward, but through his unruly ways he has awakened the forces of democracy and liberty among the forgotten middle classes. For that, we owe him our gratitude.