Will There Really Be a Next Donald Trump?
Image Credit: Brynn Anderson
America’s Changing. Sanity’s Winning. So Is Trumpism’s Day in the Sun Coming to an End?
by umair haque
There’s a truism — an accepted myth — of American discourse that goes like this: there’s going to be a Next Donald Trump. It comes from pundits, columnists, DC insiders, and so forth, who always ask the question, in a leading form: who will the Next Donald Trump be? Will it be…Ron DeSantis? Glenn Youngkin? A figure who came from nowhere like Kari Lake? The question’s on the lips of America’s establishment, asked breathlessly, repetitively, ubiquitously. Who’s — LOL — the “alarmist” now?
But a better question goes like this: what if there is no Next Donald Trump? What if…from here, the remnants of Trumpism fragment and splinter, as they’ve done, like so many other extremist movements, along sectarian lines — and no one leader emerges again who has the magnetic pull that Trump once did? After all, this is what we’ve seen over and over again in history, too, not least with…the Nazis.
Let me explain why this is a better way to think about the future of American democracy.
Pundits and columnists ask the question this way — “who will the Next Donald Trump be?!” — for a reason. It reveals that they still think of Trump as a thing-in-himself. Not as a symptom, of much deeper maladies, that came to afflict America historically and generationally. And because they think of Trump as a kind of disease with no etiology, no causative factors, hence, there’s surely going to be a Next Donald Trump, too — because, well, there’s little to no real rational thinking here to begin with.
But Trump was — emphatically — a symptom. Of many, many ills which came to ravage America, to which the establishment turned, more or less, a blind eye. Let me go through them briefly, because when I do, some might be surprised at how deep the etiology of Trumpism really goes.
It was in the 1990s that Robert Putnam, the distinguished sociologist, discovered and charted a stunning collapse in America’s levels of trust. It’s “social capital” — something it was once vaunted for, small-town friendliness and politesse and so forth — was imploding, in shocking ways. He wrote a bestseller about that — Bowling Alone. America’s levels of trust — in institutions of all kinds, particularly government, business, even between neighbors — collapsing systemically. This was decades before Trumpism really emerged — and to scholars and observers of social collapse, alarm bells should have gone off. Because of course neighbors shouldn’t turn on one another.
So why was America experiencing this catastrophic collapse in trust? Because the social contract wasn’t working. It was practically nonexistent to speak of. American life was becoming a bitter, brutal, isolated, alienating struggle. A perpetual one. Get up. Go to some underpaid, overworked job — or three. Barely be able to pay the bills. Live on a carousel of debt, and if the music stopped — well, then you were in real trouble. Your health — or your home. Your kids education — or your retirement.
You see, America’s economy had begun to stagnate in the 1970s. In 1971, to be precise, which was the precise date that America went from being a net exporter, to being a net importer. Once upon a time, America had made things — things the world made and even treasured, from cars to appliances to heavy machinery and beyond. But by 1971, the American economy had begun to import more than it exported, and consume more than it produced. The result, of course, was skyrocketing levels of debt. Debt which fell on the average person’s shoulders, in the end — because a nation that was now a net importer was of course going to struggle to have robust and strong middle and working classes made of secure, stable, good jobs.
By the 2000s or so, that transformation was becoming complete. America’s deindustrialized towns and cities were now its “Rust Belt” — places which once supplied the world with steel, lightbulbs, cars, and so forth. Now they grew sick, afflicted by a panoply of social ills — opioid epidemics, driven by chronic unemployment, which itself drove a collapse in public purses, which meant those places could scarcely afford to provide basic infrastructure and services anymore. Social indicators in many such places began to plummet below the so-called “third world” — and at this point, many Americans began to say that America was becoming a “third world” country.
Their peers in Europe and Canada, who enjoyed expansive social contracts made of generous healthcare, high speed transport, affordable education, retirement, for all, looked on, bewildered and shocked. What had happened to America? Many things had happened — but beneath those was an ideology that had come to be known by the 1990s as “the Washington Consensus.” This was the brainchild of a certain group of economists and political scientists, and it was a kind of fatal compromise, between liberalism and conservatism. It took Grover Norquist’s idea of “drowning government in a bathtub,” and married it with “free trade.” The central tenets of the Washington Consensus were that capital should be free, but labour shouldn’t, that jobs could go anywhere, but people couldn’t, that it was perfectly reasonable for markets to allocate public goods — like healthcare and energy and education and transport — that any grad-schooler should have known was the proper role of governments, because, after all, what incentive does a profit-maximizing corporation really have to offer anyone such things? That’s precisely why they’re called public goods.
The Washington Consensus was the inflection point. It was to be the End of History — jobs were to flow to the lowest bidder, which meant, in practice, places like China, and what had been lost in America would be “upskilled” by way of…free markets. The theory, like so many theories, was beautiful, in its own fantasy world — immaculate, untouchable. But in practice? All this was disastrous. The private sector didn’t step in to “upskill” millions of Americans whose industrialized jobs had been lost, for good. It didn’t offer them anything. As a result, millions simply dropped out of the labour force entirely.