A new generation of American ideologues comes centre stage

ONE OF THE STRIKING things about the recently concluded American elections which culminated in Donald Trump’s victory is how both parties read the texture of American reality in profoundly different ways. To an extent, the self-serving nature of such readings and exaggerated disagreements are par for the course in an election year. And yet, if one heard carefully the Harris and Trump campaign speeches, it becomes evident that there was little consensus on what constituted the realities of American life. One side saw an America in which the economy was growing, stock markets were rising, inflation was under control, unemployment was low, the im­migration system was facing extraordinary challenges, and the American power kept the mainland safe. The other side saw an American economy where workers were strained, incomes were stagnant, inflation was rampant, individuals were stuck in a rut, illegal immigrants destabilised societies, and American power garnered no respect in the world. The irony, of course, is both worldviews were true and false, and sometimes often at the same time.

Depending on which scale and what metric was used, one could very well have declining inflation and backbreaking cost of liv­ing, one could have an illegal immigrant influx and record employment. The entirety of the 2024 campaign came down to convinc­ing the electorate that their respective side was a more accurate descriptor of reality than the other side. This, of course, is the very nature of democratic contestations, world over. The role of politicians becomes one of advocacy, translation, salesmanship, and even demagoguery on occasion on behalf of their vision. To this end, the greatest weapon in a political campaign becomes words and vocabularies that seek to valorise oneself and make villains of one’s political rivals.

But words, as man has known since time immemorial, are double-edged swords. They can hurt others but they can also mutilate oneself if inaccurately deployed.

Trump didn’t appear holier-than-thou, he spoke of no transcendental idea, he appeared funny and irascible. What emerged was self-interested canniness and a pragmatic chutzpah, a willingness to countermand niceties and a deep distrust towards the American state—qualities which most Americans admired

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For months, the Democrats accused Trump and his supporters of being fascists, Nazis, racists, misogynists, a bevy of phobes (Islamophobes, transphobes, and so on)—a practice that intensified during the run-up to the election in the last week. On their part, the Trump campaign accused the Democrats of being weak, corrupt, defilers of American ideals, and as un-Americans. The former sought to cast the Trumpers as beyond the pale of civic society anywhere, while the latter sought to cast the Democrats as inimical to American welfare. If the Republican invectives were coloured by disgust and mockery for the other side, burnished alongside with their own claim of rootedness—these were extensions of Trump’s righteous furies—the Democrats’ vocabulary of castigation burbled with a self-satisfying glow of moral superiority which was often indistinguishable from condescension and disdain for the habits and prejudices of the working class. The irony was that Trump and Vance were Ivy League-educated politicians while Biden and Harris went to mid-to-low tier colleges.

To confound matters more for the Democrats, the Republican campaign’s strategy to let Trump go on long form podcasts and sim­ply be himself was something that the Harris campaign had no answer for. In contrast to the rambling dragon who spewed fire when in front of a rallying crowd, these podcasts revealed Trump to be a lumbering avuncular—funny, self-aware, clever, and gossipy— figure. (“I want to be a whale psychologist,” he declared to Joe Rogan.) That these podcast hosts (all male) were both awed by Trump and rarely questioned him about his legal convic­tions, accusations of sexual assault, bankruptcies, connections with Epstein, only helped buttress his image. What these interviews revealed to the middle-of-the-road voter who didn’t follow politics closely was that Trump was not a dyed-in-the-wool democrat who made a self-flagellating virtue of deferring to the contrary views of others. He didn’t appear holier-than-thou, he spoke of no transcendental idea, he appeared funny and irascible. What emerged was a mélange of self-interested canniness and a pragmatic chutzpah, a willingness to counter­mand niceties and a deep distrust towards the American state— qualities which most Americans recognised, even admired, in their neighbour, friend, or a family member. This recognition was entirely in contrast to, and deflated, the image presented by the Democrats of Trump as Mussolini or Hitler reborn.

Despite efforts to ‘humanise’ Kamala Harris — courtesy celebrity interviews and scripted stump speeches—she increasingly appeared as an embodiment of Washington, as one who was managed by a committee of media experts. A puppet, as the Republicans uncharitably called her

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In the last days of this campaign, Trump followed up with other stunts as an everyman worker at the McDonald’s food chain or by driving a garbage truck following Biden’s descrip­tion of all Trump followers as ‘garbage’—Trump defanged his opponents who sought to describe him as a monstrous pariah. The cost of transforming this election into a litmus test on Trump’s persona was that when the frontal attack on him failed to create inroads, the reality experienced by Americans in their shrinking bank balances and oversized grocery bills acquired a centrality that Kamala Harris had no means of addressing. All the while, despite efforts to ‘humanise’ her— courtesy celebrity interviews and scripted stump speeches— she increasingly appeared as an embodiment of Washington, as one who was managed by a committee of media experts. A puppet, as the Republicans uncharitably called her. In contrast, Trump was a human whirlwind—a phenomenon you couldn’t take your eyes off despite the incoming upheaval.

EVERY ERA IN American politics thinks of itself as special and all the others that preceded it as, at best, mere ante­cedents of the present or, worse, as a pale reflection of its own complex immediate reality. Nowhere is this singular conceit repeatedly asserted than during the presidential election season when the American citizen is told “this is the most important election of our lifetime”.

Arguably, the election of Joe Biden in 2020, Barack Obama in 2012, George W Bush in 2004, the two Clinton administrations would have mattered little in the long historical arc of Ameri­can democratic politics in any meaningful way. The adminis­tration that followed those elections were coloured by all the usual swathe of pinpricks and possibilities that marks any government. On the other hand, the election of George W Bush in 2000 and Barack Obama in 2008 may have fundamentally altered the very course of American history. In these cases, the choices made by those presidents recalibrated the very nature of the American citizen’s understanding of America’s place in the world and his or her relationship with the American state. Bush’s war manifested as a decade-long injury to the American body politic and treasury which disemboweled the American state’s capacity to project strength across multiple theatres of war. Domestically, it undermined American confidence in the integrity of its institutions thanks to spurious claims of WMDs and all that followed. Obama’s bailout packages and middling liberalism set in motion the belief that the oligarchic elite who control the state were irredeemably corrupt and were aided by brokers in the media who used identity politics as a cynical proxy to avoid real reforms which would have imperiled their own interests. It is in the context of these beliefs and resent­ments that Donald Trump’s political vocabulary found a natural audience among the American electorate.

His political language had a few staple themes, of which the most consistent one was a reactionary nostalgia for a ‘great’ past—when exactly was that past is left unspecified— and a promise to its return. The implication of this framing was twofold. One, the American present is greatly dimin­ished (even if American per capita GDP continued to rise and military spending dwarfs the rest of the world); and two, any return to future greatness could only be mediated by Trump alone. Along with these diagnoses, the Trumpian rhetoric encouraged an aggressive form of scepticism (or, to borrow from Richard Hofstadter, a paranoid response) towards the in­stitutions—media, military, politicians, civil servants—of the American Republic. The stewards of these institutions, in turn, saw Trump as a political force who upended decades old equi­librium of give and take, and therefore threatened the stability of the interlocking system of governance. All the while, Trump spitballed and improvised, he meandered (a narrative style he called “the weave”) and freewheeled to ask uncomfortable and unanswerable questions in an infelicitous manner about the holy cows of the American establishment.

The result of Trump’s iconoclasm was, to the surprise of his enemies, he became irresistible for the traditional media and social media. His opponents struggled to make themselves heard amid the cacophony of online vanities while he attracted eyeballs with effortless ease. As a veteran host of reality TV, beauty contests, and wrestling matches, Trump recognised that much of contemporary politics, like much else in contempo­rary life, had devolved into performative displays coloured by excesses and make belief. The age of policy briefings was gone, the age of televised spectacle was here. The end result was that he effortlessly imposed himself on the national conversation and his rhetoric contemptuously rejected the political aesthetics of the liberal status quo whose apotheosis was Barack Obama.

The age of policy briefings was gone, the age of televised spectacle was here. The end result was that Donald Trump effortlessly imposed himself on the national conversation and his rhetoric contemptuously rejected the political aesthetics of the liberal status quo whose apotheosis was Barack Obama

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AS SEEMINGLY RADICAL as Trump appeared during his first term (2016 to 2020), in retrospect it was a relative­ly benign period, even if tumultuous, of American democracy contrary to the much-telegraphed fears that a great fascist had taken charge. What we got was an indisciplined administra­tor who nevertheless lurched to a pragmatic centre time and again. A great amount of opposition to Trump was on account of the same reasons that were the source of his popularity—he spoke loudly, and crassly, when different words, and even silence, could have been just as effective. His supporters saw in him a be­sieged truth teller while his detractors could see no one else but a braggart and a liar. In due course, when the summary of early 21st-century American politics is written, Trump’s first term will be criticised for the mass casualties due to the Covid-19 virus and the January 6 assault on the Capitol Hill building. But despite these extraordinary events, Trump’s first term neither changed the contours of the American political scene nor did it do away with old categories of political self-descriptors.

TRUMP, IN 2024, is a different political animal. For the first time in 20 years, the Republican candidate won the popular and electoral college vote. This came about due to Trump’s singular political persona, but also undergirding this reality is the transformation of the Republican party into a multiracial working (male) class party—with whites, Hispanics, and blacks at its base, centre, and periphery. The only reliably anti-Trump segment of American population are college-educated women. It is still an open question how stable this Trumpian coalition is. But that said, demographic coalitions in electoral democracies take time to come together, and even longer to come undone. In this sense, Trump will leave office in 2028 after having put together a political coalition that will outlive him.

This election also brought to fore intra-immigrant political dynamics, especially among the Hispanics, which speaks to the evolving nature of American demographics. What we saw was a more layered political reality where immigrants as­sessed self-interest in more complex ways than the simple cat­egories of race or colour that they have been herded into. The old idea that the Hispanics, especially Hispanic males, are a permanent Democratic stronghold is now gone. Instead, as Hispanics enter and consolidate as the American middle class, what we saw under the force of Trumpian discourse is that racial identities are jettisoned for class loyalties. The American dream of social mobility is alive and well but it refuses to play ball as far as political predictability is concerned. This election revealed starkly that political preferences of new and old immi­grants are mediated by income level and time of arrival into the US. No voter can be taken for granted.

Perhaps the most significant impact of Trump’s electoral victory will come in the form of the planned radical downsizing of the American government (“Department of Government Effi­ciency”) to be led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Irrespec­tive of their success, this sacralises into doctrine the omnipresent suspicion in the minds of the Trumpian faithful (and various persuasion of Republican thinking since Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Newt Gingrich) that much of the American government is entirely unnecessary. This is a form of civics lesson that runs orthogonal to the liberal and conservative centrism favoured by many in Washington who see the govern­ment as either a virtuous necessity or an unavoidable evil.

Trump’s true legacy following this electoral victory will be the elevation of a new generation of American ideologues to the centrestage who think of the American state and institutions as the real enemy of the American people. Trump’s ultimate legacy will be to birth a generation who look up to these ideologues who he has embraced and welcomed to the centre of power. In this sense, after Reagan who birthed the generation of Gingrich and George W Bush, Trump may very well be the transforma­tional president that Obama promised but failed to be.

About The Author

Keerthik Sasidharan

Keerthik Sasidharan lives in New York and is the author of The Dharma Forest

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