Nice analysis on Trump's success from my Quora feed. This is only part of a huge TL:DR essay.
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I hate to say this, I really do, but I’m not at all convinced that Trump is going to lose. I know, I know, I’ve looked at the figures and I’ll be honest, my money is on Clinton still. And yet, Trump continuously defies all reasonable expectations.
Of course, as time goes on, the answer to this question may change, my position in May is not necessarily the one I will have in June and by November, a clearer picture might have emerged. Predicting an election, any election, let alone one as unusual as this one is a very difficult thing to do. One only has to look at the rise of Trumpism to realize that people, paid good money to provide analysis of the situation, got things wrong. And whilst I’m not a psephologist and whilst nobody pays me to provide such analysis, I too did not believe that Trump would make it this far. His path to the primary was after all, convoluted; he went from no hope, to little hope, to Indiana, the moment where pretty much everyone realized that a contested convention was no longer on the table.
Pity.
Looking back, one wonders why it seemed so hard to accept what was happening, I mean, the guy just kept on winning. To be fair to the pundits, for the longest time, he wasn’t wining by large enough margins to take him all the way, and up until Indiana, it seemed credible that he’d lose on a technicality. Regardless, Trump’s rise, defied analysis, it was like placing bets on a Mike Tyson v. Pee Wee Herman fight prior to the moment where Pewee entered the ring with a revved chainsaw covered in flaming shit. As he cut Tyson’s chin off and danced around in circles singing ‘I am the Champion,’ pundits had to admit that they hadn’t seen any of this coming. We stood agog and since there are few moments in life when the word ‘agog’ can be used without sounding like a renaissance bard, we kind of enjoyed it for a while. Then we stopped enjoying it and had mild panic attacks. Then we sort of stewed in a soup made of hubris and poorly constructed hairstyle jokes.
We cannot count the ballot before it is cast so all we’re left with is an analysis of what is happening from the perspective of May 2016. My answer is not definitive and relies to a certain extent on conjecture. I have no crystal ball and the only truly honest answer I can give to the question is ‘I don’t know.’ Still, if this is a guess or a gut feeling, then at least it is an educated one and it starts with a secondary question- how did Trump get this far? That, I’m afraid is not a simple question to answer, so if you don’t like long answers on Quora (and this one is really long,) then I suggest you go elsewhere; there are plenty of really great short answers for you to check out and I would encourage you to do so.
Trump’s rise stems from three major, interrelated factors.
1. The American political system has failed the majority of its citizens.
2. The American people, or rather large swathes of them, are politically ignorant. It’s important to not take this as an insult although I know many of you will anyway. There is nothing pejorative about the word ignorant. I for example am ignorant of many things- the rules of baseball, how to perform open heart surgery, how to express the likely path of a tornado as a mathematical equation and so on. Not knowing these things does not make me stupid or a bad person, I just never took the time to learn them.
3. The level of sophistry and distraction from real issues has reached such fever-pitch that few now trust anything that is said by media and politicians alike.
Why has the political system failed?
The political system has failed because the ideological ideas that govern its policy framework are fatally flawed. The framework has a name and that name is Neo Liberalism.
Neo Liberalism: The political equivalent of smelling your own farts before tucking into your dinner.
The Neo Liberal agenda began in earnest around the time President Reagan took office and has aggressively promoted its ideology and consolidated its grasp on US politics ever since. Don’t be distracted by the word liberal, this has nothing to do with the traditional liberal/conservative dichotomy, this axis of politics is more about economics than anything else. Neo Liberalism supports the idea of ‘freeing up’ the economy by using broad stroke policy, such as the removal of trade barriers, or more specifically targeted methodology, such as the micro management of specific industry deregulation. Whilst the implementation of these ideas had a relatively slow start, the end of the Cold War gave them the kind of wings usually only achieved by subjecting oneself to a 6 gallon Red Bull colonic irrigation. The perversion of existing institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF and G8 (previously known as the Group of Six,) cemented the idea that the post-Cold War era would be dominated by the kind of unrestrained, capitalist thumb-fucking that we’d all come to lament in the post 2007 world. Both the World Bank and IMF for example, though eager to offer aid to ailing economies, impose conditionals to such aid very much in tandem with what is termed the ‘Washington Consensus. Mandatory liberalization of trade, investment and the financial sector, are coupled with binding agreements to deregulate and privatize nationalized industries. These terms and conditions were attached without any regard for the borrower country's individual circumstances, and none of them had any chance of resolving the economic problems that caused it to go cap in hand in the first place. These were Faustian pacts, dirty-deals wherein poor countries were given the choice between suffering internal collapse, or self administration of the Neo Liberal parasite by way of cash injection.
The goal of the Neo Liberal was to create a world where people could do business more easily. Companies would get rich, the wealth would trickle down to the little people, and the little people would scamper off like good little consumers and reproduce in the dark corners of JC Penny or Wall Mart. In order for everything to work at peak efficiency, financial institutions had to be given leeway to act as they saw fit, which amounted to them pursuing their own interests regardless of the consequences to others. If a company could make a few extra bucks by firing their entire staff and outsourcing manufacturing to Mexico, then by god they should be allowed to do so. Everyone would benefit from cheaper consumer goods in the long run the Neo Liberals told themselves, unless of course said companies converted savings into profit-indexed bonuses for top execs and shareholders alike, which is of course exactly what they did. Then, to add insult to injury they began to offer themselves bonuses regardless of any profit made- a sort of pat on the back for trying.
You see, the problem with the Neo Liberal approach is that it just doesn’t work. Privatization, continuous tax cuts for the rich, wage repression, financial deregulation. All these things do indeed liberalize trade but do so by making the lives of the majority of the population miserable. Layoffs became common and trade deals massively beneficial to literally a few dozen individuals, took precedence over the needs of millions. As things progressed,companies began attacking trade unions, getting rid of important legislation such as Glass Steagall and reorganizing society into one of private monopolies. They smeared their manufacturing efforts across the globe, searching always for the cheapest possible labour and as we all tried to justify wearing absurdly expensive sneakers made by slave children in Honduras, they busily promoted free trade as the answer to problems that many weren’t sure needed fixing. As time went on, they were able to justify almost any action they had initiated in the name of ever increasing profits. Wages too low for the peasants to live off? Let them eat cake obtained via a Federally Mandated Food Stamp program. Activists demanding paid vacations or health care for all? Quick call to NBC and Fox asking them to run a smear piece on how lazy generation X Y and Z had become and how in the old days we slurped down gruel, put on our work boots and just got on with things.
For many of the members of the New American Aristocracy, it was hard to see what the problem was, let alone think back to why we had got rid of the nobility in the first place. It is after all, easy to think everything is AOK whilst you play a live action game of battleships using a fleet of your own private yachts. When the occasional glimmer of reality reached through the gestalt filters they put in place to justify their greed, such as when their company helped murder union activists in some far flung country, they would simply shrug and refocus their attention on the bottom line. This is bananas! Dole wants corporations to get away with murder.
After all, wealth trickles down, no?
Well, actually, no it doesn’t, I mean, why the hell would it?
Far from creating prosperity at home and abroad, something of a wedge between the haves and the used to haves was presenting itself like a burrito-fueled shit coming out sideways. We’d seen such disparity before of course but we thought we’d done something about it- 1776, 1789, 1917… these were dates when humanity took one look at the aristocracy, at their decadence, arrogance and greed and then banded together to rid ourselves of them forever. The theoretical underpinnings of Neo Liberalism turned out to be little more than an attempt to recreate a society of low social mobility and high wealth disparity and sometime around the turn of the century it became apparent that the Ancien Régime, a world where the rich did nothing and paid nothing, was back.
As the wealthy sucked up more and more of the nation’s wealth and then began sequestering it offshore, they also began lobbying governments to make the taxation of people and companies with substantial wealth more or less optional. Stuff like the $4 trillion Iraq war still needed paying for of course and ordinary hard working people began to feel the pinch as they were indirectly presented with the bills. The pinch became something of a squeeze and then, something more akin to being sat on by a 300lb gorilla with restless leg syndrome. Americans began to get measurably poorer each year; their wages stagnated, the cost of things went up, sometimes, as in the case of college education, by several thousand percent. They had little job security and a staggering 42% of them earned under $15 an hour, a figure the Labour Department feels is what one needs to earn in order to have financial security in the USA. At any given time, almost half of all working Americans were either in poverty or else suffering from some kind of economic hardship. Health care costs became the number one cause of bankruptcy, the cost of college education got higher and higher, the degrees were worth less and less and jobs began disappearing overseas at an alarming rate. When unemployment figures came out, some bright eyed SPAD cushioned the reality for us; part time, low wage, zero hour contract jobs were no good to anyone, but they were ‘better than nothing’ we were told and were held up as ‘proof’ that the economy was recovering. There were more people in prison per capita than there were in any other nation on earth and almost 50 million Americans, most of them hard working people, were on food stamps. All this, in the richest country on the planet.
By the second decade of the 21st century, 62 people had as much wealth as the bottom 3.6 billion, a depressing monument to human greed that as far as the Neo Liberals was concerned was in fact a testament to their success. The whole program of economic liberalization stank like Texas roadkill but nobody really cared. We were promised entry into the kingdom of the oligarch and for a while, people seemed to satisfy themselves with the notion that one day they too would join the thumb-fuckers in their ivory towers. Indeed, it wasn’t until the financial crisis of 2007 that most people began to take notice at all. Even in the heart of the Great Depression there had always been a pervasive idea that things would get better but by the time the 2007 crash hit, most Americans had come to the realization that things were just going to get worse.
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