Outside the count centre in Detroit, Michigan, Donald Trump supporters gathered on Wednesday, chanting “Stop the count!”. Two thousand miles away, another set of identical-looking protesters surrounded the Maricopa County election office in Phoenix, Arizona, shouting “Count the vote!”. Played back to back on the rolling news channels, these clips seemed to sum up the absurdity of Trump’s pick’n’mix threats on democracy and the stupidity of his supporters.
What explanation, other than stupidity, was there for people trying to disrupt a process whose outcome was not even decided? If not for the stupidity of his supporters, why else did the coronavirus-denier-in-chief do better than in 2016 in places where there were more coronavirus deaths? How else to explain the majority of white women who voted for the child-caging pussy-grabber? Or the fact that a larger percentage of every racial minority voted for him this time?
America's biggest problem is also the half that live in cities and have law degrees or tech jobs or flawlessly woke Twitter accounts and sneer at Trump supporters as stupid or greedy
On Thursday, I heard one Republican pundit launch into a premature discussion about how, post-election, America would need to clean up the detritus Trump will have left behind. The “detritus” she was referring to is more than 70 million people.
Here’s the thing Joe Biden-voting Republicans, Democrats, and the rest of the world sometimes forget. Trump has never been America’s biggest problem. Its biggest problem is the nearly half of voters who elected him four years ago, and the 70 million who wanted it to happen again. By the law of averages, they can’t all be stupid. So they vote for him because they are fearful about the future, or angry about the past, or desperate to carve out a space for themselves, or to cling on to the space they’re in.
America’s biggest problem is also the other half – the half that live in cities and have law degrees or tech jobs or flawlessly woke Twitter accounts and sneer at Trump supporters as stupid or greedy. For the past four years, that other half has deluded itself with the “this is not who we are” narrative. This flirtation with a charmless, delusional showman was an aberration on America’s record as the greatest country on earth.
Seventy million or so people say this is exactly what America is. Trump is not an aberration. He’s not a moment. He is as much a product of America as Silicon Valley and green bean casserole. Against all of the predictions, he grew his base, adding seven million new voters.
A lot of words were written this week about how, whatever happens, “Trumpism” is here to stay. Why do they call it Trumpism? We don’t need to invent a new word for it. We have one already. Authoritarianism.
Like the politics of disappointment driving Brexit, Trump's brand of authoritarianism is not so much an ideology, as a woolly, intoxicating, nostalgic fable of wrongs to be righted, winners and losers, grievances and resentments. Economics is part of it, but it's mostly about race. You can't talk about Trump in 2020 without addressing the anxiety engendered in some voters by the fact that this year, for the first time, the US census predicts that less than half of American children will be white. As Princeton academic Eddie Glaude told MSNBC this week, Trump is "a manifestation of the ugliness that's in us".
No, Biden, America's system of governance is not actually 'the envy of the world'. But you're right about one thing: democracy is hard won and not easily taken away
America’s situation is peculiar to America, but there are lessons for other countries. The coverage of Trump was too polite and tentative for much of his presidency. That finally changed on Thursday, when a desultory president shuffled to the podium and delivered a prepared statement that calmly threatened the fabric of democracy. One by one, the US networks and some Republicans peeled away from the feed in disgust. At last, they unleashed the words many had avoided. These were lies. This was dangerous.
The second lesson is that inequality doesn’t cure itself. Ignoring the cohorts of society who feel left behind and marginalised is unfair and dangerous. The best antidote to authoritarianism is opportunity. It’s telling that one group in which support for Trump trended downwards was college-educated voters in the blue wall states, as elsewhere, the oppressed dutifully aligned themselves with their oppressor.
The third lesson is about the danger of nations succumbing to myths of their own exceptionalism. Irish people are not immune to this. Once, the myths we told ourselves were about the unique conditions of the economic boom. Recently, they're about how the populism we've seen emerge in Britain and the United States wouldn't happen here because "it's not who we are". That was nonsense there, and it's nonsense here.
Before we peer aghast at America's dark underbelly, we need to confront our own: the shameful system of direct provision; the often unchallenged racism reflected in the experience of Travellers; the harassment of women and men of colour on social media and on the streets; the long legacy of patriarchal power structures that denied women their freedom, bodily autonomy and fundamental human rights. We're aghast at the idea of Trump separating parents and children and locking babies in cages. But we pioneered that strategy in Ireland – we just didn't use cages.
The pundits are right. Trump’s brand of authoritarianism is only getting going. On Friday, as a Biden win began to look more certain, there was already speculation that Trump would run again in 2024, or that Don jnr might.
But amid all that, the final lesson is more hopeful. If the power grabs and simmering violence offered one low point after another, the calm, considered contributions by election officials all over the country were high points. Amid the maelstrom of legal threats, presidential dog-whistling and armed protesters, these men and women turned up and quietly went to work, painstakingly counting votes, and proving that democracy is both more fragile and more robust than it sometimes appears.
No, Biden, America’s system of governance is not actually “the envy of the world”. But you’re right about one thing: democracy is hard won and not easily taken away.