Donald Trump’s triumph doesn’t show us a ‘polarised’ America. This lazy metaphor for division obscures America’s shapeshifting oneness. When pundits pointed out that Trump’s success in 2016 was made possible by blocs of voters who had voted for Barack Obama defecting to MAGAism, they were right. After Kamala Harris’s defeat, another version of this insight began to circulate; groups enthused by Bernie Sanders’ primary run in 2016 — tech bros, Latinos, young men, the likes of Joe Rogan — were amongst Trump’s most vocal supporters eight years later. The political lesson to be drawn from this is not that the US electorate is two blocs organised around fixed poles; it is that America is one beast prone to mood swings. America isn’t polarised, it’s bipolar. We’re now in its manic phase.
When Kamala Harris’s partisans in America and the rest of the world ask how a majority of Americans could elect such a misogynistic, bigoted, cruel man for a second time as president, they seem to forget that Americans have elected several presidents in living memory who have been misogynistic, bigoted and cruel.
Think of one of the presidents that Americans most admire: John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a predator who regularly had sex with White House secretaries and interns. If Jeffrey Epstein’s select club had existed then, the brothers Kennedy would have been life members. No Democrat wringing his hands over Trump’s return would club him with JFK, and yet, this jowly, priapic, cold warrior, fathered by a fascist dynast, mentored by J. Edgar Hoover, matched with a trophy wife, was vile in the same way.
Centrists despair at what Trump says, not what he does. Unlike his predecessors, Trump is a proud slob who publicly owns his prejudices. He acts out the squalor in his head for the world to see in a social media environment that amplifies it. He has no interest in being respectable because he recognises that pithily phrased bigotry is his political superpower.
That is the heart of it; respectability is what centrists crave. If Kennedy had been allowed to orange into age, Camelot might have looked like Mar-a-Lago. Yet liberals mythologised Kennedy’s court and basked in its Mad Men glory. The Pulitzer jury gave Kennedy a prize for Profiles in Courage, a ghost-written book that hadn’t made the shortlist, because his father asked it to, a book in which he had praised three slave-owning senators, among others, for their moral courage. Assassination turned Kennedy into a secular saint. Why are liberals surprised that surviving an assassination bid made Trump a hero to his people?
What makes men like Kennedy, Nixon, Kissinger, Reagan and the two Bushes respectable? Americans credit them for winning the Cold War and then consolidating an American supremacy. This dry cleans their past. Kennedy helped commit America to its war in Vietnam, presided over the Bay of Pigs disaster, and played nuclear chicken with the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis. The dirty operations, the wars, the barely covert love-ins with Pinochet and apartheid South Africa, the racist dog-whistling that Reagan and Bush Sr refined to get elected, Reagan’s senility in office, are washed clean by the collapse of the Soviet Union. For the West and West-adjacent ‘Free World’, the means used by these presidents were justified by the rout of communism.
But for the rest of the world, it’s hard to see why Nixon, who sent the Seventh Fleet to the Bay of Bengal to help the Pakistani army strangle Bangladesh in its crib, is morally less revolting than Trump. Why is Clinton’s record of lechery in office less offensive than Trump’s lewd comment about grabbing “them by the ...”? What makes Biden, whose son was accused of profiting off his father’s vice-presidency and convicted of criminal tax evasion, who never saw a war he didn’t vote for, who capped a war-mongering career by embracing and arming Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza, better or less frightening than Trump?
The answer is that Trump’s predecessors successfully deployed Free World protocols of respectability. The rules-based order that US presidents constantly invoke, the UN system that America helped create, the huge investment in rebuilding allies and clients like West Germany and Japan, the food aid the US sent to poor countries like India, made America a plausible hegemon and let its presidents play at being Dr Jekyll while bossing the world as Mr Hyde.
America’s external audience, the world that doesn’t vote in its elections and can’t migrate to it but which once accepted American pre-eminence at America’s own evaluation, finds it hard to credit the defender-of-the-international-order act any longer. It looks at America’s weaponisation of the dollarised world economy, its rejection of the free trade it once evangelised, its increasingly racialised take on immigration, its hypocrisy on Gaza, its rubbishing of the UN system and its complicity in Israel’s ethnic cleansing, and sees, despite Biden’s ritual invocations, Mr Hyde.
The Jekyll and Hyde avatars of the American State have never been a secret. From a distance, it has always been obvious that Americans elected presidents to sustain America’s dominant post-war economy and consolidate its global hegemony. It was understood (and the draft spelt it out) that the economic well-being of Americans depended on America’s military supremacy.
The protests against the Vietnam war were led by young Americans protesting against having to serve and die in distant, unwinnable wars, not a protest against war’s cruelties. No broader movement against militarism grew out of these protests. So long as they weren’t conscripted, Americans young and old, rich and poor, tolerated foreign wars as a necessary evil, a way of protecting their city on a hill.
Foreign policy is the instrument through which America shapes the world to the economic advantage of its citizens. Trump’s potty-mouthed incivility is not a departure from this abiding consensus; it is a performatively rude and politically attractive rephrasing of it.
Global statesmanship doesn’t play well at home when America’s place in the world is threatened by the rise of other nation-states like China and when its most basic measure of well-being, life expectancy, goes into steep decline. The once comfortable white working class of the Rust Belt, now addicted to opioids, doesn’t want to subsidise wars elsewhere just to allow its president to peacock about as the leader of the Free World. Asian Americans keen to be honorary whites and white-identifying Latinos see in Trump’s hostility to affirmative action and immigration a man they can do business with.
It’s not hard to see why Trump scared the Americans who voted for Harris. The future of climate change, abortion, even the ordinary democratic process, hung in the balance. But the Democratic establishment thought that a campaign that took these causes seriously might offend Goldman Sachs, the Cheney Republicans and AIPAC, character witnesses whose approval had apparently turned Harris from a laughing flake into a serious candidate.
In 2016 and then again in 2020, Democrats chose trickle-down centrists over the progressive coalition that the mildly insurgent Sanders tried to build. In 2024, they chose a suit again. They couldn’t risk populism; they would save the republic from the centre. They didn’t. The Americans who voted Trump in didn’t want to pay for geopolitical respectability. Harris was more of the same, so they elected a man who promised to monetise America’s military-industrial complex instead of giving the lethal stuff away for ‘free’.
Trump’s orange, lewdly playful face now fills our screens as Biden’s frail (but respectable) visage recedes. Not forever; there will always be a Jekyll impersonator in America’s political repertory, ready to come on when the world turns. For now, though, Mr Hyde is ascendant. The Doctor, as Jekyll’s butler would tell anxious visitors, isn’t home.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com
