For Carib News 10/6/16
The election of 2016 has captured the imagination of the world. People in Europe, the Caribbean, in South and Central America are aghast at how someone inexperienced and with such limited intelligence could become the President of the United States and the leader of the Free World. As Don “Coon” King would say, “Only in America”.
The 2016 Presidential Election is shaping up to be a re-alignment of the two dominant political parties. Traditionally, the Republican Party would win a majority of educated college graduates. This year, Hillary Clinton is attracting a majority of college graduates making further gains when it comes to female college graduates.
Trump’s message of making America Great and bringing back manufacturing jobs has resonated with white working class men, particularly those with just a high school diploma or are high school drop-outs. This strata of white workers have been severely hit by the loss of labor intensive manufacturing. Most of those jobs have gone overseas and that flight preceded NAFTA or global trade agreements.
There is an existential crisis that has shattered the reality of those workers. They have seen their wages plummet and now recognize that the prospect of maintaining a standout of living similar to their parents’ generation is threatened. This existential crisis is manifested in rising rates of suicide, heroin overdose, opiod addiction and alcoholism. As a result, white workers in this middle age bracket have seen their longevity rate falling backward.
In battleground states where whites of this class background predominate like Iowa and Ohio are likely to fall in Trump’s electoral column.
The rise of Donald Trump with his ideological potpourri of nativism has created a shift in the Republican base. The base started becoming apoplectic from the election of Barack Obama in 2008. They rallied to the polls in the 2010 non-Presidential elections and demanded the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. But this revolt was also calling for small government and making the case that a return to constitutional government would solve the ills of the nation. What was called the Tea Party movement was lacking in political coherence.
This white backlash sentiment sent militant upstarts to Congress who questioned the conventional orthodoxy of the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives and the Senate. John Boehner, the Speaker of the House and Eric Canter, his Majority Leader, were the casualties of the Tea Party uprising. Paul Ryan stepped into the breach and argued for the GOP to become the party of ideas. But Ryan’s ideas never went beyond Party orthodoxy of small government, a tax structure that favored the rich and the elimination of regulation. Ryan stayed as the Speaker of the House and watched the rise of Trump as his populist rhetoric. Trump, like a fire eating dragon, slayed his compatriots who failed to appeal to the rambunctious base of the Party.
Trump abandoned the free trade mantra of the Republican Party and identified scapegoats reminiscent of the 1930s in Germany, blaming immigrants for crime, Muslims for terrorism and Mexico and China for stealing jobs from American workers. Presumably, building walls would be the panacea and to make America white again was appealing to the white backlash movement. Trump has tried to give a new respectability to old racism.
Trump has certainly turned the Republican Party upside down. But his political fortunes are being damaged by his self-destructive impulses. His new management team has forced him to use a teleprompter and when he is on script, there are enough gullible American voters to take Donald Trump’s intellectual rubbish seriously. The Donald has no interest in public policy and has less interest in the white working class. He merely sees them as his pathway to narcissistic glory. His tweets are more reflective of his deplorable character.
His performance in the first of three Presidential debates revealed his intemperate nature and how unfamiliar he is with the complexity of the federal bureaucracy or his knowledge of foreign policy. Every scientific poll showed that the American people knew he lost the debate yet Trump in citing unscientific online polls, proclaimed he won the debate.
For the next five days, he ran with the fixation that the former Miss Universe, Alecia Machardo was disgusting and had a weight problem. Concomitantly, his surrogates like Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie and Kellyann Conway took the Presidential race another notch into the gutter by bringing up former President Bill Clinton’s extra-marital affairs. Trump, who carried out the image in yesteryear as the opulent playboy, is no virgin when it comes to extra-marital relations.
As we enter the last lap of the campaign, Trump has fallen behind in the latest national polls and in the battleground states like Nevada, Florida and New Hampshire he has seen his poll numbers contract.
The New York Times and the Washington Post have been publishing stories about Trump’s Foundation and his accumulated debt of $915 million in 1995 after staggering losses in the two casinos in Atlantic City and losses with his entry into the airline industry. Previously, The New York Times reporters had revealed that he was on the verge of declaring bankruptcy to the Bank of America as he could not pay the loan he had borrowed to build Trump City on the West Side of Manhattan. Two billionaires from Hong Kong rescued him in the eleventh hour and provided the capital to complete the project, giving Trump 30 percent of ownership and the management contract to run the development.
While Trump was wallowing in luxury and debt, he was rescued by international capitalists. The future of the Republican Party will be determined by the size of Trump’s loss. If he is trounced on November 8, 2016, that will be the end of his political demagoguery. Where does the base of the Party go from here? Does it return sheepishly to the donor class and to Paul Ryan? Or will the Party break apart and the remnants of the populist base emerge as a third force? Whatever the case, the GOP will face a challenge of maintaining its unity and being able to be competitive in Presidential elections in the coming decades.
