Donald Trump won the recent US presidential election with remarkable ease in the end.
A few months back it seemed that Kamala Harris was riding the crest of a wave, but perhaps that was just in the eyes of the media liberal bubble.
Her campaign just didn’t connect with the ordinary American people who have now sent a clear message to the world.
Trump’s their man of choice and he’s only ever been beaten in a Presidential election by another man. That was Joe Biden who probably had passed his best-before date long before assuming high office.
Maybe the Democrats should have gone for Obama – Biden – Clinton in that order and then Trump’s populism would never have gained such a foothold. But now the genie’s out of the bottle so to speak and we’ve no idea of the Aladdin’s Cave that the new President’s going to lead us down in the next four years.
One thing is for sure. It’s a very different world to the one that gave us Bill Clinton back in the 1990s. Unfortunately the Democrats appear to have failed to realise that. On the Saturday night before the election I watched Kamala Harris prancing around a stage with celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey.
Those were the sorts of tactics that worked for Clinton, portraying himself as the cool sax player who smoked weed but didn’t inhale. They also worked for Tony Blair, sweeping into power in 1997 in those heady days of Cool Britannia.
But it was a different world then. It was one where we thought we’d reached the end of history with the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain having come down. Apartheid had ended in South Africa. We were moving towards peace in Northern Ireland and even Palestine appeared to be on course for a two-state solution.
Most importantly though, in the unforgettable words of Clinton’s campaign team: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Ordinary Americans care more about the price of their ‘gas' than they do for issues of foreign policy or even domestic cultural justice.
Mind you, Donald Trump’s campaign team also tapped into discontent around the direction that America’s sense of cultural justice has taken. In one of their adverts they claimed that: "We care about you” whilst Kamala Harris cares about “they/them".
That’s a powerful slogan in the age we’re living in.
I am not trying to be crude or facetious when I say this but most ordinary Americans probably don’t give a shit about mixed gender bathrooms, the majority of the time. However, if the issue is framed in a certain way, then they’re going to care.
It’s a no-win situation for liberals when they allow the debate to go in this direction. Through various factors outside her control, Kamala Harris ended up in this kind of dead end. But it wasn’t this alone which cost her the election.
It was more to do with forgetting that other slogan of the Clinton era: “Change versus more of the same.”
If the Americans had wanted Joe Biden he would have been the candidate. Therefore, to mount a successful campaign, Kamala Harris needed to distance herself from her boss’s work. She didn’t and paid the price.
There was no point in fighting on a platform of continuing in the same vein as Joe Biden and Barack Obama before him. America wasn’t in the same place and many of the country’s minorities appear to have felt let down by Obama’s administration.
Kamala Harris needed to fight Trump in the territory which he has made his own, fighting the corner of socially conservative working men and women. The mood of the country is often very different to the mood of the city. And the country at large was crying out for change that a lot of commentators misread.
Liberal America genuinely believes that the problem is a deep-rooted bigotry that needs to be eradicated. That’s why Kamala Harris thinks the solution to America’s problems is to turn the page on Trumpism and make the country more progressive.
And yes, I would agree with her regarding attitudes to cultural justice, especially women’s rights, but you can’t win people over by portraying them as bigots. Then again, how exactly are you supposed to reason with people who would prefer their wives and daughters to die rather than getting medical help in some cases?
It’d be like trying to talk to the men out of the book and TV series 'The Handmaid’s Tale'. That’s why it’s no surprise to hear of some Americans thinking of leaving the country for the four years of Donald Trump’s tenure.
But again that’s presuming that Trumpism dies with Trump. Yes, he might have given disparate ,angry people a movement to rally around. However, he couldn’t have done that unless the sentiments he exploited already exist in American society.
Even if Trump was gone tomorrow those sentiments would still be there. Some have lingered since the time of the American Civil War, especially resentment of the big northern cities. Trump’s disappearance will no more eradicate these than Putin’s would wipe out Russian nationalism.
And that’s another story to come.
What’s going to happen in Ukraine and Gaza?
A lot of Americans, including Trump supporters, are sick of wars, especially the high levels of military spending that could be more purposeful domestic use.
That probably means he’s going to put an end to financing the war effort in Ukraine and he says he’ll end the Gaza War too.
Unfortunately with the latter, he seems to believe that the solution is for Israel to have a more secure and geographically larger homeland.
It’s no wonder that Benjamin Netanyahu was one of the first world leaders to congratulate the new President with the warmth of one husband and wife to another.
These then are dark times and the Democrats’ failure to fight a better campaign is going to have a ripple effect on the rest of the world, even here in Fermanagh.
Everything from interest rates to the price of petrol is likely to be impacted, including the possibility of greater privatisation in our healthcare as part of a trade deal.
But to blame this purely on Trump supporters being rabid bigots is wrong.
It’s also a product of the failure of liberalism and neoliberalism to help ordinary people.
They’ve been pushed to the sidelines of the political conversation in so many countries and now they’re shouting back.
If only they realised that populists like Trump aren’t the answer to their problems but they don’t, sadly.
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