The recent US presidential election has raised some interesting issues. First, about 57 per cent of the eligible voters voted, implying that 43 per cent were not interested in selecting their leader. Donald Trump secured 63 million votes and Hillary Clinton 65 million. But the president is elected by an Electoral College in which Trump secured 306 votes out of the total of 538. These electoral votes are allocated differently in different states. Trump’s success was determined by his ‘flipping’ six Democratic states: Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Iowa and Wisconsin, which gave him 99 electoral votes.
These combined with the electoral votes from traditionally Republican states took him past the post. Second, Trump’s victory was despite the hostility of the established elites in all political parties (including his own) and the media, Clinton spending $167 million more than he did, and his crude and abrasive statements both in the past and during this election. The media portrayed him as a political and social untouchable; so much so that nearly 10 per cent of voters hid their preference for Trump lest they be labelled racists, fascists, sexists, xenophobes, Islamophobes, white supremacists, etc. Clinton even called Trump supporters “a basket of deplorables”. Third, despite not winning an overall majority in the country, Trump secured majorities in the counties—illustrating the point that all politics is local. There was a divergence between the 52 densely populated coastal counties which stood with Clinton and the 3,084 heartland counties that stood with Trump.
How did this come about? Much can be said about antiincumbency, poor economic performance, high unemployment and poverty, ruinous wars, low esteem for America internationally, poor infrastructure and services, 11 million illegal migrants, continuing Muslim refugee influx and, finally, the announcement just before the election that Obamacare health insurance costs would go up on an average by 25 per cent. Trump promised to change all of that and “Make America Great Again”. Being a billionaire, Trump could spend $100 million of his money to get the Republican nomination and also fund a part of the election. Clinton, on the other hand, needed the financial support of big banks, financial institutions and large corporations and so promised to continue the policies favourable to these vested interests. Since 67 per cent of the American population believed that the country was going in the wrong direction, it was obvious that Trump—promising change—would secure considerable support.
We will have to wait and see what he does as president as the Republicans have majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives and are in a position to secure a majority in the Supreme Court as well. The US election illustrates a phenomenon that we have seen in many other countries in the recent past, including our own: the failure of the ruling elites to achieve results that benefit the population. All countries, everywhere and at all times, are ruled by elites. Some of them secure their legitimacy by hereditary right, others by military or party dictatorship and some by periodic democratic elections. It is the function of the elite to administer the country, protect its borders, ensure law and order, provide civil and criminal justice, advance economic livelihood and generally protect the cultural and religious beliefs of the population.
In return, elites secure high status, privileged access to services, fantastic income and great national and global opportunities for their children and kin. But to continue to benefit, elites must perform the functions expected of them to the satisfaction of the people. Even hereditary monarchs and dictatorships are displaced by popular revolt when the people’s dissatisfaction reaches a critical point. Over the last 20 years, there has been a failure of elites everywhere to secure the support of their people. Much of this is due to the fact that national elites joined other national elites to become a global elite that serves its own vested interests. It encouraged national elites to adopt an ultramodern global culture that had very little to do with the national culture to which their people were accustomed. Religious fundamentalism of all kinds has also been driven partly by a divergence between ‘secularised’ elites and religious populations.
This divergence between the elites and their people on the material as well as cultural planes resulted in a movement towards a return to a more national economic, cultural and religious basis. The globalist elites have taken their countries in directions that their population neither knew nor approved. This change towards a global order had its winners and losers. The problem is there has been no compensation from the winners to the losers. To add insult to injury, those who lost out in this process were labelled with all sorts of epithets and told they were not ‘modern’, ‘secular’ and ‘liberal’. The revolt of the commoners fused together a sense of material loss as well as a perceived loss of identity. Against this context, it seems that new elites who represent their people’s aspirations, culture and religion more closely will come to govern many nations. It takes a lot of courage and intelligence to turn the globalist clock back. If the new elites carry out their mandate, we will see the end of the globalist movement and a return to the idea of the nation as a national home for its people. Amen.
Gautam Pingle Former Dean of Research at ASCI, Hyderabad
Email: gautam.pingle@gmail.com