On Sunday, Donald Trump won Arizona, the last of the seven ‘swing states’ at the US presidential election. Trump and a bunch of outsiders—Elon Musk, Robert Francis Kennedy Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy and Tulsi Gabbard—have all but hijacked Washington, D.C.
RFK Jr. and Gabbard were Democrats till recently. But they were outcasts because they were not beholden to known vested interests. How did a seemingly loony side win over good, normal people like Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and Barack Obama?
The great American swing from radical liberalism to radical conservatism spans the political and cultural spectrum. What explains this polar shift in an electorate’s preference? Why prefer a bunch of incorrect men and women when the ‘normal’ is available?
It cannot have been easy for the voters. For example, free speech, the essence of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, is a demand by the conservatives, not liberals. Who is the Joker? Who the Batman?
Trump ran a ‘deficit’ theme campaign. America was great once; recently it has fallen back. Trump is the saviour. He made a series of speeches with an eye on inner Americans looking for hope and order, and financial security. Often he sounded like a cartoon, but a genuine one. He seemed determined to redeem himself: ‘I will defend every one of you.’ In contrast, Kamala Harris looked like she had no personality at all.
Trump’s campaign speeches referred to his presidential intentions in January 2025, when he would inaugurate office. He said he would promote free speech, deregulate entrepreneurial controls, massively downsize government spending, investigate political and media collusion by government officials, mass deportation of illegal immigrants, rebuild American cities, check inflation, free American culture and academia from woke domination, cultivate less dependence on China for supplies, and back out of wars.
The last two are clear indications that Trump’s America is shifting from a globalist phase to a relatively isolationist one. In a bygone era, these promises might have been made by Democrats. Except for a couple, they all sound progressive enough.
Trump’s team includes Elon Musk, the richest man on earth, who went all out and whose business interests are now looking up; his market cap has been soaring since November 6, more than making up for the millions he spent campaigning for Trump.
It is fair to note that everything Musk does ultimately furthers his business interests. In this election, Musk put his social media platform X to good use and drove up its traffic. At the latest count, X easily overtakes NYT and other media, as the number 1 source of news. He is a master at integrating the personal with the political and the political with the corporate.
Vivek Ramaswamy is another billionaire on the team. So is RFK Jr. The chances are, unlike most preceding administrations, the incoming one will be a plutocracy. The barrier between business and politics stands breached.
The Puritan pilgrims who boarded the Mayflower in 1620 from Southampton in England on a September morning to Plymouth in America for a god free from the mediation of the Anglican Church and to a more individualist faith were refugees of a special kind. Their faith in a personal god and their work ethic helped them build a modern nation. The pilgrim fathers must be nodding at each other in approval, wherever they are: this election marks a kind of return to their basics.
And in that context, a viral video last week shows a little girl near her home on a snowy blue winter night running out to greet her cowboy father returning from a fraught expedition, his right hand behind his back holding a doll. The caption reads: ‘Your ancestors weren’t villains. Don’t apologise for them to people who hate you'. Both father and child are white as the snow. Musk retweeted the clip, saying: ‘Yes.’
This is the white frontier American trying to get rid of historical guilt. He is tired of carrying that cross placed on his/her back by the painlessly virtuous liberal, and this election marks an ironic point of departure in culture in this sense.
The white American is done with apologising for their forefathers’s excesses, which in that century might have been the norm, just as the present-day liberals eating beef and lamb might be held guilty in a far vegan future. A strangely necrophiliac characteristic of the woke is to judge and punish the dead past by the values of the present.
‘Unburdened by what has been’ was a Kamala Harris slogan. But the truth is everybody needs a chance at redemption. Despite the fact that the Bible argues in favour of it, woke society denies it. Woke is the secular equivalent of ISIS, as a US commentator observed.
What might have undermined the Democratic cause culturally too is celebrities. Surely, if most Hollywood celebrities—such as Leo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Jennifer Lopez, Whoopi Goldberg and Ben Affleck—endorse a brand of politics that could be interpreted as egalitarian and radical, it is safe to assume they are impervious to its irony. Because the celebs are neither egalitarian nor radical.
According to NYT: ‘Donald Trump’s victory was driven by red shifts across the US with gains among seemingly every possible grouping of Americans, including by age, ethnicity, and urban and rural areas.’ That this has happened despite the sensitive abortion rights is an indication that political and cultural values are not cast in stone. This election constitutes a correction. But most liberals/democrats still don’t get it. Because they are unable to believe they were in the wrong.
C P Surendran
Poet, novelist, and screenplay writer.
His latest novel is One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B
(Views are personal)