A recent BBC documentary on the Obama years ends with a surprising conclusion. Fully aware of the toll exacted by an intransigent Congress; of his administration’s mixed record with financial and gun reform; and of the disastrous human cost of his agonizing choices in the Middle East, the President says: “My view of human progress has stayed surprisingly constant throughout my presidency. The world today, with all its pain and all its sorrow is more just, more democratic, more free, more tolerant, healthier, wealthier, more connected, more empathetic, than ever before.” He continues: “If you didn’t know ahead of time what your social status would be, what your race was, what your gender was, or sexual orientation was, what country you were living in, and you asked ‘What moment in history would you like to be born?’ You’d choose right now.”
It is hard not to admire such faith in progress – or, indeed, to dispute its main assertions. A favoured quote throughout President Obama’s career has been Martin Luther King’s eloquent insight that the “arc of the moral universe is long” but it nevertheless “bends toward justice.” Obama’s fondness for the line helps to explain why, unlike so many of his supporters, he has not been overwhelmed by the consequences of his presidential miscalculations. During his time in office, however, US politics has become noticeably more strident and impatient, and as the next election looms, surging populism in the Trump and Sanders campaigns suggests that what little patience remains may soon be a thing of the past.
Instead of being a black swan event Donald Trump’s now all-but-certain candidacy is better understood as a distillation of what might be called the Tea Party mind. President Obama’s optimism belongs to a different cultural moment and it is rapidly being replaced by populism’s darker narratives of moral and spiritual decline which can only be cured by Manichean views and short-term solutions. This aversion to the long game of traditional politics has also become more common in Europe and the Americas, so its resurgence in the United States is not as surprising as many believe.
A few years ago the English philosopher Julian Baggini located the most “typical” part of England – in demographic terms – and went to live there for six months. Instead of speculating about his culture, life in Rotherham, Yorkshire gave him direct access to the thing itself. Fortunately, rather than pen a predictable jeremiad on the absence of liberal, multicultural England, Baggini did his best to decipher the new world, to investigate “how far removed from the typical life of my compatriots and upbringing I had become.”
In the local pub, he found men who would be Trump’s base voters if they lived across the Atlantic. One said that if you asked newcomers – immigrants – to tell you the time they would “look at you as if you’re going to mug them.” Racist epithets and stereotypes were so common that they became barely noticeable. Yet, beneath these shortcomings, Baggini sensed not simple racism so much as a more general fear that the outsiders wouldn’t or couldn’t conform to the “British way of life”. Even so, this small, monocultural community was surprisingly friendly and close-knit. Reflecting on the community’s strengths, Baggini reached the ironic conclusion that “If we really wanted to preserve traditional community, it is clear what we should do: stop people getting degrees.”
G K Chesterton observed that fictional accounts of people and places that the privileged middle classes never visit are not a “record of the psychology of normality” so much as “the psychology of educated, liberal urbanism brought into contact with normality.” Trump knows this other world, instinctively, and speaks to its fears in ways that urban liberals have long forgotten, if they ever understood. That is why his many offensive statements often prove to be a source of power. The last American politician with such uncomplicated nationalist passions, and such a cartoonish view of the wider world was Joseph McCarthy. It is not a comparison that inspires hope.
