A little bit of country life - political lessons from the US elections

The election of Donald Trump has led to a veritable stampede of chicken lickens rushing wildly about crying that the sky has fallen in. I'm pretty sure they're wrong and that, for all Trump's manifest failings, we aren't heading towards nuclear war, chaos and depression. What's interesting is why, faced with the election of Trump, we are getting this reaction. Partly it's not a new phenomenon - my sister reminded me that in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president they (Frances was a student at the Royal College of Music back then) held an 'End of the World Party'. But mostly it's quite simply a fear of 'them', of 'others' - just the same fear as we point to in people supporting Trump.

“You know, you’re the first professor from Madison I’ve ever met, and you’re actually kind of normal.”

The comment comes from Kathy Cramer, who is a professor from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and reports her meeting people in rural Wisconsin as part of a long term study leading to her book "The Politics of Resentment". Just before this comment, Cramer had said:

Thank God I was as naive as I was when I started. If I knew then what I know now about the level of resentment people have toward urban, professional elite women, would I walk into a gas station at 5:30 in the morning and say, “Hi! I’m Kathy from the University of Madison”?

And here we have the first glimpse of our problem - not just the resentment of rural communities towards urban elites but the belief among urban professionals that such resentment will play out like the less savoury scenes from 'Deliverance' complete with a sinister banjo soundtrack. Here's David Wong from Cracked talking about how half of America lost its mind:

Every TV show is about LA or New York, maybe with some Chicago or Baltimore thrown in. When they did make a show about us, we were jokes -- either wide-eyed, naive fluffballs (Parks And Recreation, and before that, Newhart) or filthy murderous mutants (True Detective, and before that, Deliverance). You could feel the arrogance from hundreds of miles away.

Many Americans only ever fly over or drive through rural America and their image of the communities out there come from books, from films and above all from TV. The image of the thick redneck, the hypocritical preacher and the associated sneering put down of Christianity all play to a belief that the values of folk out there in the backwoods just ain't the same as good progressive folk in the cities. But what are those values? Here's David Wong again:

Basic, obvious truths that have gone unquestioned for thousands of years now get laughed at and shouted down -- the fact that hard work is better than dependence on government, that children do better with both parents in the picture, that peace is better than rioting, that a strict moral code is better than blithe hedonism, that humans tend to value things they've earned more than what they get for free, that not getting exploded by a bomb is better than getting exploded by a bomb.

Or as they say out in the country, "Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining."

The foundation upon which America was undeniably built -- family, faith, and hard work -- had been deemed unfashionable and small-minded. Those snooty elites up in their ivory tower laughed as they kicked away that foundation, and then wrote 10,000-word thinkpieces blaming the builders for the ensuing collapse.

And the sad truth is that, as Kathy Cramer found out when she talked to them, people in rural America aren't so very different from those living in the cities. Cramer also talks about the nature of that resentment - things like:

All the decisions are made in Madison and Milwaukee and nobody’s listening to us. Nobody’s paying attention, nobody’s coming out here and asking us what we think. Decisions are made in the cities, and we have to abide by them.

This still makes sense to me if I switch the words Madison and Milwaukee to Bradford and Leeds. As a local councillor serving a ward called Bingley Rural for 21 years, I've heard this sentiment time and time again especially in the most rural, most working class parts of my ward. A sense of 'being done to', a belief that other people (and, yes, there's a racial element to this in Bradford just as there is in Wisconsin) are getting the benefits of decisions, spending and attention. Some of this is true - always and everywhere, governments are most fearful about how people living in cities will respond so give them more attention - but much of it is either a function of isolation or the cost of service delivery in remote rural areas.

The problem is compounded by the economic decline of those rural areas. Some, and we see this in the UK, become places of rural retreat and second homes for that urban elite (creating a whole new set of resentments) but the places that aren't pretty enough or accessible enough simply decline. The best and brightest depart of the city leaving behind the old, poor and ill. And, as Aaron Renn - one of the best and brightest who left rural Indiana - describes, the result isn't pretty:

In Medora we see not only poverty, but nearly complete social breakdown. I don’t recall a single player on the team raised in an intact family. Many of them lived in trailer parks. One kid had never even met his father. Others had mothers who themselves were alcoholics or barely functional individuals. They sometimes bounced around from home to home (grandmother, etc.) or dropped out of school to take care of a problematic mother.

This is the stark picture of rural America's failures but we also see - reported by Kathy Cramer and described by many others - a bunch of rural folk doing what Americans always felt was the right thing: working hard, looking out for the neighbour, sticking by the family. Problem is that, for too many such folk, this doesn't seem to be working quite so well these days:

28.3% of poor families receive child-care subsidies, which are largely nonexistent for the middle class. So my sister-in-law worked full-time for Head Start, providing free child care for poor women while earning so little that she almost couldn’t pay for her own. She resented this, especially the fact that some of the kids’ moms did not work. One arrived late one day to pick up her child, carrying shopping bags from Macy’s. My sister-in-law was livid.

Again, any English politician with ears will have heard the same resentment. I remember a colleague - and I worked for a charity helping people into work at the time - angrily condemning some of her relatives because they'd a car that worked and a foreign holiday but were "on welfare" whereas her and her husband, both working, felt they were barely scraping by.

There's nothing new in all this, it has been gently simmering away in places too many commentators choose to patronise as "left behind" but what has happened over the last ten years or so is an accentuation of the difference and the 'othering' of those communities as, well, just a bit backward. Worse urban-driven, progressive policies actively damage the economy of 'fly over ' USA.

Geographer, Joel Kotkin, describes two Americas - urban 'Ephemerals' in the Democrat-voting coastal states dependent on new media, software and moving money about, and a 'New Heartland' that depends on tangible goods production. Assertive climate change policies, for example, directly impact the economy of this 'New Heartland':

Climate change increasingly marks a distinct dividing line. Manufacturing, moving goods, industrial scale agriculture, fossil fuel energy all consume resources in ways many progressives see as harming the planet. Progressives threaten these industries with increasingly draconian schemes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Gone are the days of supporting moderate shifts -- which could work with some Heartland economies -- from coal to gas and improving mileage efficiency.

Instead the demand from the left is for a radically rapid de-carbonization, which will reduce jobs in the Heartland and lower living standards everywhere. In California, Jerry Brown is fretting about ways to curb cow flatulence, an obsession that is unlikely to be popular in Kansas, Nebraska or Iowa.

The result of this is that more small towns lose their reason for existence more quickly - it all feels a bit like 'Other People's Money', the 1991 Danny DeVito, Gregory Peck film about a declining business in small town American. Back then it was an attack on heartless, uncaring capitalism but looking at the film now, it has the same concerns as Trump has hit on in rural America - loss of community, unemployment, off-shoring and wealthy untouchables swishing out from the cities to dump on struggling communities.

But it's no so simple as looking back to a golden age through rose-tinted glasses however much the progressive want to believe. People living in the rural and small town places are looking to a troubled future:

Economic anxiety is about the future, not just the present. Trump beat Clinton in counties where more jobs are at risk because of technology or globalization. Specifically, counties with the most “routine” jobs — those in manufacturing, sales, clerical work and related occupations that are easier to automate or send offshore — were far more likely to vote for Trump.

This reminds me of a recent post of mine asking what we'd do about 'proper jobs for proper blokes' - those routine jobs that are crucial to places like Bradford but which will be the ones our digital, robot-run age will kill off first. But in the city we've the chance to catch up with ourselves - as David Wong points out, this is pretty tricky in a small place:

See, rural jobs used to be based around one big local business -- a factory, a coal mine, etc. When it dies, the town dies. Where I grew up, it was an oil refinery closing that did us in. I was raised in the hollowed-out shell of what the town had once been. The roof of our high school leaked when it rained. Cities can make up for the loss of manufacturing jobs with service jobs -- small towns cannot. That model doesn't work below a certain population density.

The thing is that, while there's plenty of displacement, poverty and loss of work in urban areas, it feels like we can fix that problem, indeed that the government is trying to do just that. Up in the hills away from those big cities is doesn't look that way. Tatty boarded up places linger on and the only change seems to be the buddleia colonising every untended nook and cranny. For some places there's a roll of sticking plaster - the UK's coalfield communities (unlike America's - another argument in the Trump camp) got a load of regeneration cash and this has smartened such places up. But the problem's still there - just as Aaron Renn described above, anyone with any get up and go, got up and went, leaving behind a community in a place with no purpose.

None of this represents the whole reason for Trump's election (any more than does accusations of racism, xenophobia and general horridness) but it has thrown a light on a challenge facing every developed nation - in a time of economic change how do we protect the idea of community and can we create purpose for places that, right now, are losing their reason for existing. And, even if we recognise that places must die if they have no purpose, are we doing enough to ease the transition for the people who're from those places:

The vast majority of possible careers involve moving to the city, and around every city is now a hundred-foot wall called "Cost of Living."

Cities are expensive places that we've chosen (for reasons of keeping them liveable and not too big - or so we claim) to make even more expensive. And perhaps the Trump Presidency is the price we're paying for the selfishness of making the city too expensive?

I have a new explanation for Trump's win that does not involve Weiner or talking about Deplorables or emails. California's zoning codes caused the win. If California had Texas style housing regulations, then 80 million people would live in California and the state would have 100 electoral votes. The state would still vote Democrat (because of the composition of these new voters) and Clinton would have won.

There's some truth in this. Planners - of all stripes - helped created the sort of divided world that made Donald Trump's election possible. And if you think this is a problem, ask how you bring on side those who are victims of those planners, folk patronised by left-wing academics, sacked by climate change policies, and insulted as racists or xenophobes day in and day out by the punditry. What I fear is that you won't do this, you'll call them 'morlocks' and punish them for having an opinion you didn't like.

....

How not to analyse an election result (Marxist studies version)

I'm not going to give my take on the events in the USA. I was wrong (not in disliking Trump but in thinking he would get thrashed) and this is most probably because I don't know enough about the dynamics and processes of US elections so relied on the media filtering of polls to provide guidance. Problem is, of course, that the media leans towards polls that are either outliers or favour the ideological bias of that media (or both).

There's lots of good stuff emerging - not from the big brave pundits on national media but rather from folk like Aaron Renn and Joel Kotkin who bring experience and geography to bear on the issue.

For some though, we get an object lesson in how not to analyse an election result. Here's Dr Sophia Price, Head of Politics and International Relations at Leeds Beckett University. It starts like this:

Marx’s adage ‘first as tragedy then as farce’ seems a fitting place to start on this bleak winter post-election morning. In Zizek’s (2009) book of the same name he notes Marx’s correction of Hegel’s idea “that history necessarily repeats itself”. “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy , the second time as farce” (Marx 1973 quoted in Zizek 2009). For Marx, this second comedic version would mark the “last phase of a world-historical form”.

I know what you're saying - why read on and what in heaven's name has all this to do with the US Presidential elections. Some of you might also smile and remind our author that Zizek - every trendy's favourite Marxist - endorsed Donald Trump. But the article's not very long and soon escapes from quoting Marx as it settles down to present the usual collection of academic sub-Marxism's favourite memes:

...there are a wide range of memes and posts that relate our present moment to the rise of fascism in the 1930s.

Of course. Just a shame that modern Marxist academics seem not to have the first clue about Fascism.

...the analysis of the shift to extreme, right wing politics...has to be located within the context of the global spread of neo-liberal capitalism in which free trade and the roll back of social protection and labour rights has intensified the competition between workers.

We move on:

It is important though that...we do not lose sight of the intersections of race, gender and class within these processes.

We arrive at the conclusion having decided that - Donald Trump is a fascist (he isn't) and won because of racism (partly true but, I suspect, an oversimplification). And that the response should be:

...to properly locate race and gender within the analysis of class relations and contemporary capitalism that have provoked these social changes, in order to be able to formulate a viable, progressive and inclusive alternative.

It seems to me - having sat up all night watching people poking at maps on the telly - that the problem isn't capitalism but rather the failure of government that talked more about race and gender than it did about jobs, schools and healthcare.

The problem is, however, that students only get this sort of analysis - framed in terms of boilerplate Marxism - meaning that they can only see the ideas underlying Trump's success (or Brexit for our author takes a moment to demonise voting the leave the EU) as problematic. The almost complete absence of any academic commentary from the right means that our understanding of the social changes influencing the Trump phenomenon are developed entirely on the basis of a discredited philosophy of state control.

....

How would Satan vote?

The one thing that has struck me most forcibly about the Donald Trump campaign is the extent to which it is a coalition of conspiracy theorists. From 2011 "truthers" and Obama "birthers" the entire campaign has been littered with sinister accusations, allegations and suggestions of dark conspiracy on behalf of The Donald's opponents. This evening, reading the torrent of Tweets about the US election there's a steady trickle of "the voting machines are fixed" suggestions from Trump's supporters - the US equivalent of "use a pen".

From among this seething pit of madness it's hard to plump for just one conspiracy about Hillary Clinton, Democrats or the election that sums up the depressing ignorance of Trump's campaign. Until that is, the "Clinton is a Satanist" line arrived. This didn't so much as jump the shark as do a double back somersault over a vast tank of piranha. But here it is at Trump's Conspiracy Theorist-in-Chief's Infowars blog:

Hillary Clinton’s ties to satanic rituals and the occult have been well-documented for decades.

Clinton insider Larry Nichols told Infowars that Hillary Clinton used to attend a “witch’s church” in Los Angeles during Bill’s presidency.

And a source claimed many FBI agents consider Clinton to be “the Antichrist personified.”

And Alex Jones (the conspiracy mane who runs Infowars) goes on to provide link after link, video after video each one madder than the previous and all purporting to 'prove' Hillary is a Satanist (which she isn't - I bet she's never even rolled a 20-sided dice). The source of all this stupidity is a particularly odd artist called Marina Abramović who is the modern performance art equivalent of a 'shock-jock':

Her work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Active for over three decades, Abramović has been described as the "grandmother of performance art." She pioneered a new notion of identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusing on "confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body."

It's an acquired taste (as anyone who has seen her cake would know) but Abramović is a recognised - even acclaimed artist. The hoo-hah here results from an email (it would be an email, wouldn't it) inviting John Podesta to a showing of 'Spirit Cooking':

“Spirit Cooking” is an Abramović piece supposedly inspired by famous Satanist Aleister Crowley’s occultist rituals. It involves the artist painting the walls with menstrual blood, breast milk, and other bodily fluids.

It may not be all that wholesome but it's just art (and John Podesta's bother Tony is a big time art dealer and collector) with as much connection to Satanism and Black Magic as that 20-sided dice I mentioned earlier. Yet Alex Jones and other Donald Trump enthusiasts lap this up - indeed a depressingly large number seem even to believe Hillary Clinton is some sort of Satanist witch literally hell-bent on destroying the city on the hill that is America.

There's only one word for all this - bonkers.

.....  

It's not a conspiracy, Donald Trump really is losing

Speaking as a marketing and market research professional, I could get offended by this sort of stuff:

It is not "wishful thinking" to distrust the polls. Nor is there a "natural tightening up" of the polls as election day approaches. The entire polling industry is an exercise in attempted manipulation of public opinion. That's why there is so much media attention focused on it.

Yes folks this is the "the polls are fixed" line we see from Corbynistas in the UK. Unsurprisingly this is from the World of Trump, a strange place filled with paranoia about the actions, motives and capabilities of anyone who questions - let alone presents evidence contradicting - the weird-haired one's march to supreme power.

The truth - there's no getting away from it - is that Donald Trump is crashing and burning. OK so there are glints and glimmers of hope as the odd poll shows Trump within the margin of error - this is like the Brexit polling but not in the way The Donald's fans want to believe. Polling in the run up to the EU Referendum didn't show a lead, let alone a big lead, to Remain but rather that it was 'too close to call' or a narrow lead for Leave. What Trump enthusiasts are doing is the same as Remain - believing their own propaganda.

So no, the polls ain't fixed. The voting machines ain't fixed. The 'mainstream media' isn't in secret cahoots with the Pentagon. The problem is that Donald Trump - the classic 'Republican in Name Only' - is an absolutely appalling candidate only made remotely credible by the happenstance of Hillary Clinton being an almost equally appalling candidate. What is sad here is that the fall out from Trump's candidacy will be the crippling of America's conservatives - embracing a warmed over, pig-ignorant version of 'know-nothing' nativism and mixing it with the gung-ho stupidity of Teddy Roosevelt's Progressives closes off any chance at all of Republicans ever getting back any support among the urban middle-class let alone the Hispanic Americans so carefully cultivated by Reagan and Bush father and son.

There's no winning, however, with this sort of viewpoint:

The Podesta email doesn’t merely prove that the poll-doubters are right to be dubious about their credibility, but demonstrates, once more, that the conspiracy theory of history is the only one that can properly account for historical events.

For the record, I'm a firm and dedicated supporter of the 'Cock-up Theory of History':

Brazilian economist Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira suggests that the relevant variable in this case is incompetence. Incompetence is an independent explanatory variable; it cannot be explained in rational or historical terms.

....