I’m not widely travelled, but I have visited America on three separate occasions and I have observed a group of people whom I suspect feel they have somehow “missed the boat.” They are not a minority group; but in fact American-born males who have graduated from high school, but have not gone on to “college” and got a degree which might have led to better job prospects. As a tourist you tend to observe them as surly porters in hotels or lack-luster gas station attendants when they fill up your left-hand-drive rental car.
Writing in The Australian Financial Review recently correspondent David Frum called them the angriest and most pessimistic people in America. “Middle-aged and middle-classed; not rich and not poor; people who are irked when asked to press 1 for English, and who wonder how ‘white male’ became an accusation rather than a description.” Frum reckons you can see the effects of their despair in the new statistics describing horrifying rates of suicide and substance-abuse fatalities. They express distrust in every institution in American society, not only government, but corporations, unions and even in the political party they normally vote for, the Republicans.
They aren’t necessarily super-conservative and they don’t think in ideological terms, but they do believe that life in America used to be better for people like them and they want that older country back.
And so it’s no surprise that when Donald Trump came along they were the people who told the pollsters “That’s my guy.”
Trump entered the race for the Republican Presidential nomination in June last year with his own mantra of pessimism “We’ve got $18 trillion in debt. We’ve got nothing but problems. We’re dying, we need money, we have losers, and we have people who don’t have it. We have people who are morally corrupt; we have people that are selling this country down the drain.”
“The American dream,” he said, “Is dead.”
He wasn’t taken seriously and even now, despite rising poll numbers, he is still dismissed by the main stream media. Just last week President Obama said he was merely a reality TV star who had no experience to take on the biggest job in the world. This was a bit rich coming from Obama who was a “community organiser” in Chicago before becoming a one-term senator and then the President.
The “reality TV star” reference alludes to Trump hosting prime time TV show The Apprentice for fourteen seasons and his celebrity status is probably why so many people flock to his rallies; thousands as opposed to hundreds who attend his rival’s conventions.
But something has changed since the great recession of 2010. The old slogans ring hollow and rank outsiders like Trump seem less absurd. The moneyed donors of the Republican Party planned a dynastic restoration in 2016 as did the Democrats. Hillary Clinton looked like a shoo-in and Jeb Bush seemed certain to get the nod from the conservatives who poured millions into his campaign.
Instead it has triggered a class war that may pitch billionaire Trump against socialist Sanders.
Fasten your seat belts; the world is in for an interesting ride.
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