Fintan O’Toole: The cluster of global crises that created Donald Trump

When something as strange as Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential race happens it’s not because there is a crisis. It’s because there is a cluster of crises, a set of related breakdowns that drive a nation beyond the edge of reason.

In this case there are six of them, and they are not uniquely American. Together they form the greatest internal challenge to liberal democracies since the end of the second World War.

1: The postimperial crisis

There is, at least in the Anglo-American world, a postimperial crisis. American and English nationalisms have not suddenly erupted from nowhere. They were always there, but they had an outlet. To put it crudely, they were inflicted on other people. The British had an empire in which English nationalism could wrap itself. Its loss has made space for the nationalism that fuelled Brexit.

The US began to think of itself as an empire after its victory in the cold war. As George W Bush's handler Karl Rove put it in 2004: "We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality."

American nationalism could be projected beyond its borders through raw military power. But the disaster of the invasion of Iraq, the inability to achieve more than a draw against the Afghan Taliban and the complications of a post-cold-war world have denied it that satisfaction.

What happens to all that energy? If it cannot be projected outwards it is projected inwards. It has to find new enemies on the home front: “liberal elites”, “experts”, immigrants.

2: The masculinity crisis

There is also a crisis of masculinity. It had been fondly imagined that the US election would be a landmark in gender relations: the elevation of the first women president. And gender did, indeed, turn out to be perhaps the biggest force in the electoral drama. But not in the way that anyone had expected.

The drama of gender was a drama of masculinity, not of femininity. It was there in the grotesque caricature of alpha maleness that Trump represents: the boasting about sexual predation and the size of his genitals, the dumb, swaggering parody of a Wild West sheriff running immigrants and Muslims out of town, the schoolyard bully’s taunting, the open projection of himself as the American Duce, the one big man who alone could save the country from imminent ruin – but not just in those.

It was there, more importantly, in all those (overwhelmingly white) men who found this outlandish distortion of their own gender comforting and weirdly reassuring. Trump ran as a bad male impersonator, a crude and exaggerated burlesque of maleness. Most white men loved the show, and most white women who have an investment in tolerating that kind of maleness chose to ignore it.

It’s obvious that Trump’s sexuality is deeply neurotic. A man who feels secure in his sexuality does not need to boast about grabbing women’s genitals. What’s striking is that this insecurity chimed with so many men (and with some women). And perhaps what they responded to in it was not the crude boasting itself but the self-doubt that lies behind it.

As Bob Dylan once put it, even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked. Trump is already naked, before he becomes president, and what anyone can see when his own-brand suits are off is a bundle of dark confusions about what it means to be a man. Trump, at his most ludicrous and vulgar, embodies the crisis of masculinity.

That crisis is tied up with the rise of feminism and of LGBT rights: could there be anything more neurotic than the Republican panic about transgender women and toilets?

But at its heart is something much sadder. For the older blue-collar men who formed Trump’s base being a man is founded on the not ignoble traditions of doing hard, physical work, being the breadwinner and providing for the family.

It is all very well to tell these men to move on, but the ability to do so requires educational capital and social mobility, which are precisely what the core Trump supporter lacks.

3: The them-and-us crisis

The next crisis is one of intellectual authority. When the egregious Michael Gove (himself an intellectual) told voters during the Brexit referendum campaign that they had "had enough of experts" he was cynically hypocritical but not wrong.

Three big things have happened to the notion of expertise. One is that much expertise, especially in the Anglo-American world, has been spectacularly wrong.

It is ironic that the right benefits from this, because most of the faux expertise has come from the right: the neoliberals who were so catastrophically wrong about the universal benefits of so-called free markets; the neocons who knew for sure that US troops would be greeted in Iraq with flowers and boom boxes; the stockbroker economists who said that boom and bust were over and that the banks were stabler than ever.

Another change is the rise of social-media channels and their capacity to create echo chambers in which distortions multiply and facts have the same status as lies.

But the most interesting aspect of this crisis of intellectual authority may be the loss of the belief that briefly flourished in western societies in the 1960s and 1970s that higher education was not an elite pursuit but a right for all.

One of the common factors in determining whether someone voted for Trump or Brexit is whether they graduated from college. Many highly educated people voted for both, of course, but there’s no getting around the fact that in US counties where more than half the adult population is made up of white people with no college degree Trump beat Clinton by a staggering 15 to one.

Both Trump and Brexit are, in an important sense, the revolt of the less educated against the more educated. They are revolting, surely, because they feel excluded from educational opportunities and see those who have them as an alien breed.

If you put up barriers that stop ordinary people from aspiring to higher education for themselves and their children, sooner or later those people will start to see the well-educated as “them”. That time has arrived. And, as it happens, it is the worst possible time, because there has never been a moment when expertise is so vital on a single issue: climate change.

4: The crisis of democracy

The fourth crisis is the crisis of democracy itself. The collapse of mass political parties and the weakening of politicised social movements

such as trade unions has hollowed out political participation. Politicians are increasingly a technocratic, professional group, and their language is managerial. They operate on the margins of corporate power.

Meanwhile, the machinery of democracy has failed to move on from 19th-century forms; the great opportunities for renewal through much wider participation in decisionmaking have seldom been taken. And the dominance of the right in recent years has led to a constant undermining of the notion that government itself can ever be a force for good.

5: The identity crisis

Next there is an identity crisis, specifically a crisis of what we are forced to call white identity. The idea that we are all going to live in postracial societies, so general in the optimistic days after Barack Obama’s election in 2008, seems a very long way away.

Residual racism, the rise of ever more virulent forms of Islamist terrorism (inevitably construed in racial as well as in religious terms) and the current refugee crisis have all contributed.

This identity crisis is a paradoxical phenomenon: both with Brexit and with Trump the most violent anti-immigrant sentiment tends to be in communities where there are fewest actual immigrants.

White resentment is concentrated in communities that are in reality homogeneously white. But this does not make it less potent. If anything it makes it more so, as the idea of being “swamped” is not counteracted (as it is in diverse communities) by actual knowledge of nonwhite people.

In the United States this white identity crisis has an added dimension. The US is irrevocably on the road to being a “majority minority” society. A majority of children under five are already in minority ethnic groups; by midcentury this will be true of the whole country. There is an element of panic in the “whitelash” that is part of the Trump movement: stop “them” before it is too late.

6: The crisis of inequality

The final crisis is, of course, the one that underlies them all: the relentless rise of economic inequality. What’s crucial here is not so much the absolute state of inequality (stark as it is). It is the trajectory.

Until the Reagan-Thatcher revolution it was taken for granted even by conservatives that developed societies would become ever more equal. People with even a small stake in society could feel with good reason that life would be better for their children.

Either social mobility would allow them to move from blue-collar to white-collar jobs or, if they stayed in the working class, strong unions and higher skills would get them a bigger share of the pie. They know that’s not true any more. Once the steelworker dreamed of his kid not having to do his bloody awful job. Now the kid dreams of having his father’s life. The father’s bloody awful job is the son’s impossible dream.

It is the interaction of these crises that has created a perfect storm of reaction. It has blown away one of the key assumptions of the developed world after the fall of the Berlin Wall: that liberal democracy is a once-and-for-all achievement. Once you have attained it, and bedded it down, there is no going back. It is the end of a journey.

Now the two countries from which political modernity emerged, the United States and France, are on the brink of becoming illiberal democracies: the US under Trump, France, conceivably, under Marine Le Pen.

Liberal democracy may have seen off communism in the cold war, but it faces a far more plausible internal threat. It is losing the competition with its virulent rival: the style of elected dictatorship, underpinned by resurgent nationalism, that is on the march in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Russia and perhaps India.

The obvious lesson is that democracy is not a steady state. Like the shark, it must keep moving forwards or it will die. It was an Irishman, John Philpot Curran, who first said: "The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance." The problem is that democracies lost their vigilance.

After the catastrophes of the 1930s and 1940s a generation came to power that had branded on its brain a terror of what happens when democratic states allow large numbers of their citizens to feel insecure and hopeless.

There was a kind of healthy fear; even the elites knew that if wealth was not shared, and if the mass of the people did not have the basic necessities required to lead a dignified life, things would turn very ugly indeed. They had a healthy kind of pessimism.

That pessimism was replaced by the stupid optimism of the market fundamentalists who told us that if only the dead weight of government were lifted the pursuit of individual self-interest would mean that all would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds. We are now reaping what was sown in that smugness.

What’s most alarming about the triumph of right-wing populism with Brexit and Trump is not just that these things have happened but that they were so easy. They are the work of dilettantes, amateurs and chancers farcically ill prepared for the power that has been thrust upon them. Therein lies both the cause for deepest alarm and the one chink of light. The alarm sounds in the question of what, if these messers can so easily plunge their countries into chaos, more serious people could do.

But there is also some consolation. The fact that the Brexiteers and Trump are indeed dilettantes and chancers, with no notion of what to do with their triumphs, means they are very likely to screw up. They will fall on their faces, and when they do the future of democracy may well depend on who can speak most persuasively to those whom they leave in even deeper despair than they found them.

The far right will have its offering ready: an even more extreme turn towards bigotry, blame and authoritarianism. There is another offering, a new New Deal that redistributes wealth, rebuilds broken communities, restores the value of equality and offers people a chance to regain their dignity.

If progressive forces do not recognise the urgency of making that offer, and making it real, the cluster of crises will continue to close down the space for democracy and civility. But if they do it can be opened up again.