The trump, trump, trump of repressive boots

Nothing excuses the German election of a ranting, bigoted demagogue in the 1930s. But at least one can understand the trauma of a nation that had been beaten in a ruinous war, only to stumble into an unprecedented financial crisis in which the cost of living rose fifteen-fold in just six months of 1922; barely had they stabilised their currency than they were hit by the great depression and watched unemployment climb to 30%. One can understand the despair and therefore the blind groping that drove a large enough minority (the Nazis never won a majority) to choose an inexcusable, and false, solution to their problems.

But what explains the Americans? One of the wealthiest nations on Earth, the United States has 4.9% unemployment and inflation inching towards 1.6%. So why choose another hate-filled merchant of fear? The worst problem economically in the US is that wealth is so badly distributed, so that a small percentage of enormously rich individuals can hire or fire at will, forcing others to live precariously and on inadequate incomes – but the Americans have just chosen one of those individuals to occupy the White House.

Indeed, he has promised to do away with the one significant achievement of Obama’s White House, the one measure designed to alleviate the inequity of wealth, the Affordable Care Act (‘Obamacare’).

They have chosen a man who has promised the impossible: to bring industries back to the rust belt, to build a wall against illegal immigration, to prevent terrorists gaining entry to the US. He can only disappoint but he’ll wreak terrible suffering along the way: arrests, deportations, denial of basic rights.

Along that road, women will lose essential rights over their own bodies, and the major social progress of the last half century, towards toleration of minorities, most notably of LGBT communities, will be at least partially rolled back. And yet many women voted for Trump in preference to Clinton, though they know he holds them in contempt. Indeed, the only white demographic in which she won a majority was among educated white women – and even then, she only took 51%.

One of the more telling images of this most divisive election

The key word in that last paragraph is “white”. Something ugly has happened in the US. I can’t help feeling that what’s going on is the re-emergence of a white supremacist temptation that many feel, and most had learned to suppress in recent decades. Obama had seized the White House and, though he pulled off the feat of re-election in 2012, I suspect there is a widespread feeling among many whites that his success showed blacks getting altogether too uppity. With a candidate who openly expressed these feelings and therefore seemed to legitimise them, far too many were prepared to turn to him.

They did so despite the clear warnings he’d given of the damage he would do with the power they were handing him.

Trump’s is the victory of fear and hatred over reason and tolerance. Sadly, that’s by no means a purely US phenomenon. It emerged strongly in Britain too, in June, when the country voted to leave the European Union. At the time, there was much talk of the need to protect sovereignty and put an end to the erosion of supposed British rights. The reality was clear before and has been confirmed since, that the true concern was with keeping minorities at arms’ length.

Even Theresa May has been openly proclaiming that what the electorate voted for was tighter control of immigration. In other words, just like the white American voters fearful of people who look different from them, or have sex differently, or worship differently, Britain voted to throw up the walls and keep the foreigners out. I know a number of long-term foreign residents in Britain, and there have been media reports of many others, who were asked within hours of the referendum vote when they’d be leaving.

Xenophobes and white supremacists felt legitimised in Britain by the Brexit vote, as they did by the Trump campaign in the States.

On both sides of the Atlantic, a small majority of closed-minded individuals, driven by basic – and base – feelings of hatred and fear have taken control of the destinies of us all. There are grim times ahead. There will undoubtedly be regression, on many fronts. Hard though it is, we have to keep up our spirits and continue pressing as effectively as we can for a return to progressive, tolerant, open-minded attitudes. We have to maintain our hope that in time those better values will prevail.

With, I’m afraid, absolutely no guarantee that they will. Though if we don’t keep up the pressure, we can guarantee they won’t.