New Lockdown: Day 6, Wednesday
I admit it. I got up very early, in the darkness and, under the subterfuge of going to have a pee, I had a sneaky look at my mobile to find out the state of play in the American election. What I read was not exactly comforting and my attempt to go back to bed and sleep until daybreak did not work.
So, up before dawn and reading my Guardian app on the phone while listening to Radio 4, I had a consolatory cup of tea and pondered on the sheer unadulterated differentness of people.
People like me are going to have to come to terms with the fact that Trump got more votes than he did in the election in 2016. Whatever the outcome of the election, and, as I type nothing at all seems even remotely settled, over 50 million (probably nearer to 60 million by now) people watched Trump be ‘president’ for four years and still voted for him. I will not recite Trump’s glaring faults – perhaps they trip too easily off liberal tongues, like mindless repetition of rosary prayers. I am tempted to say that the repetition has the same empty efficacy, serving merely as sonic balm to hide the fact that they are merely words with no further function than mouthed sounds.
I listened to a Trump supporter say that she had her doubts about the character of Trump but felt that she shared his ideas and values. She obviously didn’t mean the repulsive ideas and values that I see in him, but presumably some hazy version of what being a Republican means. She was affluent and had higher education, but she mentioned the disturbingly left-wing policies of Biden (!) and the fear that he would limit freedom in some undefined way as justifications for her instinctive rejection.
Obviously, this woman was on camera, felt under an obligation to ‘justify’ her support of Trump and, as far as I could tell in the fairly unnatural position of a televised interview, she seemed sincere and content with her choices. She seemed decent enough, but had obviously put aside, or perhaps rejected as False News, much of the negative (factual) coverage of this depressing presidency.
It is certainly tempting, from my point of view to dismiss Trump supporters as self-deluding idiots, and some of the choices that non-American commentators make in their choice of Trump supporting interviewees seem to fit that category, but 60 million Americans (and counting) voted for this person, and they cannot all be idiots, and to continue to think so will ensure that the divide in the country will never be healed.
Some of the Trump supporters are in it for the money and for the power, or are the immediate nepotistic-sweetened family, but that only covers a fraction of the voting electorate.
The four years of Trump have led some people who seem to live fairly coherent lives to say that, “He is the best president we have ever had!” To say, “He really understands people like us!” or, “He cares!” They see his public speaking, which I see as cringe-makingly embarrassing, as “natural” and “welcoming”, that he is, “really speaking to us!” His free association of incoherent and contradictory meanderings allow Trump supporters to see the wealth-inherited billionaire (he claims) as one of their own, chatting to them in a way no other ‘politician’ can - or would dare to.
Even as I try and be fair-minded, I can feel my bitterness and contempt seep through into my writing. But astonishment at his continued ‘success’ will do nothing to stem the toxic populism that he represents and fosters.
People on the left have a duty to understand how it is that so many people reject what seem like age-old standards of human decency for a strident self-defeating national selfishness. And where do we start?
Only one of my friends has admitted (that is an important qualification) to voting for Brexit. None of them admits to voting for the Conservatives. I read The Guardian and study the History of Art and live in Catalonia, not the obvious background to a right-wing populist, or a background likely to bring me into contact with other populists. But my point is, that if the numbers of those voting for Trump or Johnson can be taken as a guide to how widespread their ‘ideology’ is then I must know a fair number of people who vote for what I regard as the disturbingly right-wing, and they are the people I need to understand and interact with in the expectation of bettering not only my own understanding of what is making people tick at the moment, but also of bettering our national dialogue.
The problem, of course, is what to do next.
I reject the idea of living in a Trumpian world: virtually everything he does and says is anathema to me. But how do you change what seems to be a perniciously attractive way of looking at the world and one’s place inside it to many whom I have been able to regard (and I mean in an observational sense) as ‘other’?
Perhaps, as part of our ‘Family Wisdom’ has it, “Anything is better than nothing!” Speaking, conversation, writing, participating in political life, sharing thoughts, ideas - who knows what might eventually help, but an awareness of the divisions within society and a sensitivity towards them must surely be a step forward.
And, when I get up tomorrow, perhaps Biden might have garnered the requisite number of Electoral College votes to start the process of the reinvention of the New Normal Politics, and then we can work on the New Normal during/after Covid without worrying what the so-called Leader of the Free World might tweet off the top of his head!
