Trump is the consequence of a political tipping point
In political history, there are few moments more dangerous than when a tipping point occurs in the balance of power. When the centre of power shifts from one group to another, it frequently unleashes a no-holds-barred struggle between the old guard and the new. Right now in America, precisely such a political tipping point has been reached, and it goes a long way to explaining the Trump presidency.
To illustrate what happens when a political tipping point is reached, consider two historical examples: the Fijian military coup of 1987, and the American Civil War. Both can be understood in the light of a shift in the balance of power. Fiji was and is a country in which two ethnicities comprise the great majority of the total population: indigenous Fijians, and Indo-Fijians (Fijians of Indian extraction), with predictable tensions existing between the two. For most of the twentieth century the indigenous population outnumbered the Indian population. Consequently, with Fijians voting overwhelmingly along ethnic lines, from the time of independence in 1970 Fiji had always had an indigenous Prime Minister.
However, during the eighties, the faster growing Indo-Fijian population finally came to exceed the size of the native Polynesian one. In the elections of April 1987, the Indo-Fijian candidate Timoci Bavadra was elected prime minister. Just one month later he was deposed in a military coup led by General Sitiveni Rabuka. In 1990 the Fijian constitution was rewritten to ensure that the highest offices of government could only be occupied by indigenous Fijians. This sequence of events revealed that democracy in Fiji was little more than a fig leaf: the army — which was comprised almost exclusively of native Fijians — would allow democracy for as long as the interests of indigenous Fijians held sway. Once the population balance tipped, the underlying truth was exposed: Fiji was not and never had been a democracy.
In the case of the American Civil War, the tipping point that caused the war to erupt was not a shift in the balance of the population, but in the balance of slave states versus free states — that is to say states where the slave trade was legal and those where it wasn’t. At the time of the American Revolution, slavery was legal in all thirteen states. During the latter years of the 18th century, however, an increasing number of states in the north moved to outlaw slavery, so that by the turn of the century, the Union was comprised of nine Southern slave states and eight Northern free states. As the young nation expanded west and new states were created, there was increasing tension about whether these states would be free states or slave states. At stake was the balance of power at a national level. Because of the way states were represented in the United States senate, if the number of free states exceeded the number of slave states, slave states would no longer be able to promote their agenda through the national legislature. After years of tension and political machinations, in 1858 this balance of power finally shifted in favour of the free states with the admission of Minnesota into the Union as a free state. Two years later, the slave states voted to secede, and the stage was set for the Civil War.
The common theme uniting the American Civil War and the Fijian coup is a shift in the balance of power that threatened the core interests of a previously dominant interest group, resulting in the breakdown of political co-operation. In the Fijian case, the fact that indigenous Fijians had retained a stranglehold on military power meant that the matter was resolved quickly and without bloodshed, albeit at the cost of a functional democracy. In the case of the American Civil War, where no such military monopoly existed, the result was a paroxysm of violence that convulsed the nation for four years and left close to three quarters of a million dead.
The extraordinary political situation currently unfolding in the US can be understood in terms of a similar power shift. Conservative, white, protestant America is no longer the majority stakeholder in American power, at least in terms of numbers. Trump — with characteristic shamelessness — admitted as much when he declared that, if proposed Democratic reforms aimed at making voting easier were adopted, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again”. It is well known that Republicans have been using a range of techniques including gerrymandering, discriminatory identification requirements, limitations on absentee voting, and other methods, to suppress the vote of African Americans and Latinos. Current efforts to stack the legislature with conservative judges and block Democratic nominees to the Supreme Court are part of the same effort to consolidate power at a time when the demographics of America are moving ineluctably in a Democratic direction. Yet with the proportion of non-Hispanic whites in the population dropping at a rate of around 6% per decade, such dirty tricks can only work for so long.
During the Trump presidency, many observers have witnessed with stunned disbelief the disintegration of political institutions and norms that have held firm for centuries. The spectacle of a blatantly corrupt president of the United States trampling over the rule of law, telling outrageous lies on a daily basis, peddling absurd conspiracy theories and trashing the dignity of the presidential office has left many asking how such a thing could occur in the self-proclaimed heart of democracy and freedom.
Yet all this is predictable given the demographic power shift taking place. Democracy and the rule of law are sustained and empowered by collective agreement and belief, nothing more. Formal documents, monuments, rituals, imposing offices and uniforms help to sustain the fiction, but as the Fijian and Civil War examples illustrate, a shift in underlying power dynamics can cause such institutions to unravel extremely rapidly. Democrats are fighting with one hand behind their backs because they have a stake in maintaining the current political system, whereas — ironically given their nominal conservatism — Republicans no longer do. The failure of Democratic attempts to use the impeachment process to hold the president accountable revealed the futility of attempting to use legal processes against a Republican Party that has abandoned even the pretence of objectivity or due process. Republicans now will simply do whatever it takes to hold onto power. That is why Trump is able to violate some of the traditional tenets of conservative ideology — such as opposition to Russia — without losing the support of his base. In what is perceived as a fight for survival, some ideological niceties can be dispensed with.
Republicans aren’t stupid. It’s no use shrieking, “can’t you see who this man is?” They can see. They know Trump is a liar and a chauvinist, that he is venal, narcissistic, immature, petulant and unable to govern his own impulses, let alone steer a nation with wisdom. It doesn’t matter, because in a fight for your life, you don’t want a nice guy in your corner. It’s a classic case of “he may be an asshole, but he’s our asshole.” His rise shouldn’t even have been surprising; he was just the first guy to stand up and say, “gloves off”.
In truth, Republicans have known they’ve lost the fight ever since Obama was elected, and now they’re prepared to bring the institutions of government crashing down around them. So-called “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is a projection: the derangement is all on the Republican side and it is an expression of the desperation of people losing their power and lashing out at those taking it from them. This is not of course to say that racial minorities are close to achieving equality, merely that the increasing proportion of non-whites in the voting population is inevitably moving the political centre of gravity to the left, and that this shift is responsible for the increasingly desperate tactics of Republicans.
Some have described the culture war in America as a Cold Civil War, and indeed the parallels to the actual Civil War are many, and reflect the same cultural fault line. The visceral hatred of Obama among the Trump base, and Trump’s obsession with the man, spew out of the same festering wound in the American psyche: the guilt for what was done to black Americans, and the need to dehumanise the people against whom one has sinned. “Make America Great Again” was always code for “”Make America White Again”. The same fissure that split the country in two in the 1860s is opening up again.
Yet the modern day confederacy — Trumpland — is doomed by the inexorable tide of historical change. Time has moved on, the tipping point has been reached, and nothing now is capable of turning back the clock. The only question that remains is how much damage Trump and his cohort of enablers can do to America, and indeed to the world at large, as they go down.