History Never Repeats, But It Rhymes

I am informed that the typical UKIP voter, to over-simplify the matter, was a white male of or above middle age, whose occupation is sufficiently valuable to be a level above entry jobs but which either has a low ceiling or is endangered by technological advance. In other words, the exact demographic that has shared – at least from its own perspective – in none of the gains of the past twenty years; moreover, feels strongly that gains of others have come at its expense.

The same phenomena are, unsurprisingly, at work in the US. The Jacksonian feels that America is no longer ‘his’ America; that nobody asked him for his opinion and, when he gave it, ‘they’ ignored it.

In the same way that it was far too simplistic to label UKIP a ‘right-wing’ movement, so it goes for the Trump phenomenon. After all the warnings, it just didn’t turn out that you voted UKIP and you got Labour; the ‘right-wing’ vote, such as it is, didn’t fracture as did the centre-left vote in 1983.  Similarly, those who back Trump are right-wing only by some criteria; they are, clearly, not bound by any easily-identifiable ideology.

To return to the first paragraph, this is a prime example of trying to find a suitably pleasing precedent. Donald Trump certainly isn’t a revenant Andrew Jackson; but, in terms of finding characters that fracture the convenient consensus, there are other plausible candidates. The election of 1912 has been mentioned more than once and, at face value, it looks like a solid example: the energetic Theodore Roosevelt, a man for whom tomorrow couldn’t come soon enough, tired of his replacement as Republican President, William Howard Taft, and ran as a ‘Progressive’ third-party candidate, commonly known as the Bull Moose Party from Roosevelt’s assertion that he was ‘as strong as a bull moose.’

The desire for someone – anyone! – to represent those who feel excluded by the governing class largely informs the effect of the Trump candidacy. In consequence, the election 2016 more closely resembles is that of 1968, in which the former Democrat Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, ran on an ‘American Independent’ ticket of states’ rights that arguably cost Vice-President Hubert Humphrey the election. This was a direct appeal to the Deep South, the segregationist South, who had never really got over losing the Civil war and were damned if they were going to have equality in their states.

There was certainly racism in the appeal, but we have to be rather more intelligent about these phenomena instead of dismissing them as the whoops of Neanderthals. We have to comprehend a substantial sub-stratum of the population who don’t have the skills, don’t have the voice, don’t have the professional clout to fight back in the channels we (dear reader) would employ. They feel dictated to by those above, even by those whom (they fondly imagined) were on their side. The key word to recall is ‘populism’: the appeal to a body of the electorate that feels disenfranchised and warms to a rhetorician who promises to do something – anything! – about it.

Not, I hasten to add, that Trump’s support is comprised of card-carrying segregationists. There are some dubious fringe characters, but more could be attributed to envy and resentment – which is why several commentators have noted the overlap between the appeal of Trump and that of Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Socialist running for the Democrat nomination. Feelings of inequity + feelings of exclusion + populist appeal of ‘outsider’ = Wallace and Trump and Sanders. Populist demagoguery will occasionally get you quite far in politics; sometimes as far as actual power. And that, of course, is when the real fun begins.