Amid the
post-election havoc was the recent gathering at Harvard University of political
strategists from the campaigns of Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hilary
Clinton, there to discuss how they won and how they lost.
Like the
election itself, the event was less than civil with shouting and accusations
flying. One man who managed to raise his voice over the din was Tony Fabrizo,
Trump’s pollster. He explained to those who managed to stop talking for a
moment his take on Trump’s victory.
“Donald Trump is post-ideological. His
movement transcends ideology,” Fabrizio said, according to the Washington Post.
“Through his own antennae – and, trust me, many times I had this conversation
with him – Donald Trump understood the fold in American politics. It’s the
reason so many Trump supporters and so many (Bernie) Sanders supporters agreed
on so many things.”
Fabrizio
appears to have an interesting point. How else to explain a liberal Democratic
billionaire, posing as a Republican conservative and supported by white
supremacists, convincing tens of millions of voters who pull from both
political parties and from all socio-economic and ethnic groups to vote for
him?
Much
of the post-election analysis has focused on the white working-class voter
turning out because they felt unattended to for so many years. Some may have bought
Trump’s claim to return manufacturing jobs and restore the Rust Belt, but
that doesn’t begin to explain the election results.
The
last time voters ushered a wealthy candidate into the White House as champion
of the working class was the height of the Great Depression. President Franklin
Roosevelt’s New Deal programs may have well saved American capitalism, but those
policies earned him the scorn of his upper-class brethren who viewed his
pragmatic approach to policies that were progressive, if not radical, as a
betrayal.
Other
than his penchant as businessman wheeler and dealer, Trump enters the White
House, and government, pretty much a blank slate. Who knows exactly what his
agenda will be – conservative-business or liberal-progressive? Or a bit of
both?
As
the first president to use social media almost exclusive of any other forms of
media, Trump appears to be feeling his way along as to how to govern. It seems
a monumental task for him; a 70-year-old man who all his life has pretty much
did things his way and succeeded.
No
doubt that is how he expects to govern, but he may have a rude awakening when
he realizes there are many – perhaps too many for him – checks and balances
that will require him to wheel and deal. He will have to negotiate with
everyone from a Senate committee chairman to the Chinese premier.
Trump’s
election has disrupted a status quo that many argue has long needed disrupting.
However, at least for a majority of Americans, Trump’s crass behavior, coarse
communications and seeming alignment with extremist groups such as white
supremacists makes him unfit to serve as president. But if the status quo
needed disrupting the only candidate in this election that could have done so
was the only non-status quo candidate among the nearly 20 who vied for the
presidency since the primaries – Trump.
Perhaps
Trump is post-ideological, elected on a post-ideological wave. Does that mean
America has an ideological vacuum? The Oxford Dictionaries defines
post-ideological as “a time in which (a particular) society is no longer characterized
by a strong adherence to political or social ideologies.”
Trump’s
pollster, Fabrizio, thinks so, as he told the gathering at Harvard’s Kennedy
School, “We really live in a world where everybody thinks that ideology is
linear, and that, ‘If you answer these 10 questions correctly, that makes you a
conservative.’ But not every conservative is pro-life. Not every conservative
is anti-gay marriage. Not every conservative puts 100 percent emphasis on this
or that.”
If
Fabrizio’s post-ideological argument is correct, then that might explain why
the media, the Clinton campaign and the majority of Americans who voted for her
missed Trump’s ascension. It might explain why voters from Christian
evangelicals to Republican conservatives to Democratic union members found
salvation in a billionaire who lives in a gilded tower in New York City.
Depending
on the influence of political leaders in power, ideological vacuums could
produce positive, progressive change. History shows they often fill with destructive
forces. This is why the white supremacist alt-right is more than worrisome. Trump
appointed an alt-right nationalist, Steve Bannon, as his senior aide. The
alt-right believe Trump has their back. Does he?
Sometimes,
ideological vacuums are filled by groups behind political leaders. After the
election, an alt-right leader, Richard Spencer, appeared at Texas A&M
University and gave a speech to about 400 people. According to the Chronicle of
Higher Education, Spencer said this when a student asked how he could claim the
United States started as an all-white nation when Native Americans were already
here when Europeans arrived:
“It was terrible, bloody and violent, but we
conquered this continent,” Spencer said. “We won and we got to define what
America means and what this continent means. America, at the end of the day,
belongs to white men.”
If this is a post-ideological era, does
America want to define itself as this? Or does America want to define itself as
what it actually is, a diverse nation fighting for equality and
inclusivity for all people?
