After eighteen months of personal attacks, invective, distortions of the truth and outright lies, the dispiriting 2016 US presidential election has come to a dramatic, if unexpected, ending. Though the result, which saw Donald Trump mount a remarkable victory, clearly does not satisfy the half (or more, given the final popular vote tally) of the American electorate who voted against him (and much of the world’s governing elites), it needs to be reiterated that America is a pluralist democracy which has just had a free and fair election, the result of which power is in the process of being transferred in an orderly manner without coercion or violence. That, in and of itself, is rare in a world where many countries practice “guided” democracies or outright dictatorships. What was also extraordinary, was that a nation built on ideals of self-sacrifice, meritocracy and public spiritedness ended up nominating two dynasts who at times acted as bigger than the office they were seeking.
Trump’s victory was the coda to a tumultuous change cycle which saw the rise of movements which powered the diametrically opposed electoral campaigns of left and right: Brexit, the fall of David Cameron, the imminent retirement (electorally forced or otherwise) of Francois Hollande, the rise of isolationist, right and left wing parties with the mutual chorus of socio-political xenophobia, the popularity of the Occupy movement, right wing party successes in Austria, France, Italy; backlashes against refugees, illegal (and legal) immigrants.
These events are all logical outcomes of a slow-burning skein of discontent underlying industrialized economies. These outward manifestations are only the most obvious ones. If continually unaddressed, they will build and explode into acts of shocking impact with the potential to rend the very fabric of our socio-political order.
It’s not quite 1968 – we have been spared massive protest riots in the streets, horrific assassinations (i.e. Martin Luther King; Robert Kennedy) and military coups – but what is out there cannot be ignored. A deep vein of discontent runs beneath the polished surfaces of our proud ‘First World’ societies, fueled by a sense of profound alienation betwwen the working (and even, middle) classes from the elites, and all the so-called media-hyped artificial “markers” of success (i.e. endless television programs about rich people and their toys) which encourage a false materialism that can only ever truly provide transitory pleasure. In America it’s widely referred to as “the death of the American Dream,” the feeling that no matter how hard one works, how much one “plays by the rules,” getting ahead to achieve two cars in the garage, a cottage, and the ability to send the kids to college has become ever more elusive.
Asian countries like Japan have long felt this malaise. Real salaries have not appreciably increased over the last decade even as living costs have steadily risen. The economy is hobbled by maddening deflation as the yen’s extraordinary levels causes the exports to become prohibitively priced, thus limiting growth, expansion of employment opportunities and suppressing living ages. Gone are the days when one could stroll down any Tokyo street to find perfectly good and workable merchandise (i.e. televisions, electronics) put out for the garbage collectors for the sole reason they were not the "newest" model. Groups of former salarymen still wander aimlessly around parks, suits becoming increasingly frayed, briefcases filled with yellowed papers from jobs that let them go months, or even years ago. They would rather still try to keep up appearances, clinging to past glories, in the name of maintaining "face."
Encouraged by government, and the elites which swim around them like so many remoras swarming over sharks, the population has come to think of wants as needs. Economies struggle with this self-perpetuating imbalance as companies concentrate not on producing enough food for everyone or ensuring that goods and services are allocated to the most crucial societal areas, but rather to keep producing non-necessities. This, of course in turn, causes a supply issue as necessities run short and prices on basic items rise. Worse, there is a sense of entitlement which, in their minds translates into “it’s my right to have…<fill in the blank>.” And when they are told that there is not enough of something or that something is too expensive for their budget, grumbling begins. Too much grumbling leads to annoyance which leads to angst, anger which culminates in frustration.
It's not limited to goods and services. Education, health care, the effects of this malaise is comprehensive: students emerge from highly-ranked universities (who ranks them the 'best anyways, and by what measurable, real-world criteria?) expecting to become managers and earn good wages right away, but then are dismayed when the offers don't come and they are instead told of a certain quality called "experience;" senior citizens who have helped build economic success through lifetimes of quiet toil end up forgotten in nursing homes crammed like sardines.
The problem with this kind of anger and frustration is that, invariably, citizens become enraged, and enraged people start to look for others to blame for their perceived misfortune. Governments then invariably make the same historical mistakes: first they blame other “external factors” like supply, demand, logistics, the global slowdown (take your pick). They then exacerbate the situation by offering goodies such as tax credits, rebates, free subway rides for seniors, tax relief…and the cycle builds and builds and repeats and they dig a deeper and deeper hole as using the people’s own money for bread and circuses. The deficit balloons, the national debt explodes, and one, by one, the services get cut back in order to “balance the budget.”
It happened to Canada in the 1990’s, the UK in the 80’s and is coming soon to an economy near you if any of the above sounds familiar and your government is of the 'spend and spend and don’t’ worry about where we get the money' variety.
The good news is that this actually works. It may be the economic version of cutting off a limb to save the patient for it condemns a nation to high taxes, fewer services and quite a lot of loud protest and societal disruption, but it works. A leaner, more efficient governmental structure emerges, less compassionate, more focused in its priorities and limitations perhaps, but it also breeds a society that is more self-aware, self-reliant and resilient. Canada has weathered downturns more effectively than many of its G8 equivalents and is poised to do so again.
Then there are societies who never make the hard choices. These strive to avoid structural reforms but attempt to have their cake and eat it too by preaching resilience yet perpetuating a system that keeps the people soft, weak and therefore, pliable. All at the same time. They tell their citizens they should be proud because they are special and strong but do nothing to test that assumption by sharing the truth with them. They hide the fact that the unemployment figures looks so darn low because it factors in part-time workers and senior citizens who gasp and wheeze while pushing heavy carts stacked with dirty plates at food courts. All the while the say “You never had it so good!” while gently turning up the heat so that the citizen lobsters do not realize that they will soon boil. Slowly, surely, things go up incrementally: the price of staples – rice, butter – followed by heating, hydro; electricity; medical coverage and insurance premiums. Small steps, but the trajectory is ever upwards.
We know where this ends. As people get angrier and angrier they look around for something – someone – to blame. The first casualty is usually the Truth, murdered long ago when the Powers That Be decided not to tell people that things were perhaps not so rosy as they were led to believe. It’s not going to be dead alone for long though, as blame shifts to the “foreigners who are taking OUR jobs” to “all those damn immigrants” and “why are we letting all those people in anyways?” If not caught early enough this proletariat revolt, fuelled by an acute sense of disenfranchisement as people see others get ahead, make more money, drive better cars, waterski behind many more yachts, will direct its fire at all of the elites whom they believe have actively conspired to suppress them.
Elites are vulnerable precisely because their members invariably feel secure, superior and self-centred. They dismiss the Occupy movement as young vagrants or oversexed artists with too much estrogen or testosterone. They look down at the those who work at Wal-Mart whose kids have holes in their clothes or live in the boonies, and spend their free time shooting wild hogs from the back porch. We know how the world works, they assure themselves. That this view can lead to smugness or the perception of condescension to those more concerned with tangible matters like paying an overdue phone bill is not often concerning to the elites.
Therein lies the rub. The view over the South Lawn of the White House is no different than that from the Elysee Palace, 10 Downing Street, the Kremlin, the halls of Harvard, or the offices of Goldman Sachs, Sumitomo Mitsui, or Samsung. Where they see stability, others see instability; where they see the logic of market forces and globalization, others perceive greedy corporations
This kind of indefinite concern, if unaddressed, can metastasize into doubts about government coherence, vision and strategy, and very quickly build into resentment against the entire established order. Timed with an election cycle, it finds expression in the populist politics of "insurgent movements." (i.e. Pat Buchanan's 1992 bid to challenge President George (41) Bush's reelection; Ross Perot's 19% of the popular vote in the general election). 2016 was truly unusual in that the US saw insurgencies from the Left (Bernie Sanders) and the Right (Donald Trump) squeeze out the anointed candidate of the elite centre, Hillary Clinton. The eventual victor, Trump, will find that in order to govern he must inch towards the centre while somehow satisfying his base. If he does not, his administration might fault victim to the axiom that all revolutions devour their children.
The clear lesson for democracies, “guided” or not, is that in the United States the political establishment and its associated elites have been toppled: this includes legions of consultants, the media, talking-heads, pontificating academicians who’d specialized in theories without actually accumulating the experience, market-tested language and catchphrases which sounded good in theory but stilted and canned when repeated, focus groups, polling, triangulation, the ground game now appear utterly archaic in the age of Trump. All fell to someone with both a simple, clear message, and the ability to deliver that message leveraging on social media – he didn’t need policies, just attitude. Against this kind of onslaught, conventional wisdom is helpless.
Preventing such an outcome might, in the short term, be a fool’s errand, given that virtually every industrialized nation is under the sway of their localized version of the elites which were so recently vanquished. These entrenched interests must ask themselves a fundamental question: what are we missing? Trump, Duterte, and Brexit happened because the usual mechanisms of detecting subtle to seismic shifts in public opinion were betrayed by the simplest of actions: people kept their opinions to themselves. No one would overtly say they were voting for the Donald, Duterte or to leave the EU precisely because those views were being so openly derided by the establishments which were seeking a much different outcome. However, in the privacy of the voting booth, they exercised their rights and, for some, held their noses to register their displeasure.
What then, is to be done? What chance do the elites have of reducing the chance of missing potentially lethal shifts in public opinion?
The first step is to understand that in a world largely built around indirect rule (i.e. American presidential and Commonwealth country parliamentary contests), sweeping changes are not usually the result of wholesale decisions to vote one way or another. It’s virtually never a stampede, but the result of a tactical shift – to send a message, register a protest vote, or just because one doesn’t like to betray voting intentions. Quite often, the difference is a matter of 1.5 – 5% of the voting electorate. Take the recent US elections: each major political party has a rock hard base vote – the True Believers – constituting about 41% of the population. Historically, Democrats and Republicans battle over for at least 60% of the 19% that is left, understanding that not everyone will turn out. This net percentage is a disparate group, whose composition is highly fluid: Independents, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Gays, and what Richard Nixon (the master of misdirection) deliberately mislabelled the “Great, Silent Majority,” and Donald Trump called his voters – disaffected middle-aged white men. It is this fungible percentage – if concentrated in the right states or constituencies, that can swing elections. In most political systems today, the winning side does NOT have to get the majority of the votes.
Unfortunately, a number of countries decide to jury-rig a political process to ensure an electoral edge for one party or another. This gerrymandering can only last so long before it becomes blatantly obvious and has the opposite effect by eroding the voting public’s faith in both their institutions and those who would run them. This was certainly the case in the 2012 presidential contest when African-Americans and Latinos, furious at Republican attempts to withdraw some constituency borders compensated by surging their voting numbers to deliver results strong enough to re-elect Barack Obama (In comparison to the election of 2008, about 1.7 million additional Black voters reported going to the polls in 2012, as did about 1.4 million additional Hispanics and about 550,000 additional Asians). It can also fall victim to a Trump-like figure whose simplicity and clarity of message combines with public disaffection and personal charisma to move the dial enough in just enough places to tilt the results.
Rather than attempting, as they have done for years, to manufacture consent, governing elites should allow dissenting voices to be heard. If managed properly and given the right avenues for expression, this can provide crucial safety valves for public steam to be released and mitigate feelings of disenfranchisement. By-elections, referenda on clear questions framed in unambiguous terms with the stark implications of decisions taken, are some means to do so. Televised town halls could also be held with full transparency. The blogosphere can be opened up for debate, with no areas out of bounds, giving room for free and fair discussion. There is a risk, of course, that opinions contrary to those held to be palatable for the elites will be voiced, but that is a risk any ruling agglomeration should take. If a government truly feels that its policies are correct and appropriate, it must impartially frame the context, subject the proposed policy to open debate, and attempt to defeat opposing views in the theatre of the mind and heart.
There will be times when, after all discussion is over and viewpoints laid out, when governments will have to take action despite majority opinion, yet allowing the airing of dissent will go some way to ensuring that opposing viewpoints will have their say. The negatives inherent in repressing alternative views are far more dangerous than airing them.
There is a definite Weimar Republic feel to the world right now. The population is showing an inclination to be replaced by men on horseback - Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte, Vladimir Putin - with purported solutions and a simplistic message akin to, "Only I can solve your problems!" The overriding prerogative for those elites is the need to take corrective actions before events snowball beyond their ability to influence, a process that could take days, weeks, months of years. However, if they read the wrong signals, or take the wrong actions, or react in conventional ways, there can only be one outcome...
