For more than two months, the world’s only superpower and “indispensable nation” has been completely consumed by a debate about President Donald Trump’s wall on the border with Mexico, a structure which will solve none of America’s illegal immigration, crime and drug problems, to say nothing of various other problems facing the country. Worse, despite declaring a national emergency to ensure funding for his wall, Trump has no intention of actually building it. For a variety of practical reasons, the wall will never be built, and, moreover, the next U.S. president will probably tear down the completed portions as a symbolic first act of the new administration.
It is as if Trump, who was revealed recently to do very little actual work at the White House – yet another characteristic he shares with Russia’s Vladimir Putin – has imposed the wall debate on America just to waste time. Yet, the wall and the situation which surrounds it are emblematic of the current state of the American nation.
Think of how a traditional Hollywood movie would have treated the subject of the wall. It would probably go something like this: The Government built a looming, impenetrable titanium border wall. It is guarded by soldiers in full combat gear, electronic killers, drones, German shepherds, the whole nine yards. A kid from Guatemala needs to get across to rescue his mother and little sister who got themselves in trouble in America. A gruff rancher living near the border, a man of few words but a big heart, befriends the kid and helps him outsmart ICE agents and the police.
Americans have always been on the side of the underdog, and Hollywood has always exploited that. Its movies follow the classic script of the early Star Wars series, in which the powerful Empire faces a ragtag band of free spirits armed with jerry-rigged weapons.
Being on the side of the underdog is a sign of strength. It is the strong and the independent who stand up for the weak and confront bullies, both in everyday life and in politics. That’s how the Old World used to see Americans – from the Civil War when the North went to war to put an end to the institution of slavery, to the Lincoln Brigade fighting Hitler and Mussolini in Spain and the cheerful, generous liberators of Europe in 1945.
Much of it was legend, but legends are based on facts. And facts are different today. Trump’s America, embodied by his rallies (he held several dozen of them in the two years since his election, each attended by thousands), are not a bunch that are bent on defending the underdogs or sympathizing with the weak. They don’t stand up to bullies. On the contrary, Trump spends hours insulting and bullying everyone who comes to his mind, attacking illegal immigrants, refugees, Democrats, the FBI, the free press – and his mobs squeal with delight.
That’s because they no longer see themselves as strong. Trump’s Americans, his base that consistently makes up 30-40% of citizens – i.e., the largest single voting block – are convinced that they are now the underdogs. They can’t protect anyone and need protection themselves – from rapists and drug dealers pouring across the southern border, from African Americans at home, from China and other thieving trading partners, from devious NATO allies, from domestic liberal elites, from gay and transgender people, etc., etc.
And at long last they have found their protector. It is a highly successful self-made billionaire who was always in command on his reality TV show. They have taken an image created by Trump’s TV producers for The Apprentice to be the real thing.
Throughout his presidency, Trump has stayed in character from his show. Stanislavsky might have shouted his famous: “I don’t believe you!”, but Trump’s supporters lap it up. The way he talks about his base at his rallies is very much like a father talking about his children. And those crowd of overweight men and women, armed to the teeth and mostly in their middle age, are in fact his kids. He is their Daddy Don. He alone can fix it. Or so he says.
To see an exact parallel, watch Russian President Vladimir Putin (very much Trump’s role model) performing his annual TV chat with the Russian nation. Or, more precisely, with his children. Callers ask him to help them with a variety of minor problems, which he fixes with a benign smile in a splendid deus ex-machina fashion.
What links those browbeaten Russians with their humble appeals to Putin and MAGA hat-wearing Americans? Why, economic insecurity of course.
America is still a land of opportunity. Maybe even more so than in any other time of its glorious history. You can very quickly go from a penniless grad student to a billionaire. But it is also a winner-take-all economy. If you are a blue-collar worker, you have to hustle several underpaid part-time jobs to support a family. And even if you have a decent job, you don’t have job security, you can be bankrupted by a medical emergency in your family and you don’t have much of a possibility to pay for your children’s college education.
Mid-America has become a blighted landscape plagued by social problems, family breakup and drugs.
Putin’s Russia is also a land of opportunity. If you can plug into one of the oligarchic-bureaucratic-security structures that rule the country you will become wealthy. If not, you drag a pretty miserable existence.
It turns out that when people lose their economic security they rarely fight for political power which could force those who do exceptionally well in an economic system to give back some of that wealth to others who created that system. On the contrary, they run for protection. Like medieval serfs, they start looking for a kind patron. Like Trump or Putin – who of course have no interest in really helping them.
This suggests that various “socialist” proposals advanced by progressive politicians in America to impose a tax on excessive wealth are not going to be supported by American voters. Indeed, why would billionaires protect us if we are being so nasty to them? Let them keep their billions and hope that some scraps somehow trickle down.
