This means that Ukraine may breathe a sigh of relief. Even
though Trump’s supporters are not going anywhere, Trump will likely go down.
Even though he has started to prepare the ground for his defeat by claiming
that the election will be rigged, people don’t like losers. Besides, Trump was
an accidental leader – he had originally meant his presidential run as a stunt
to gain some publicity. He will likely go back into business – to capitalize on
his newly found fame and to repair his shaky finances. Former Senator and
onetime presidential candidate Gary Hart recently speculated that Trump’s sidling
up to Putin may be a stratagem to solicit a bit of post-election business – to
develop properties in Russia under the wing of his friend Vladimir.
Whoever replaces Trump as America’s No. 1 populist – and
it can be anyone, from extremist political commentator Ann Coulter to Duck
Dynasty’s Willie Robertson – will not necessarily embrace Trump’s election
proposals. Pro-Kremlin pronouncements may go by wayside, and even the
“beautiful wall” on the Mexican border and the ban on Muslim may be forgotten. True,
the audiences at Trump’s rallies hoot with delight when he talks about all
this, but this is merely because they see it as a poke in the eye of the
Washington establishment.
I sometime wonder what would happen if Trump declared something
like “Islamic terrorists were right, folks. They were right. Crooked Hillary’s
America deserved 9/11.” I suspect they would have cheered that too – for real,
unlike Muslim residents of Jersey City, New Jersey, who according to yet
another Trump lie cheered the destruction of the World Trade Center from across
the Hudson.
This points to the real source of Trump’s success: his
supporters no longer consider the United States, in the way it has developed as
a liberal, open-minded, inclusive, secular and highly multicultural,
multiracial nation their country. The have been alienated from the government
in Washington which they do not consider their government.
And they have a point. The United States is mostly run for the
benefit of the newly rich – the highly educated urban elites who manage
American corporations, drive technological progress, develop properties and
finance economic activity. White males without college degrees living in the
South, the Rust belt and other parts between the two coasts don’t have the skills
to prosper in the new economic environment and find themselves marginalized.
Between 10% and 15% of the country’s population not only
control more than 80 percent of America’s net worth, but they have reaped more
than 100 percent of benefits from Barack Obama’s economic recovery since 2009 –
meaning that while they have become wealthier, the rest of the country, and
most notably the white blue collar America, has become noticeably poorer.
Today’s typical 15 percenter was born into a middle-class
family in the pre-Ronald Reagan era, a middle class that itself was a product
of the New Deal: the rise of trade unions in the 1930s and their strength in
the 1950s, the minimum wage and a variety of benefits and, after World War II,
the GI Bill. Members of that middle class benefitted from the opening of
quality college education to kids of average means, which created remarkable
opportunities for learning and advancement.
This middle class is now disintegrating and the opportunities
are shrinking for the rapidly growing American underclass. Actually, they have
been closed already for a while. Michael Moore’s documentary Roger and Me, detailing the decline of
the blue-collar middle class in Flint, Michigan, was released in 1989. Since
then, lumpenization of America spread from the automotive heartland throughout
the middle of the country, deepened and affected three generation of Americans.
One of the reasons immigrants are “taking American jobs” is
that younger people from Europe and Asia, having received cheap – and often
free – quality education at home, are filling jobs in America which locals
simply are not qualified to do. Paradoxically, people from Asia, Latin America
and Eastern Europe are better adapted to succeeding in modern America than a large
number of American-born citizens.
If you take a house tour of palatial “cottages” in Providence,
Rhodes Island, you might hear your tour guide explain that the luxury you see
around you was possible in the pre-income tax era and that the introduction of
income tax in 1913 marked the beginning of an end of the robber baron era.
A century later income tax exists but that almost doesn’t
matter. Rates on the rich are pretty low – in the 1950s, the top marginal rate
could be as high as 93 percent – and besides, the rich have become adept at
protecting their income from the taxman.
America is a country of private wealth
and public decay.
The rich don’t want to pay their fair share and are able to
avoid doing so with the connivance of American politicians. The rich get richer
while the Federal government is going deeper and deeper into debt despite the
fact that spending is being cut and the government has abdicated many of its
responsibilities.
Meanwhile, 47 percent of Americans don’t make enough to pay income
taxes.
We now have a pre-World War I situation – excesses of wealth
concentrated in relatively few hands, no trade unions and rampant speculation
in financial markets, leading to regular, and increasingly more severe,
financial crises. Money also buys politics – witness the Republican sweep of
local elections, courtesy of the Koch brothers, and the massive inflow of cash
into elections at all levels.
Less than one third of the country believe that it is headed in
a right direction. What the fifteen-percenters refuse to see is how much the
lower middle class’s embrace of the Second Amendment – even if gun owners
themselves, along with their family members and kids, end up being shot – is a
way to claim at least some power.
The real danger for the world is not an alliance between
Washington and Moscow along the lines suggested by Trump – which is remote, in
any case – but the weakening of the United States which this social split
implies.
In the 1960s and 1970s a large number of Americans – the Baby Boomers
– similarly felt alienated from their country. What followed was a period of
social turmoil, political drift and, as a consequence, a severe weakening of
the United States on the international arena in the second half of the 1970s.
During the Carter presidency, with the Soviet Union gaining ground in Asia,
Africa and even Latin America and Iran taking American hostages with impunity,
there was a very real sense that the West was losing the Cold War.
Back then, Washington had a considerable margin for error.
Its only
rival was the Soviet Union, a colossus with feet of clay which was soon to
enter a terminal crisis of its own.
Now, with the emergence of China, the
ungovernability of much of Africa and the Middle East, the rise of global
terrorism and the possibility of unchecked nuclear proliferation, another
period of isolationism and introspection in the United States may prove fatal
for the world order.
Domestic turmoil could prove fatal for American power and
influence in the world.
That would be a tragedy for many countries, and Ukraine in
particular would be left dangerously exposed.
