Trump and American Left

Donald Trump’s rhetoric, promises and even at times his policies (when they see the light of day) are as far from the neo-con/neo-liberal status quo of contemporary American policies as one could have deemed imaginable for a US President, not long ago.

When one analyses his policy rhetoric, Donald Trump remains something of a Robert Taft style conservative. The defining characteristics of such an ethos is an opposition to foreign interventions and the bloated ‘moral’ (aka immoral) justifications for such wars, a strong sense of tradition and patriotism, a robust defence of both free speech and the American conception of low-church Christianity and perhaps most interestingly “a touch of socialism”.

While Senator Robert Taft was known as “Mr. Republican”, in the final years of his life, there were whispers in the Republican Party that Taft had “a touch of socialism” about him. This was mainly due to his support for government housing programmes after the Second World War.

While the self-identified left of modern America are rushing to portray Trump as an un-reconstructed reactionary. An element of his recent press conference wherein he discussed the fallout from the incidents in Virginia was classic socialism.

When asked, “What do you think needs to be done to overcome the racial divides in this country?”, Trump replied,

“Well I really think jobs can have a big impact. I think if we continue to create jobs — over a million, substantially more than a million — and you can see just the other day, the car companies coming in with fox- you know, FoxConn. I think if we continue to create jobs at levels that I'm- that I'm creating jobs, I think that's going to have a tremendous impact, positive impact on race relations”.

Trump continued, adding,

“And the other thing, very important, I believe wages will start going up. They haven't gone up for a long time. I believe wages now, because the economy is doing so well with respect to employment and unemployment, I believe wages will start to go up. I think that will have a tremendously positive impact on race relations. Thank you”.

The very notion that relations between social sects can be improved by material gain is a classic tenant of socialism, one which contrasted itself against the determinism of so-called reactionaries as well as against the utilitarianism of classical liberalism.

Now of course, Donald Trump is no socialist. He is an icon of America’s capitalist free markets and he certainly doesn’t have the style of a typical socialist leader. However, from Disraeli to Bismarck, Tsar Alexander II to Vladimir Putin, leaders who are associated with traditional conservatism have often embraced elements of policy making which one more typically associates with the materialist dialectic of the traditional left.

The fact that Trump’s remarks about material wealth in the form of job creation having the ability to ease racial tensions were so readily dismissed by the so-called contemporary left, is a sign of two things. First of all, that such individuals judge Trump more on his style than on substance (which he does actually have, for better or worse).

Secondly and more importantly, the modern left have bought so deeply into the identity politics narrative that they have totally forsaken the idea that fairly distributed prosperity can unite social divisions.

This concept is lost on the identity merchants primarily because many of their leaders are economically well-off. When one has the latest iPhone, a good job and a place to live, it is easy to spend one’s weekend putting on masks and agitating for identity based ‘revolution’. The realities of those whom the identitarian leaders putatively fight for are far from the protest and riots. They are the people struggling to find work, struggling to feed their children, struggling in many cases to stay off the street.

The schism between the American nightmare of poverty and the inverted American dream of doing whatever one wants with the luxury of knowing that they will be well-off one way or another, is the chasm which delivered Donald Trump the votes of the so-called rust-belt that were very much up for grabs.

Strangely, the identitarian politics of the contemporary American left has a proven record of failure. When foreign actors encouraged Yugoslav citizens to consider their ethnic identity before a common Yugoslav civic identity, the country fell into chaos and its former constituent parts are on the whole much worse off today than they were prior to the 1990s. In today’s India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken the country of Jawaharlal Nehru, a place which strove to integrate Indians in spite of caste and confession and turned it into a country where Muslims, Sikhs and others are forced to define themselves against the tide of Hindu extremism rather than simply as fellow Indians. Both the crumbled Yugoslavia and Modi’s sectarian India have lost many of the economic advantages that were actualised and more possible in a country united civically rather than divided by sects.

Whether Donald Trump is the ‘real deal’ or is just a good marketing man using socialism when he sees fit and other themes for other occasions, is not relevant in this instance. The point is that a genuine left wing would applaud Trump on his jobs rhetoric and hold him to account in respect of making it happen.

Instead, those who self-identify as any number of social groups continue to forget the poor who are no longer identifiable at all to the vacuous American left.