The horrific attempt to assassinate Donald Trump will turbocharge the polarisation of American politics. The security lapses are already grist for the mill of conspiracy theories. Many senior Republicans jumped to conclusions and immediately blamed it on Joe Biden. Democratic politicians have condemned the assassination attempt. But it will not prevent Republicans from using loose internet talk by marginal elements in the “left” ecosystem to underscore that any criticism of Trump’s potential threat to democracy is an incitement to violence, and that opponents of Trump are responsible, never mind the identity of the perpetrator. This incident will add to the nervousness about the potential for violence in American democracy.
But while the politics of assassination and the focus on Biden’s age will continue, it is also important to see the strangeness of this ideological moment in American politics.
Despite its avowedly rightward tilt, the Republican Party is also trying to occupy much of the ground of the Left. There are two critiques of the American state: The Left critique that America has under-invested in the state, and the Right critique that there is regulatory sclerosis. The problem is that there is truth to both critiques, but often in their ordinary lives in accessing health or housing, or small businesses, many ordinary Americans experience the latter more directly than the former. So the critique of the state can acquire a populist tinge.
The Republican Party is trying to forge a coalition of extremes: It advocates tax cuts for the super rich but it is also positioning itself as the party that has instinctive identification with the working class. In some ways, Trump produced an identification with his persona amongst sections of the white working class that had long felt neglected by mainstream politics. The selection of JD Vance only underscores this phenomenon. His is a quintessential story Americans like: A self-made success who rose out of poverty. He is hyper articulate and already has four successful careers by the age of 39 (marine, author, investor, senator). And he can combine them with two great political skills: Marketing and an ambitious nose for power. More interestingly, he has a set of ideas that are very much part of the Left’s repertoire: The project of re-industrialisation of America and through that the reinvigoration of the working class. Interestingly, he is on record praising the anti-monopoly, anti-Big Tech trust busting of the Biden administration.
Immigration has always been a difficult issue in American politics. In the end, the Biden Administration has to follow much of Trump’s cues, especially on the southern border, blurring the difference between the two parties. But there are two interesting moves, again captured by Vance. The first is explicitly tying immigration to the fate of the American working class. In some ways, Vance makes a classic Marxist argument: Elites love cheap labour, and whatever the benefits of immigration, they accrue to elites at the expense of working class wages. He has a pointed response to the argument that there are certain jobs “whites” will not do and therefore immigrants are needed. The response is that they will not do it at the low price points currently offered and facilitated by immigration. One can debate this proposition but it aligns the immigration debate with class politics.
The one thing Republicans have sensed is that immigration is about class politics as much about race. The second is that like Tories in Britain the argument focuses on well integrated immigrants. In some ways, the Republicans now stage manage a choreographed multi-cultural iconography as well as any other party. Again, JD Vance becomes a powerful image in this choreography: A multi-racial family, as a perfect example of what good integration looks like.
The third issue is foreign policy, where the margins of uncertainty about what Trump would do are the highest. This is an area where the Democrats have lost their sheen. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine had no justification whatsoever, and one ought not to confuse pretexts with justification. But the fact that it happened at all, and that now the war grinds to a protracted stalemate with no end-game in sight, will be a cross for Democrats to bear. On Israel and Gaza, the Left wing of the Democratic Party so lost any distinguishing high ground by its inability to call the Biden Administration to account that Trump seems no worse a bet. But the strangest challenge for the Left is to reckon with the fact that Trump plausibly passes off as more of an anti-war candidate; and JD Vance more as a spokesman who understands the limits of American power.
Biden’s version of liberal internationalism has been a deep disappointment both at home and abroad, and the mercurial uncertainties of what Trump might bring cannot disguise this fact. The Democratic Party will be doing itself a disservice if the focus on Trump prevents it from seeing the ideological challenges it faces. How much of a threat is Trump to democracy? On a precautionary principle, one might say that one should not wait to find out. But it has been difficult to articulate it as an existential threat. All the signs are that a second Trump administration might want to radically remake all institutions in its image, and like all nationalists create a chill by intensifying a hunt for imagined internal ideological enemies. Freedom will be eroded, institutional quality might be degraded further, but will it be the end of democracy? Voters are not convinced. But it is a striking fact that at the moment, it is the Left that has lost the political credentials on free speech.
The culture war on wokeness remains important to Republicans less for its substance than as a way of buttressing its distance from elites, a symbolic expression of class warfare. The only place where there is a clear distinction with some political bite is on the issue of abortion: An example of a tangible freedom that Republicans are already taking away and that still has mobilisation potential. Here, Trump has had to fudge by making it a federalism issue.
The problem for the Democratic Party is that the focus on the persona of Trump, and the preoccupation with Biden clinging onto power by all means, is obscuring the fact that Trump is acquiring more ideological coherence, governing plausibility and undercutting Democrats on their own terms. No election is over till it is over. But democracy in danger is not enough of an argument. The effects of January 6 have disappeared long ago.
The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express
