Will New Zealand’s Body-Politic Be Snatched By Trumpism?

“They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next! You’re next!”

WHO CAN FORGET the penultimate scene of the 1956 movie classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The wild-eyed doctor, stumbling down the highway, trying desperately to warn his fellow citizens: “They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next! You’re next!”

Ostensibly science-fiction, the movie shuddered with political unease. Something had taken over the American body-politic. People had begun to question whether their neighbours were still their neighbours: people to eat, drink, talk and argue with; recognisably loyal Americans. Had something really turned them into something else? Something alien?

The crisis currently gripping the United States is far from over. Within 72 hours, it is possible that catastrophic violence will have broken out in all 50 state capitols – as well as in Washington DC. The fanatical followers of President Donald J. Trump have called a million of their far-right comrades onto the streets – with their guns. If even half that number show up, armed to the teeth, the US authorities will face the greatest challenge to the constitutional integrity of the republic since 1861.

Hyperbole? Not really. There are growing fears at the highest levels of the federal government that a so-far-undetermined percentage of law enforcement officers and military personnel may have secretly repudiated their oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”.

They are concerned that Americans may encounter at the state level the same curious reluctance on the part of law enforcement to confront and challenge what was clearly an insurrectionary mob hellbent on preventing the Congress from certifying President-Elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College majority.

A number of congressmen and women have reported to the American documentary film-maker, Michael Moore, that when they parked their cars outside the Capitol Building on the morning of Wednesday, 6 January, they were struck by how much it felt like a Saturday. Where were the Capitol Police? Why was the place so quiet? Asking around, Moore learned that out of the more than 2,000 Capitol Police personnel available, barely a fifth had been rostered-on for duty that fateful Wednesday.

This was in spite of the fact that the hostile intentions of the tens-of-thousands of angry Americans summoned to Washington by President Trump had been flagged for days. To the congress-persons and their jittery staff-members, the situation must have seemed eerily reminiscent of the scene in The Godfather where Michael Corleone arrives at the hospital in which is father lies gravely wounded, only to find the place more-or-less deserted, his Police guard withdrawn, and the imminence of a second “hit” palpable.

The hit came in Washington, claiming five lives, and avoiding perhaps hundreds more only by virtue of the bravery and quick-wittedness of such loyal Capitol Police officers as were willing to do their duty. That, and a fair measure of dumb luck saw the insurrection – the coup d’état – thwarted.

Whether America’s luck will hold until 12:01pm on Wednesday, 20 January 2021, when Joe Biden assumes the powers of the USA’s Commander-in-Chief, remains to be seen. With Donald Trump still in possession of the awesome weaponry of the presidency right up until mid-day on the twentieth, the survival of American democracy must be considered an open question.

It’s easy, so far from these daunting events, to feel smug. New Zealanders, we are confident, could never disgrace themselves so completely as Trump’s lumpen stormtroopers. Such confidence is, however, misplaced. New Zealand’s political system may differ considerably from that of the United States, but culturally we are blood brothers. The same racial neuroses, born of the same historical transgressions, afflict both peoples.

Americans and New Zealanders, and in this context those terms refer to the descendants of the European immigrants who subjugated the indigenous populations of both countries and built upon their confiscated territories what they anticipated proudly would become a shining (white) city on a hill, have much in common. Both peoples were raised in the deadly coils of Nineteenth Century capitalism and the blood-soaked imperial networks that kept it fed. Slavery and its successor institutions may have made the culture of the United States more vicious, but the racism that exonerated both peoples’ colonial excesses is embedded no less deeply.

As the Twenty-First Century gathers momentum, and the moral compromises of the Twentieth begin to fray, New Zealanders must accept that the makings of “Trumpism” are here already.

We are next.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 15 January 2021.

Not Quite Enough "Passionate Intensity".

The Fire And The Fury: And so, they came out and voted for him – four million more of them (and counting) than turned out for Trump in 2016. Not quite enough, it would seem, to keep their Rough Beast in the White House. But close. Far too close.

PRESIDENT BIDEN. It has a reassuring ring. A democratic ring, too, given that more Americans have voted for Joe Biden than for any other presidential candidate in US history. That is hardly surprising, since the last time such a large percentage of eligible Americans turned out to vote the year was 1900 – twenty years before US women secured the franchise! And yet, in spite of all these hopeful portents, the world is not ready to cheer – not yet.

Because it is close. Very close. So much closer than, in theory, it should be. In theory, a big turnout equals a big Democratic Party victory. For decades, the political scientists have argued that if it is poor and marginalised Americans who are boosting the numbers voting, then, overwhelmingly, they will be voting for the party which, ever since the Great Depression of the 1930s, has presented itself as the friend of the ordinary American working man and woman.

That theory now lies in tatters. The huge surge in voting numbers has, in large measure, been a bi-partisan surge. Yes, the Democrats have turned out their vote, but so have the Republicans. The latter’s strategists learned the art of the “ground game” from, of all people, Barack Obama, whose campaign team pioneered new and highly effective methods of identifying and mobilising the Democratic vote. Even those pundits sympathetic to the Democratic Party have conceded the superiority of the Republicans’ ground game in key battleground states.

But it wasn’t just the party’s ground game that turned out the Republican vote, it was Trump himself. With the energy of a man half his age, the President criss-crossed the United States on Air Force One, sometimes speaking to as many as four rallies in a single day.

The veteran Republican strategist, Karl Rove, famously advised those wishing to understand American politics to watch the television news with the sound turned down. Anyone following his advice over the course of the final few days of the campaign would have seen Trump, pumped-up and punching the air in front of rapturous crowds. Biden, careful and Covid-wary, spoke to car-parks full of masked and socially-distanced voters. With the sound down you wouldn’t even have been able to hear the beeping of their horns.

Observing these very different events from afar, it is difficult not to be reminded of the following lines from W. B. Yeats’ famous poem, The Second Coming:

The Blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

It is also very difficult not to be reminded of the political magic of the UK Leave Campaign’s Dominic Cummings – the man who made Brexit happen. With help from the notorious Cambridge Analytica, Cummings was able to communicate directly with people who, for years, had given up on politics as a mug’s game. The sort of people who chuckled when someone joked: “Don’t vote – politicians always win.” The fatal mistake of the Remain Campaign was to assume that these non-voters would stay non-voters. Their chief pollster, one of the best in the UK, built that assumption into his data analysis. That’s why he got it so wrong. That’s why the Remainers never saw Dominic coming.

It is highly probable that the US pollsters made a very similar sort of error. Certainly, Michael Moore, the left-wing US film-maker, who famously called the election for Trump as early as June of 2016, has been warning anyone willing to listen that the pollsters were dramatically under-counting Trump’s supporters.

Moore knew this because he’d made it his business to go to the places where Trump supporters lived: to the trailer parks and the endless miles of soulless suburban tract-housing. He knew because he had sought out, as Paul Simon puts it in his song The Boxer: “the poorer quarters where the ragged people go, looking for the places only they would know.” He knew it because he’d heard it from their poor, white, barely-making-it, working-class mouths: “Trump is making us great again.”

And so, they came out and voted for him – four million more of them (and counting) than turned out for Trump in 2016. Not quite enough, it would seem, to keep their Rough Beast in the White House. But close. Far too close.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 6 November 2020.