Valdai Club

If the Republicans win in November, we can expect moves to destroy everything achieved under the Obama administration, from health care to alternative energy. If they lose we can expect a consistent strategy of using the Senate to paralyse government.

Abraham Lincoln said of his country that “America will never be destroyed from outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves”. These words came back to me watching the primary debates of the Republican presidential candidates. Of course, the USA is nowhere near a return to the Civil War of Lincoln’s time. Nonetheless, the nature of these debates is a reminder that democracies can and do sometimes collapse. And today – unlike in Lincoln’s time – the problems of US democracy have grave consequences for the entire world.

Democracies can fail for a number of reasons: When they meet new existential challenges that they are by their very nature incapable of meeting; when they cease to provide the mass of the populations with the minimum services and living standards that they have come to expect as a right; and when their populations become split by unbridgeable differences over how the state should be governed and society regulated, to the point where the losers in elections no longer recognise the legitimacy of elected government by their opponents. In 2004, when I wrote a book called America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, as an analysis of the deep historical and cultural background of the Bush administration’s policies, I described these problems in the USA as dangerous but not yet existential. Twelve years on, they have grown very considerably.

The three great interlinked challenges facing the USA are how to manage the economy in a way that the mass of the population will be adequately supported; how to manage demographic change leading to Whites ceasing to be a majority of the population by mid-Century; and how to manage the profound cultural and moral gulf between Christian conservatives (mostly, though not exclusively White) and liberal secularists (increasingly multi-racial).

None of these tensions is entirely new in itself. America has of course gone through economic crises in the past; the entire history of the USA since the second quarter of the 19th Century has been one of tremendous and ongoing demographic transformation – and it is worth remembering that 19th Century American White Anglo Saxon Protestants did not consider Italians and Irish to be fully White, at least not in the same sense as themselves; and profound cultural fears on the part of Christian fundamentalists have been present for a century and more. These played a key part in what the American historian Richard Hofstadter in a famous essay called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”. Hofstadter was writing in response to the McCarthyite anti-communist outburst of the early 1950s – another reminder that episodes of national hysteria are nothing new.

Each of these elements today however is present in a particularly toxic form, and together make up an especially toxic mixture. For the first time, a large majority both of immigration and of the natural growth of the US population comes from one source, that of Latinos from Mexico and Central America. As a result, unlike previous immigrants they are to a great extent retaining their own language. Moreover, unlike previous migrants, a high proportion of them are illegal entrants. Finally, the power of the drug gangs in Mexico, and the truly dreadful state of law and order in that country, have increased every White middle class fear about the Latino impact on the USA. Trump in particular has played assiduously to these fears.

Over time, these anxieties would probably fade as Latinos assimilate and move into the middle classes – a process exemplified by Trump’s current greatest rival, Ted Cruz. The problem is that this immigration is putting great pressure on working class wages at a time when for the first time in American history, these wages have experienced almost two generations of stagnation, and since 2008 decline. Both the nature of the new US economy and the abolition of redistributive strategies by successive Republican (and, under Clinton, Democratic) administrations means that for the first time, very large numbers of white Americans are not benefiting from the growth of the US economy, and have not done so for decades. This is unprecedented. The USA has gone through deeper economic depressions than the financial crash of 2008, but they were relatively short lived and were succeeded by periods of growth that benefited the mass of the White population. The USA has also experienced a period of extreme economic inequality and concentration of wealth in a small number of hands – the so-called Gilded Age of the late 19th Century, which lasted in many respects until 1929; but that was a period of enormous economic expansion, with the creation of huge numbers of comparatively well-aid industrial jobs, guaranteeing a decent income to the hard-working, and a better life for their children – the so-called “American Dream”.

This Dream is no longer a realistic hope for a very large number of White Americans, and by the look of things never will be again. This is the most worrying thing about the state of the Republicans: that there is simply no real prospect (other than the demographic decline of the conservative White population) of the factors that have produced their radicalisation changing; and while in the long run demographic change may well make the Republicans in their present form unelectable, in the meantime – even if they lose this year – they will not go on losing elections forever.

Finally, while America has gone through periods of religious-moral hysteria before (Prohibition, which was also a lightly veiled backlash by nativist Protestants against Catholic immigrants, was perhaps the greatest of these) no previous generation of Christian fundamentalists has been confronted with anything as offensive to their basic beliefs as gay marriage and abortion. This alone would incline working-class Christian fundamentalists to vote against the Democrats even when their economic interests point all the other way.

Religion forms the largest part of the cultural gulf now dividing the two parties and their followers. This religious element marks the USA out from Europe, but in another way America conforms very closely to a European historical pattern. While I have spoken in European terms of “working classes” in the USA, that is not how they (or at least the Whites among them) describe themselves. They call themselves “middle class” – and in Europe, endangered lower middle classes have always responded to economic and cultural crisis by moving not to Socialism (now represented by Bernie Sanders) but to right-wing populism, or worse.

If the Republicans win in November, we can expect moves to destroy everything achieved under the Obama administration, from health care to alternative energy. But given their denial of all legitimacy to Democratic administrations, if they lose we can expect a consistent strategy of using the Senate to paralyse government. And indeed, over the next decades the shrining White conservative population is likely to use to the full every opportunity afforded by the Constitution (especially the rules of the Senate and the way that Senate composition is grossly skewed in favour of tiny White conservative states) to defend their position – a strategy honed by Southern Whites in the decades before the Civil War, and again in the 1950s and early 60s in opposition to Civil Rights. The result of such a strategy will be a continuation or intensification of the crisis of governance in the USA.

In international affairs, the appalling rhetoric of the Republican candidates is likely to be moderated in a Republican administration by the war-weariness of the US population, and the prudence of the US uniformed military, which is certainly not looking for any more ground wars at present. This will however only work as long as no shock occurs to mobilise Americans – if only briefly – behind an aggressive programme: a major terrorist attack, a naval clash with China over the disputed islands, or some unforeseen development. Under President Trump or President Cruz, we would have to pray very hard that no such shock occurs.