介绍： Lexington: The people v the people
Setting Americans against each other paved Donald Trump’s path to power
From The Economist 20161112

Audio:

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ON ELECTION day in America it is usually a comfort to spend hours talking to voters emerging from polling places. After months of interviews with partisan...

介绍： Lexington: The people v the people
Setting Americans against each other paved Donald Trump’s path to power
From The Economist 20161112

Audio:

0:00




ON ELECTION day in America it is usually a comfort to spend hours talking to voters emerging from polling places. After months of interviews with partisans at campaign rallies, regular citizens are reassuringly unzealous, and willing to volunteer that neither party has a monopoly on wisdom. Not this year. In 2016 too many Americans sounded sour, unhappy and quick to dismiss as illegitimate or immoral those who disagree with them.

Lexington spent November 8th in southern Wisconsin, talking to voters in small towns known for an unflashy, church-picnic and chambers-of-commerce sort of conservatism. This is Paul Ryan country—the home turf of the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, a beaky ideologue and devout Catholic who several times clashed with Donald Trump during his presidential campaign, publicly rebuking the businessman for his boorish ways (Mr Ryan called Trumpian slurs against a Mexican-American judge a “textbook case of racism”).

Reporting from polling stations in Elkhorn and Janesville was dispiriting and revealing. Republicans who had just cast ballots for Mr Trump and Mr Ryan expressed contempt not just for Hillary Clinton—“She should be impeached,” said many—but for the sort of Americans liable to vote for her. As a rule, ventured Shane Price, a shipping manager in Janesville, Democrats put their own interests over those of the country, while a big majority of Republicans are “red, white and blue”, and put America first. Pondering those sections of the electorate immune to Mr Trump’s charms, Mark Schweiner, a financial adviser from Elkhorn, lamented that the country is changing, with a growing proportion of residents who lack a vested interest in America’s future and merely “want handouts”. To greatly broaden its attractiveness the Republican Party might have to appeal to such free-riders, he conceded, yet he would rather it did not, for that would mean compromising on its small government, low-tax principles.

Trump voters encountered in Wisconsin were fully aware that their presidential pick is a polarising figure. Several said that he had not been their first choice to be the Republican nominee—and indeed back in April Mr Trump lost the Wisconsin presidential primary to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a social conservative. They called Mr Trump “blunt” and “very bold”. They cast his rudeness as a form of candour, and proof that he is not a career politician. Several chided Mr Ryan for rebuking Mr Trump, seeing their congressman’s criticisms as evidence that he is just another mealy-mouthed, calculating elitist, who has seemingly forgotten that in the real world “everybody makes mistakes”. Put another way, when the much-loathed press or Democrats attacked Mr Trump, that reassured his voters that they shared common foes.

That points to another reason to fear Mr Trump’s populist victory. For populism involves more than policies that are at once simple and stirring enough to shout at a rally (“Build That Wall”) or print on a bumper sticker. Populism is also the politics of Them and Us, involving appeals to tribal identities, and zero-sum contests over hard-pressed resources. Populism is hardly new. What makes Mr Trump’s win different is that he so explicitly sought to cast his opponents as illegitimate, unfit, contemptible, un-American or (a favourite word) “disgusting”—and was confident that he would find an echo among his voters.


Mr Trump was the nominee of a party which, after losing the presidential election of 2012, commissioned a post-mortem concluding that until Republicans built a new coalition, including more non-whites and other fast-growing demographic blocs, it would struggle to win national office again. Mr Trump’s gamble was to take an exactly opposite approach. He bet everything on a strategy of nostalgic nationalism, summed up in the slogan “Make America Great Again”, precisely because his hunch was that the country is home to an underestimated mass of voters who do not want to be part of any rainbow coalition, thank you—and certainly not if the price is granting amnesty to immigrants in the country without the right papers, or embracing gay marriage.

Nasty, not nice

Mr Trump was open about his plans, telling The Economist in interviews that he planned to appeal to a “silent majority” of “hard-working, great people in the United States that have been disenfranchised”. He ticked off areas in which he could beat Mrs Clinton: on border security and fears of crime caused by immigrants, on foreign trade and jobs and on Islamic terrorism (“She’s very, very weak”). Working Americans and their wives are “the biggest group of people in our society”, Mr Trump noted, explaining how he had learned to relate to such folk as a schoolboy spending summers on his father’s building sites, working with sheetrock fitters, carpenters and electricians. He boasted, correctly, that his focus on working-class voters would be rewarded with a “big crossover” from independents, Democrats and those who rarely vote. A pollster told him that his only weak point was when voters were asked about candidates being nice, Mr Trump confided in an interview in August 2015. “And I said, this is not going to be an election on niceness.”

Mr Trump may be unique in embracing nastiness as a way to demonstrate sincerity. But it is also the case that Mrs Clinton rallied such voter blocs as Latinos, blacks, women or gay Americans by telling them not just that she was on their side, but that her coalition would not seek to win the votes of those Americans they dislike or distrust. That is what it meant when she declared half of Mr Trump’s supporters “deplorables”: Mrs Clinton was promising that she had no intention of trying to persuade the wrong sort of voters. That politics worked in 2016 because so many Americans have moved beyond distrusting politicians, parties or Washington. Talking to voters in this horrible election year, it has become clear that they dislike one another. Now that divided republic is Mr Trump’s—if he can keep it.

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