Two Americas faced off on 5th November, and one swept the table.
The America that voted for Harris was to be found, as it had been under Clinton, Obama and Biden, among younger, city-dwelling, higher income, college-educated men and women, living either on the West or East Coasts. These people have feasted on the tech and AI boom, profited from the stock market rise and leveraged the credentials they earned in American universities to gain power in American government, media and corporations. These Americans still live the dream. Harris won each of the voting segments of this America, but Biden’s delay in exiting the race left Harris without the time to win the trust and support of the portions of the 2020 vote, especially Latino and black people, who hadn’t lived the dream and who drifted away to a man who seemed to hear them.
The second America, Trump’s electorate, included these new Latino and black voters but remained concentrated among older non-college educated white men living in small towns and rural areas in the south and the Midwest. It’s an America that worries that its great days are past, that distrusts the elites on both coasts and fears that America’s institutions are irrevocably corrupted.
In one decisive night the world discovered which of these Americas makes up the majority. In the world’s richest nation, it turns out there are more people who await the fulfillment of the American dream than those who enjoy it, more without the opportunity of education than those who reap its benefits, more who fear what is happening to America than those who embrace its transformation through immigration, the rusting out of America’s industrial capacity and the convulsive emergence of a digital economy; the rise of China and the challenges, everywhere in the world, to American pre-eminence.
The America that backed Harris essentially endorsed the changes that have convulsed the country since the Sixties: the enrollment boom in higher education; the civil rights act that enfranchised black people in the American south; the changes to immigration law that brought Africans, Asians and Latin Americans to the United States in huge numbers; the feminist revolution that brought women to positions of power and influence for the first time; and the gay revolution which culminated in marriage equality in 2015.
Taken together, this revolution of inclusion turned American politics and society upside down. It frightened and dismayed those who didn’t benefit, especially white males who saw their authority, on the shop floor, in the union hall, in the party precinct, and most of all in the home, come under challenge. When liberal progressives translated the revolution of inclusion into affirmative action, speech codes, diversity and inclusion bureaucracies, when they sought to entrench the revolution in a bureaucracy of political correctness, the resentment at the inclusion revolution exploded. Trump, the living incarnation of snarling male authority, unchained and unrepentant, made himself the spokesman for all the building resentment.
The president-elect now has to reward the resentments he has proven so adept at provoking. His problem is that the revolution of inclusion is two generations old, and its beneficiaries now form part of his own electorate. There are gay Republicans, as there are black and feminist Republicans, and he cannot keep them in the tent if he plays too nakedly to the white, heterosexual majority that gave him his victory.
With control of the Supreme Court and likely both houses of Congress, he enters office with the kind of unchecked power that frightens everyone who didn’t vote for him and even some of those who did. He will have to choose whether to govern as the leader of a movement bent on revenge, or as the leader of a party bent on long-term political hegemony. If he chooses revenge, he will give Democrats the chance to swing the great pendulum of American politics back to equity and justice in 2028. If he chooses to build long-term hegemony, it requires him to pull more of the black and Latino vote away from the Democrats, and were he to show the skills required for that, he would end his term transferring the White House to his heir apparent, JD Vance.
Overseas, Trump’s voters are telling him they don’t like foreign entanglements, or alliances that commit America to fight and die in distant places. These voters support Israel, but they don’t want the US tied down in the Middle East and they don’t see why the Pentagon is shipping weapons to Ukraine when the US is depleting the stock of shells it needs to defend itself. But a president who allows Putin to win a peace that is a defeat for Ukraine will discover that in allowing Putin to dictate terms, he has not made America stronger. “Who lost Ukraine?” would then become the accusatory mantra of Trump’s second term. If he maintains support for Israel and for Netanyahu’s ruthless war, his voters may begin asking, if making America great again was the goal, why does the Israeli tail keep wagging the American dog? His voters want an America that is a hegemon, not a hostage.
Making America great again is no easy task in a multipolar world, especially if you scorn America’s greatest asset: its network of global alliances. His transactional unilateralism may lead him to dismantle Biden’s South Korean and Japanese rapprochement, and in Europe, he may be tempted to pull out of Nato. France, Germany and Spain are weak and divided and he may believe he can get away with punishing them for being freeloaders on America's security heft. Despising your friends, however, invites them to hedge rather than obey. Losing Europe’s support is unwise in a world where Russia, China, North Korea and Iran are supplying each other with weapons and technology, and where South Africa, Brazil and India are edging closer. America can’t contain and deter an axis of resistance if its incoming president tears up the alliances which truly did make America great.
Enraged by these contradictions and constraints, internal and external, he may be tempted to turn the presidency into a dictatorship, but if he does, he risks civil war, with the America who elected him and the America who didn’t at one another’s throats.
