Even in the Western European heartlands, you can see a Europe B coalescing around nationalist, anti-immigrant parties like the National Front in France, the UK Independence Party in Great Britain, the Swedish Democratic Party, and the Freedom Party of Austria (whose leader just lost the country's presidency by 0.6% of the vote). While Europe A tries to keep the EU show going, Europe B is already heading for the exits. (Think: Brexit in England.)
No doubt it's occurred to you by now that the United States is not immune to this trend. With the rise of an aggressive version of right-wing American populism, the United States is waking up to a dividing line that is becoming sharper by the day. Donald Trump has made headlines with his talk of building a wall between the United States and Mexico, but his campaign has highlighted a more important division: between America A and America B.
Responding to the irresistible pull of celebrity culture and to the exclusion of almost anything else, the U.S. media has focused on the person of Donald Trump. Far more important, however, are the people who support him.
America B
In the speech that made him famous, the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama challenged the way "the pundits like to slice and dice our country" -- into black America and white America, liberal America and conservative America, and most famously into red states and blue states as defined by party affiliation. We live, however, in a purple America, Obama suggested, "all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."
That rousing speech put Obama on the map. But that map would have its revenge. Once he reached the Oval Office four years later, the representatives of the Republican red states would ceaselessly battle the president's every initiative from health care to the Iran nuclear deal. As a result, during his tenure, the U.S. became more, not less, politically divided.
In some sense, though, the Obama of 2004 was right. The key dividing line in the U.S. had little to do with Republican vs. Democrat, rich vs. poor, or liberal vs. conservative. To explode these conventional oppositions, it would take a billionaire Republican populist, who had once been a solid Democrat and who offered a political program that mixed together liberal and conservative ideas, conspiracy theories and racial animus, but above all else exhortations to America B to rise up and retake the country. Indeed, the triumph of Trump in the Republican primaries -- based, in part, on his appeal to former white working class Democrats and independents, his fierce attacks on mainstream Republicans, and his flouting of what passes for conventional wisdom about electability -- sent the pundits back to their think tanks to figure out what on earth was happening with American voters.
Trump was, they concluded, sui generis, a peculiar mutation of the American political system generated by the unholy coupling of reality television and the Tea Party revolt. But Trump is not, in fact, a sport of nature. He reflects trends taking place around the world. He is, in many ways, just a mouthpiece for America B.
It's been notoriously difficult to characterize the Trump constituency. It's much easier to identify the people who will never vote for him: Latinos angered by his racist taunts about Mexican immigrants and a federal judge, women outraged by his sexual innuendo and misogyny, and virtually everyone with an advanced degree. Writing off these constituencies -- particularly women, since they constituted 53% of the electorate in 2012 -- should doom Trump's presidential bid.
Yet Trump is proving to be a guilty pleasure for many voters, like binge-watching a TV show about a serial killer or eating an entire quart of artery-clogging premium ice cream. The urge to vote for him is something that some Americans will never admit to outside the curtained privacy of the voting booth. But he scratches an itch. He's the electoral equivalent of a day at the firing range, a way of blowing off political steam.
Trump voters tend to be overwhelmingly white, middle-aged, lower-income men whose education stopped at high school. They are not stupid, nor are they, as Thomas Frank argued about working-class Republican voters in his astute book What's the Matter with Kansas?, voting against their own economic interests. Trump may be a billionaire, but he has articulated an economic policy that diverges from the naked plutocracy of the party of Mitt Romney.
He has opposed trade deals that outsource American jobs, supported higher taxes for "hedge-fund managers," and declared his commitment to saving Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Yes, of course, Trump has also made statements directly contradicting these positions or aligned himself with politicos who take the exact opposite stances. But the billionaire has constructed an image of himself as a triumphant version of an "average Joe" (with billions in pocket change) that plays well in America B. Whether consciously or not, he has taken a page from the Europe B playbook by combining positions skeptical of the unrestrained free market with a lot of nationalist bluster. It bears a family resemblance to fascism, but the American variant is firmly anchored in the kind of individual initiative celebrated on The Apprentice.
What also sets Trump apart is his commitment to making "America great again." His opponents have tried to argue that America is already great, has been great, and will always be great. But the truth is, for many Americans, things have not been so great for at least the last two decades.
This line, more than Trump's intemperate rants and off-the-cuff insults, is what ultimately distinguishes America A from America B. At a time when the American economy is growing at a respectable pace and the unemployment rate is below 5% for the first time since 2008, America B has not benefitted from the prosperity. It has suffered, not profited, from the great transformation the country has gone through since 1989 (and was particularly hard hit by the near economic meltdown of 2007-2008).
After all, it wasn't just the former Communist world that experienced a transition at the end of the twentieth century.
Transitions Are U.S.
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