This question in no way implies that he shouldn’t have won. On the contrary, the ideas Trump shared with the electorate, the promises he made, were much more sound than those of his rival.
No, take that comparative back, let’s talk in absolutes. His ideas were mostly sound, whereas his rival’s weren’t. Moreover, he could be confidently predicted to carry his ideas out or at least do his best to try.
Yet better programmes don’t necessarily win elections under conditions of universal suffrage, nor do bad programmes necessarily lose them. For example, everything Labour proposed during their campaign last year was guaranteed to produce a disaster. And yet they won by a whopping majority.
Is the American electorate more sophisticated? In fact, I’ve heard MAGA people go out of their way to compliment the voting public who, they claim, saw through the Democrats’ Left-wing policies and revealed their true conservative nature. This ignores the fact that exactly the same electorate, give or take, elected Biden four years ago and earlier gave two terms to Barack Obama, that living argument against affirmative action.
It was Socrates who, according to Plato, first decried indiscriminate democracy. Voting, Socrates said, was a skill and, like any other skill, it had to be developed, not awarded as an automatic birthright. Specifically, an essential qualification was a heightened ability for critical thought, knowing the difference between truth and falsehood, fact and judgement, opinion and argument, likely and unlikely.
Anyone who says today’s masses in any country, including the US, have that ability is lying, probably for ideological reasons. Voting for most people is a knee-jerk reaction to some irritants, either positive or negative. Usually it’s the latter, with most people voting not so much for one candidate as against the other.
Our 2024 general election is again a prime example: even many Britons who tend to vote Tory went for Labour because, according to them, the Tory government was useless. So it was, but they lacked the skill Socrates considered essential. They couldn’t put two and two together to see that Labour would be even worse, catastrophically so.
That’s why Trump won not just because the voters found his programme to be better upon mature deliberation. That alone wouldn’t have carried the day, and even his rival’s vapid vacuity, though doubtless helpful, wouldn’t have been decisive.
Trump realised that underneath the outer shell of wokery the electorate wore either willingly or under peer pressure sat a vast reservoir of uniquely American patriotism. And he had the demagogic skills to tap into that reservoir more successfully than any candidate since Ronald Reagan.
When Trump shouted about the Democrats keeping America from being great again, he was a preacher fulminating against heretics and for true faith. He was a priest of the secular American creed of self-worship, replete with messianic connotations.
Winthrop’s (and Christ’s) “city upon a hill” and O’Sullivan’s “manifest destiny” came together in Trump’s rhetoric, and sparks flew. Americans were served a reminder of their secular cult of national exceptionalism, shamed about their prior apostasy, and their knees jerked.
It so happened that this time around they voted for the right candidate since Harris would have done to the US what Starmer is doing to Britain. But a similar osmotic appeal could under different circumstances have brought to power someone considerably less qualified to wield it.
For over two centuries, Americans were taught that their country is more than just a country. It’s God’s message to the world, the fulfilment of His plans for mankind, a lesson every other country should heed. That’s how they were conditioned to understand national greatness, and Trump found a way to refresh that lesson in their minds.
I’m aware of only one major country other than the US where patriotism takes on a quasi-religious dimension: Russia, with her self-serving idea of the Third Rome, replaced for a while with an equally messianic communism and then revived.
The other two nations I know well, British and French, aren’t immune to regarding their countries as exceptional, but any attempt to express that feeling in quasi-religious terms would elicit a wry smile in London or Paris.
Britons may happily sing their intention to “build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land”, but deep down they know there can be only one Jerusalem and it already exists. Anything else can only be an impostor, or else a metaphysical simulacrum.
Yet there are many Americans who understand ‘a city upon a hill’ and ‘manifest destiny’ literally. This messianic feeling continues to fertilise American grassroots, for all the attempts of the liberal intelligentsia to weed it out.
Donald Trump is both a product and promulgator of the secular religion of American self-sacralisation. He sensed its dormant vitality and awakened it with consummate skill.
One has to be American to stand up in response to that clarion call, and my American passport is long since expired. However, one has to acknowledge that the US has become a great country largely on the strength of her religious self-worship.
Unlike the Russian vintage, this has been channelled into creating a secular paradise as free of suffering as it’s possible to achieve in this world. But it’s a peculiar paradise, suspect and ultimately unfathomable to people weaned on (if eventually off) the culture owing its existence to a formative act of suffering.
By all means, we should root for Trump’s America, regret her failures and applaud her successes, especially since we all stand to lose from the former and gain from the latter. But we’d try to emulate her at our peril since that would involve repudiating not just Britain’s national history but also her national character.
Anyone who thinks that’s possible or indeed desirable is deceiving himself.