That acute case of Liberalitis

Some smart alecks are already saying what many hoped never to hear: It’s a Trump world and we’re just living in it.

Is this just about that right-wing tease called “owning the libs”, increasingly in evidence on social media? That political strategy, employed by some MAGA types in US, mostly in red baseball caps, delighted in offending liberal activists for their stance on culture war issues. But it’s morning in America, to quote Ronald Reagan, and “owning the libs” may have just stopped being a game.

That may be the deeper meaning of Trump’s improbable comeback as first US president to be elected to non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland in 1892, despite a conviction for felonies, multiple criminal charges and sustained criticism for using vulgar and demeaning language and professing appreciation of strongmen.

Trump, as much of the world noted in astonishment, scored a decisive win across America’s blue and red states alike. Even ‘swing’ states swung his way. What’s more, Trump may have closed out a toxic and polarising election campaign with a national popular vote majority, something that eluded him by a wide margin in his 2016 victory. Finally, if his Republican Party manages to hold on to the House of Representatives, Trump will have led it to that prized trifecta – unified control of the executive and both legislative chambers. The Supreme Court is already under conservative control.

What’s striking about America’s 2024 story then, is how different it is from previous elections Trump contested. This doesn’t appear to be a divided country moving in two directions – rural vs urban; white vs non-white. It would be fair to see it as a hinge election, like 1860, when Lincoln became the first Republican president, running on an anti-slavery ticket.

So, what happened? On the surface, this looks like a broad and severe rejection of the arguments, language and logic (or lack of) advanced by a liberal cadre of activists in major democracies around the world. A decade ago, it used to be called political correctness. Now, it’s demonised as ‘woke-ism’, which is to say the embrace of sometimes outlandish causes and issues sans common sense.

This includes the debate on transgender issues especially in sport, pub lic bathrooms and as an acceptablemedical procedure even for impressionable adolescents; the testy matter of what is (or isn’t) a woman; a manic adherence to tick-the-box diversity, equity and inclusion policies; a ‘cancel’culture that cuts the metaphorical mic from proponents of a more traditional view; the whatever-it-takes position on the Ukraine war and a general refusal to acknowledge limits of humane immigration policies.

Let’s call it acute liberalitis, this vision of the future that claims to be inclusive but often breaks down the electorate – and the world – into tribes, each with their own culture, rights and rules. Late last year, Yascha Mounk, the German-American Johns Hopkins University political scientist, caused a bit of a stir with The Identity Trap, a book that focused on the inherent problem with progressive politics: salami-slicing identity and consequently losing touch with the electorate.

Turns out he was right. Strong support for Trump is in line with a trend increasingly obvious across Europe and elsewhere. Not only are voters faced with high prices, they’re frustrated by perceived limits to their freedom of speech and thought. And they’re furious about immigration, regardless of the reality of actual numbers of arrivals or their overall social and monetary cost to the system.

Issue of the uninvited migrant has played a massive role in elections across Netherlands, Portugal, France, Germany and Austria. Even in UK, where the centre-left Labour won the July election, Trump’s friend Nigel Farage led his anti-immigrant Reform Party to a 14% vote share. As a political strategist in middle Europe recently noted, politics in America has this in common with other elections around EU: We’re all MAGA on migration now.

So too Canada, where PM Trudeau may be facing a snap election and his Liberals an existential crisis a la Kamala Harris and her Democratic Party. Like Americans over the border, a sizeable segment of Canadians have been telling pollsters they believe their country is going in the wrong direction. According to a leading analyst, the “common hot button issues” in both parts of North America range from cost of living to immigration, but more importantly, “the subtext that the system is broken”.

And so they brought in Trump to “fix it”, as the slogan went in the last days of the campaign.

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