Really interesting Medium article by Martin Bryant

The ‘screw you’ vote: Why it’s so hard to fight Donald Trump

I’ve been meaning to write something angry about American politics for while. Not about Donald Trump (although he certainly makes me angry) but about a lazy faith in ‘the system’ that has helped him get as far as he has before anyone started to take him seriously. Now that same lazy faith may well clinch him the keys to the White House.

I was serious when I tweeted that, a year ago. Trump was being treated as a clown by TV networks who loved the ratings he brought in. Meanwhile, the political commentariat assumed everything would continue to work exactly as it always has. A ‘normal,’ ‘serious,’ ‘credible’ candidate like Marco Rubio would obviously wipe Trump out in the primaries, right?

No. ‘The system’ is held together by string and sticky tape, just as it always has been. The people who make up the ‘elite’ form alliances of mutual interest but are in the end they’re just fallible humans like the rest of us. The Republican party ‘establishment’ couldn’t stop Trump through shadowy deals, and voters in the primaries didn’t do what they were ‘supposed’ to do according to the way the system is meant to work.

Years of laziness

If Trump wins the presidency, it will be years of accumulated lazyiness caused by metropolitan coastal privilege that got him there. This tweetstorm by Clay Shirkeysums it up perfectly.

Smart people in relatively well-paying jobs have been completely ignorant to how many in low-income middle America have grown tired of the same old candidates with the same old policies that appear to put everyone but ‘ordinary, hard working Americans’ first.

It’s easy to see why this has passed the privileged folk by. The disenfranchised don’t often air their views to the masses. They don’t write op-eds for the New York Times or rant about their plight on TV, or to a huge audience of Twitter followers. Largely, they just get on with their lives and grumble about the new government being the same as the last one.

‘Our country has problems but everything is generally okay,’ is what most privileged, coastal metropolitan people seem to think. Those people should look to recent UK history before it’s too late.

Lessons from Brexit

In the UK, me and most other people in the liberal media/tech bubble thought it was obvious that we’d remain in the EU. Sure, a few racists and jingoistic old-timers wanted us to leave, but surely most of the country recognised that it was in our best economic interests to maintain the status quo?

The first inkling I got that maybe there was a hidden swelling of ‘vote Leave’ sentiment was when I went to my local takeaway one Saturday back in April. I live in a moderately low-income area. It’s not a slum but you won’t find bankers or chief executives living in my neighbourhood. I’m a rare Guardian-reading liberal in my particular corner of Manchester.

I was waiting for a cheeseburger when I overheard a conversation between another customer and the shop owner. “Everyone I know round here is voting Leave,” the customer said. He explained that they were all sick of the government; sick to the point where any chance to go against the Prime Minister's wishes seemed like a good idea.

I thought ‘hmm, that’s interesting, but surely it’s not a popular opinion.’ How wrong I proved to be last month when the Leave campaign won the referendum.

That same scenario is now playing out in the States. Forget Trump – it’s the Trump supporters that aren’t being taken seriously by ‘the elite,’ by the media, by the Manhattan, DC and San Francisco Twitterati.

One reason the Leave vote was hard to beat in the UK was that the reasons behind it were so varied and complicated.

Reasons people voted for ‘Brexit’ included:

• Sticking it to the government as a kick against austerity policies
• Ideological opposition to the existence of the EU
• Patriotism
• A belief we genuinely would be economically better off in the long run
• Fear of ‘immigrants’
• Wanting to breaking free of the EU machine to make it easier for the UK to adopt socialism.

Very few people will have had all those reasons – each individual had different mixtures of them. That made countering the Leave campaign with reason and logic didn’t work.

Michael Gove was widely mocked for saying “people in this country have had enough of experts,” but he was right, up to a point. The Leave vote was visceral and emotional, not led by data. When you’re voting with your heart, data doesn’t matter much – especially when that data comes from the opposing side.

The Remain camp’s predictions of economic calamity now seem to be coming true but they didn’t work as deterrents because they were dismissed as nothing but fearmongering. Emotion-led campaigning and outright lies won the day. Sounds like the content of a Trump speech, right?

Like the Leave vote, Trump’s support will be difficult to counter because there are many different reasons that people will vote for him, and most of them can’t be fought off with all the fact-checking in the world.

Some of the reasons I’ve heard for voting Trump include:

• “He’s not a politician. Politicians screw us over and can’t be trusted”
• “He’s a successful businessman and America needs someone who thinks of the country like a business”
• “As a white American, someone is finally standing up for me”
• “As a white supremacist, someone is finally listening to me”
• “He’s a bit crazy but at least he’s not corrupt like Hillary”
• “All I care about is a president who will support Israel. I’ve no time for a president who cosies up to the Palestinian cause.”

That last one may seem a bit leftfield, but someone genuinely said that to me today, which shows how hard it is to pigeonhole Trump voters.

The ‘screw you’ vote

As with the UK’s Leave voters, reasons people might vote Trump are manifold – overlapping, interwoven threads of ideas that each apply to some, but not all of his supporters.

Essentially though, both ‘Leave the EU’ and ‘President Trump’ are ‘screw you’ votes. ‘The system isn’t working for us so we don’t care what you say – we don’t trust the status quo so we’ll go for this other thing, no matter how uncertain the results may be.’

That attitude means that successfully countering the Trump campaign is difficult. His supporters don’t care that he’s lying about so many things, so fact-checking doesn’t work. The Hillary Clinton campaign has flooded social media with ads and other content that mock Trump, but when ‘the establishment’ has been laughing at him for years, why will it have an effect now?

The Trump vote is also difficult to counter because, like Brexit, it’s so wrapped up in issues the Left struggles to deal with. Immigration and political correctness are forces of good in a leftist world view. Any suggestion that they might not be completely wonderful for everyone simply does not compute.

Can we fight the ‘screw you’ vote?

So, how do we fight the ‘screw you’ vote? For the reasons above, I’m not sure anyone can. Maybe it just needs to play out. Maybe we’re heading for a massive realignment of the world, one of which Brexit and Trump are just the leading edge.

Even if Trump doesn’t win, his supporters won’t be happy with four more years of the status quo with “Crooked Hillary” at the helm. And they’re unlikely to just disperse and forget about what they nearly achieved. Evidence of collusion against the Left’s own (admittedly more constructive) ‘screw you’ candidate, Bernie Sanders, won’t help Clinton’s cause, either.

Brexit and Trump have echoes in other parts of the world too, where people are increasingly turning to parties with racist or fascist traits as a perceived solution to problems there.

In other words, we should get used to phenomena like Brexit and Trump. Just like the ‘Arab Spring’ swept a contagious appetite for change across the Middle East and North Africa, Western democracies may be set to face a similar force.

The quietly discontented, the ‘losers’ in the current system are finding a voice and they don’t much care what the privileged commentariat think about it.