PT 2 Philo.docx - CHRISTIAN O. CLAUS GRADE 11 - ORIGINATORS...

C
HRISTIAN
O. C
LAUS
GRADE
11 -
ORIGINATORS
A T
least there’s one country where elections
produce swift results. Since Donald Trump’s
victory, the Mexican peso has collapsed, the cost
of mortgages has risen in France, the European
Commission has eased its demand for budget
austerity, Japan feels encouraged to re-arm, Israel
is hoping that the US embassy will move from Tel
Aviv to Jerusalem, opinion pollsters and
proponents of campaign micro-targeting have kept
their heads down, what little remained of
journalistic credibility is all but gone — and the
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is dead.
A whirlwind of events and speculation makes
many Americans feel as if they are living in a
disturbing dream: if a man almost universally
described as incompetent and vulgar has
managed to become president of the United
States, then anything is possible. Global
contagion from the US election seems conceivable,
such is the worldwide attention its unexpected
result has attracted, and not just from foreign
policy experts.
In the past decade, there have been many
electoral surprises of this sort, almost always
followed by three days of soul-searching from the
leaders found wanting, and then by the quiet
resumption of discredited policies. The
persistence of such a lack of understanding — or
the repetition of such a sham — is easier to
comprehend when so many of the protest voters
live far from the big centres of economic and
financial power, and also far from the centres of
the arts, media and the universities. Hardly
anybody voted for Trump in New York and San
Francisco; London massively rejected Brexit in
June; two years ago Paris returned its leftwing
municipality to power in an election in which the
right triumphed nationally. As soon as the
election is over, the fortunate people feel entitled
to go on governing in their cosy clique, ever
attentive to the recommendations of the press and

the European Commission, always prompt to
ascribe to the refractory voters psychological or
cultural deficiencies that disqualify their anger.
Are they anything but know-nothings, easy prey
for demagogues?
This sort of perception goes back a long way,
particularly in educated circles. Recent analysis of
the ‘authoritarian personality’ of Trump’s blue-
collar voters resembles the psychological portrait
that cold war guardians of the intellectual order
produced of ‘subversives’ on both right and left.
Analyzing the prevalence of such subversive
elements in the working class as opposed to the
middle class, the American political scientist
Seymour Martin Lipset concluded in 1960 that
‘the lower-class individual is likely to have been
exposed to punishment, lack of love, and a
general atmosphere of tension and aggression
since early childhood — all experiences which
tend to produce deep-rooted hostilities expressed
by ethnic prejudice, political authoritarianism
and chiliastic transvaluational religion’ ( 1 ).