Fergus Finlay: Trumpism will not survive Trump as it is not built on any ideology
President Donald Trump at a rally before the election. Picture: AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar
I’m going to gloat for a bit, about three things I have no right to gloat about. No right because I didn’t have a vote. No right because I’m not a (capital D) Democrat. No right because all I could do was watch it unfold, helpless to help, although I really wanted to.
I’m still going to gloat though (and you know what the begrudgers can do). There are three reasons. First, I won my bet. Second, a bad man is gone. Third, a decent man will take over.
Last week I wrote here that Paddy Power “offered me 7-1 if I predicted that Joe Biden would get between 300 and 330 electoral college votes, and that’s what I went for”. As I’m writing this, Arizona and Georgia are still taking their time to officially turn blue. But they will, I’m certain, and in the process secure the 300 electoral college votes I need to win the bet.
Of course, that doesn’t matter in the bigger scheme of things, and I wouldn’t have cared less if I lost the bet as long as Joe Biden got 270 votes. But you’d be surprised at the amount of derision I got when I wrote about that bet here. There are clearly a lot of people out there — in Ireland, I mean — who couldn’t envisage the possibility of a Biden win, and in fact, didn’t want him to win.
Maybe because I’d stuck my neck out with a bet, I started getting loads of social media reaction as the count got underway. And it was really revealing too. When Florida went wrong, the messages I was getting almost split down the middle, between those already in despair and those preparing to celebrate.
I’m no expert, but I had been reading as much as I possibly could about the way the two campaigns had developed, and it was pretty clear that if the Biden camp won Florida it would be a welcome bonus. But for weeks they’ve had a list of “must-win” states, and Florida wasn’t one of them.
In fact, Joe Biden looked pretty comfortable right from the beginning — although mind you, when I had the temerity to say that in the small hours of Wednesday night, one of the less charming inhabitants of Twitter told me to “step away from the drinks cabinet”.
But hey, they didn’t win their bet, whatever it was. I did.
Much more important, a bad man is gone. I have to say I’ve had a pain in my face the last couple of days reading the articles headed “we need to understand why so many people voted for Trump” and “Trump may be gone but Trumpism will survive”. That latter headline in particular really annoys me. Intolerance will survive this election. Racism will survive. Hatred and fear will survive. We really need to celebrate the fact that none of those things, contained as they are in a man devoid of moral compass, won the election.
Mitt Romney won 59 million popular votes in 2012, John McCain won just short of 60 million four years earlier. They were the candidates of the Republican Party, and that’s what happens. But that’s all it meant. Do we really need to understand where those votes came from? Is it ok if we don’t lie awake at night wondering if Romneyism is still alive — or even what it was?
Donald Trump is a bad man who won the US Presidency by tapping into something dark and different in the American psyche. That’s not the basis for an enduring movement — or if it is, it’s not the basis for a country that could survive indefinitely. If he had won a second term, those of us who have a sentimental attachment to the land of the free and the home of the brave would have to worry seriously about its future.
Politicians have created movements that have outlasted them, at least for a while. Thatcher did it, Reagan did it, Roosevelt did it. Those movements were always centred on a person, but also on a very big idea.
Would anyone who believes that Trumpism will survive please tell me what the big idea was? Trump was a tool for other people’s ideology — that’s why he agreed to a huge and lop-sided tax break, and why he packed the Supreme Court. Make America Great Again was a slogan, not a plan. And is America great again?
There has never been a politician in any of our lifetimes whose only purposes were greed, self-aggrandisement and self-indulgence. He stood for nothing, and anyone who tries to build a movement around his character, philosophy, or ideas will find they have built a hollow shell. The good news, I believe, is that we’ll shortly never have to think about him again.
But here’s the third reason to gloat, at least to celebrate. America has elected a decent man to lead it, at a spectacularly difficult time.
There’s huge speculation already about what kind of President, and as much about what kind of Vice-President. Some of it seems to have made up its mind already. The left in particular — and that’s a term that means something different in American politics — seems to have dismissed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Before they even get started, the left feels betrayed. Again.
I belong to the left. I’ve spent most of my working life campaigning and working for greater equality. But nothing infuriates me more than the endless conversations we want to have about moral victories, while we forget about real victories. Terry Prone criticised the Democrats here yesterday for being smug — and (with the greatest of respect Terry!) for once she was talking through her hat. We’d much rather lecture ourselves than anyone else.
You can’t make change if you never win. But some of us would rather talk about utopia than get involved in the hard graft of winning. We hand victories to the other side all the time, by refusing to defend our own.
In the immediate and medium-term, America needs two things. It needs to get a hold of the pandemic and it needs to put its people back to work. That means Joe Biden needs to change hearts and minds when it comes to masks and social distancing, and he needs to negotiate a huge stimulus package with the Congress.
There probably isn’t anyone better placed in recent American politics than Joe Biden to undertake those tasks. But America is a country riddled with inequality and injustice, and fixing that is the work of a generation. And it will need to be a focused, driven generation, that sticks together as it builds mandate after mandate.
That’s not going to be his job. He can, and he must infuse the next few years with a sense of decency about race and the environment and public health. He can and he must change the atmosphere and the tone of the country. But I’m guessing that along the way, if he succeeds, he’ll develop into the role of America’s Grandad. I’d settle for that. In fact I’d be thrilled if he was admired and respected for that alone.
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