By Jyotirmoy Prodhani
It was unexpected, at least going by the Twitter trolls, FB posts, TV channels, print media, opinion polls, long panel discussions, academic discourses and the hectic corporate activism in her favour, Hillary Clinton was on the verge making history to restore everything that the rational society believed as right. But on the result day there was hardly a moment that gave a pause to indicate any possibility for Hillary’s win, it was Trump all the way, fiercely unstoppable. A very significant section of the world lamented with horror, “The worst has happened”. What actually went wrong?
Despite being one of America’s richest, he seemed to have lacked the finesse and polish one expects from a prospective POTUS, some kind of suavity and appeal that Pierce Brosnan and George Clooney exude. Obama had it. As for Hillary she reflected the subtle nuances of her class, a Yale returned former First Lady occupying a significant political post to have enough exposure to world politics. She truly belonged to her class. For many, being a woman added to her qualification, she gave America the great opportunity to choose their first woman president. She personified almost a heady mix of perfect and ideal discursive proprieties, a sophisticated blend of everything correct. Against such circumstances Trump’s win has turned out to be dumbfounding, generating astonishment and at the same time desperate anger. The supporters of Hillary, the Twitterati, social media enthusiasts and the powerful mainstream media including television and print, are up in arms against Trump with the intention to create a possible blockade on the road to the White House forcing Trump to be stranded on the road despite the absolute verdict in his pocket. Desperation is so acute, leading to a campaign to sabotage the process, quite in Indian style, by trying to convince the Republican Electorate College vote for Hillary instead of Trump on December 19 in blatant disregard to the faith with which the common people voted them to the Congress. Trump, actually, is seen to have risen from the ashes of an apocalypse. His victory is widely interpreted as the assertion of White supremacy as well as a vicious manifestation of anti immigration anxieties.
Trump has legitimately won the election through a constitutionally valid electoral process of the land. But the amount of hatred and indignation inflicted on Trump after his victory, quite curiously, is symptomatic of what is generally attributed to Trump- deep seated hatred towards the ‘other’. Trump has quite clearly been rejected by the elites, the university and college educated sophisticated lot, the economically affluent well earning metropolitan section, by the powerful group that arguably control and regulate opinions and views, by the mainstream media barons, the corporate powerhouses that operate at the global scale and, of course, the majority of the non White and immigrant Americans. Then how come has he won?
Instead of taking a grand stand to define what the US election this time meant, it can also be seen from simpler vantages. It was an election between the Democrats and the Republicans; between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. When Hillary got 232 of the electorates, Trump got a whopping 306. The Democrats were in power for the last sixteen years with Bill Clinton and Obama’s consecutive two terms each (with four years in between of Republican George W. Bush). The Democratic rule, however, has not been all about great glories, nor was the Republican interlude. But this time the election was largely determined by the poor, unemployed, less educated, vulnerable and insecure citizens though mostly comprising the Whites as against the White elites. It is evident that the rule of the Democrats and their jealous campaign for globalisation brought wider gaps to make clear division among people as beneficiaries and victims. It is the victims who had voted Trump to victory this election. 64 percent of the White Americans who form 45 % of the electorate do not have college level education. They are deluded with the great capitalist dream of globalisation. Most of them live in abject poverty and cannot afford even Obamacare health facilities nor can they meet the very basics of human needs when retrenchment has become for them a familiar fate.
Ashutosh Varshney has revealed the curious pattern of votes cast in this election. 67 percent of non college educated voters voted for Trump and 28 percent for Hillary. This was expected. Which is perplexing is that when 49 percent of college educated voted for Trump, Hillary got only 45 percent of their votes. Besides, the minorities, the Hispanics, the Asians, the Blacks did not go for Hillary gung ho. In fact, she polled much less votes from these constituencies than what Obama had got. Trump even polled 8 percent Black votes and 29 percent Hispanics. Apparently Hillary was not an overwhelming favourite even for the traditional voters of the Democrats. More importantly, when Hillary has been projected as the natural choice of the feminists, the women vote she got was far from impressive. Though she has got more overall women votes, 54 percent women votes as against 43 percent for Trump, but among White women 53 percent voted for Trump when 43 percent voted for Hillary. Evidently Hillary Clinton was not the universal choice even among women. After all, Hillary Clinton is not the epitome of all those ideals, a personification of those great values what Trump is not. As a politician, holding powerful positions, she cannot boast of an impeccable career that was beyond any trace of visceral allegations. Her stint as the Secretary of State was mired with some of the nastiest of controversies. Besides, after a long and largely disappointing Democratic rule in terms of economic and social security, the people of America deserved a change, more so, the people whom Trump addressed as the “forgotten men and women. The people who work hard but no longer have a voice.” Trump wanted to be their “voice”. America’s ‘voiceless’, America’s subaltern, as it were, deserved to elect a President of their own as they believed, writes Katty Kay of the BBC, “he gets me, he understands my struggle”.
This election has opened up a new territory for the rest of the world- the odious underbelly of the opulent America, beyond California and New York, the two of the major states where Hillary swept the election. The world is hardly aware of the rural angst, the perennial existential anxieties of the working class in the urban conurbations of America, who were the ones seemed to have made a point. This is the group of people nobody bothered to take into account while framing their strategies to ensure Hillary’s win. This election has also made this imperative to reconfigure the perspectives and discourses on the issues of globalisation, demographic anxiety, sense of economic and social insecurity, question of mass influx, lack of employment even in the first world and so on. Instead of enforcing ruptures and be constantly accusative of the host entities, there is a need to address the issue with mutually appreciative and respectful idioms in order to create a congenial climate of mutual trust and confidence. So far the liberal discourses on the issues have been mono-directional, resulting in the extreme consequences like Trump victory.
Despite the despicable record of his utterly politically incorrect campaign trail, Trump’s victory speech on November 9 was laudably inclusive for he proclaimed to be the President for “everyone” and pledged to work for America by reaching out to all, even to his opponents. However, his prospective presidency is not devoid of any uncanny premonitions either. It was George W. Bush, a Republican, who had changed the world forever through his contemptible craze for devastation; similar predilection in Trump, if cultivated, might well spell another regime of irrevocable doom. Trump now has to prove what he meant in his victory speech, after all the cards are now in his hands to lay it right.
(Jyotirmoy Prodhani is a Professor in the Dept. of English at NEHU, Shillong and can be reached at [email protected]