Making sense of Trump in ’24

November 6, 2024

The most common Canadian observation about US politics is confusion over what has happened to American democracy.

How could more than 70 million Americans re-elect Donald Trump: felon, racist, fascist and possibly a future dictator? 

For any Canadian older than Generation Zed, American reality no longer jibes with our learned experience of the American public, how they vote, or what they think.

This cognitive dissonance we experience might have something to do with with our inability to place Trumpism within a “political order,” even if we have a clear take on Trump the man.

On that note, a week ago the New York Times’ Ezra Klein, had American historian Gary Gerstle on his podcast show.

Gerstle’s gift of commentary is to organize our thoughts into a sensible narrative, in particular his sketch of American history as a sequence of paradigms of political consensus on political economy and the voting coalitions that support them.

His account begins with the bipartisan political order of the New Deal (Franklin Roosevelt to the administration of Jimmy Carter) eclipsed by three decades of neo-liberalism under Reagan, Clinton, the Bushes and Obama. 

The end and beginning of political orders, he says, are marked by great economic upheaval. The Great Depression of the 1930s. The oil price shocks and stagflation of the 1970s. He identifies the end of neo-liberalism, and the beginning of an as yet undefined new political order, as the financial crisis of 2010 followed by the 2016 election of Trump. 

Gerstle suggests that the class disparities in the economic impact of the financial crisis and recovery tipped the neo-liberal order into a credibility crisis: the exploding income inequality between rich and poor that was supposed to be tolerated so long as working and middle class Americans were incrementally better off was making Main Street America very angry. The Pandemic shock did the same thing.

And in fact the uncertainty over where we are in 2024, and what kind of political order exists, is what causes Gerstle to say towards the end of the engrossing 90 minute podcast that he doesn’t yet know how to define this new paradigm, because there isn’t one. In a nation divided, it’s still contested.

And here we are trying to make sense of it all. This morning my X feed sent me to two video commentaries among thousands. 

Have a listen and a look:

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