If you are shocked, then you haven’t been paying attention. Electorates have been handing out ruthless assessments of the political establishment for almost a decade.
In Western developed countries especially, pollsters and a rump of commentators seem surprised — by Trump’s win in 2016, by Brexit in the same year, and confounded further by Brexiteer-in-Chief Boris Johnson’s UK election victory in 2019 in spite of Brexit.
Here, our own entrenched political elite was chastised by voters in May, with the ANC unceremoniously stripped of outright power and forced into a tricky coalition with those whom just six months ago they dismissed.
Those parties — the DA and others — were also put on warning, with less-than-stellar growth despite a decade of state capture and dysfunction as delivered by the ANC.
Now Donald Trump has won a landslide US election, and the search for answers will begin once again. Previous expeditions into the real electorate by brave and baffled liberals to listen and understand have failed to change much at the Democratic Party.
This time around we can only hope that constitutionalist and social-democratic leaders look in the right places — and there are many — but it should start at home.
If your candidate loses the electoral college, the popular vote and your party loses both houses, it cannot stand that shocked metropolitan pearl-clutchers get away with dismissing more than half of the US voters as racist, misogynist, knuckle-dragging, fundamentalist incel deplorables.
There will be a great deal of this kind of thing over the coming days and it is the duty of intelligent people to ask commentators to work harder.
Such people characterised above are depressing in numbers and obviously attracted to Trump and his particularly toxic rhetoric on contentious issues. He articulates their anger and isolation — young men in the US have been going backwards compared to other demographics for years.
Trump remains a dangerously radical and wildly unpredictable force in global security, geopolitics and trade. Uncertainty is the order of the day.
But it is also true that women and other demographics across age, class, race and gender voted in numbers for Trump. It is over this inconvenient truth — more than any other — that the Democratic Party must obsess.
It won’t be easy. The US is vastly wealthy but unequal. That has created space for the proliferation of what Robert Henderson calls “luxury beliefs” among those who can afford them at the cost of those who cannot, and the Democratic Party is a hotbed of it.
The party’s embrace of urban liberalism and its perceived abandonment of working-class people — along with Trump’s often dishonest ability to get under the skin of those who feel they are missing out on the American Dream, leaves the rest of us in a tricky situation.
Trump remains a dangerously radical and wildly unpredictable force in global security, geopolitics and trade. Uncertainty is the order of the day. Trump’s antipathy for Nato and his position on the war in Ukraine are immediate and enormously alarming for Europe’s security.
We can expect a dramatic escalation of a trade war between China and the US, and the ratcheting up of tension surrounding the G20 and progress on climate change.
The UK can expect short shrift from Trump, given the governing Labour party’s weight of support to the Harris campaign and the sitting foreign secretary David Lammy’s description of the new president as a “neo-Nazi sociopath”.
For SA, we are but a cork in a turbulent sea and likely to be a distant issue on Trump’s triage. He has little reason to love us and it’s not clear what his view of issues such as Pepfar and Agoa will be.
Non-alignment will be harder and more necessary than ever in a profoundly more dangerous world, and it will be wise for our new and more level-headed international relations and co-operation minister Ronald Lamola to establish good relations with the new administration in Washington.
For the US, conservatism seems to be entrenched. The future of the Republican Party is now surely incoming vice-president JD Vance, whose 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy, is his memoir of blue-collar poverty and societal dysfunction.
Vance has taken an expedient approach by hitching his trailer to the Trump Train, of which he was previously derisive. Vance, who is just 40 years old, in fact offers a more sympathetic conservatism for the future than the chaos and crassness of Donald Trump.
That, and possible incoming appointments to the supreme court, suggest that the US will remain a conservative country for the foreseeable future unless the Democrats can find a way to appeal to working-class Americans again.
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