DISCLAIMER: all opinions in this article reflect the views of the author, not the position of STAND UP FOR EUROPE.

By Drakoulis Goudis

11/11/2024

 

Convicted felon and sexual abuser Donald Trump won the US Presidential Election on Tuesday and will return to the Oval Office in January. Trump’s triumph (he won the popular vote for the first time in his 3 presidential campaigns) is more shocking and appalling than his 2016 win, because this time everything about who he is, what he represents and what he plans is widely known–he wasn’t hiding it. America chose a vile bigot with multiple convictions, who believes that “the truth is what I say”, admires dictators, despises everything the modern West stands for and has the character we are all aware of, to be their president.

Why?

Most analysts have fallen into the trap of analyzing whether Harris was a good candidate, what the Democrats did wrong and a myriad of other aspects which are not the root of the problem–because the root of the problem is too uncomfortable and paternalistic.

Trump has a steady voter base which will vote Republican even if the candidate was a dead possum or the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. Very little can be done about this part of the voter base, who are fanatical Christian conservatives, with all the baggage this entails in USA on topics like race, gender, sexuality etc. These people do not win elections, though. They exist in every country (albeit in most of Europe to a lesser extent than in the USA) and consistently vote for candidates who represent these views. In the USA, they control the rural states and the South.

 

'Red states and Blue states'

CC BY 4.0: Born Isopod, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Red_states_and_blue_states_2016-2020.svg

Trump’s victory came from two groups of voters: the selfish amoralistic ones (or low-engagement), and the blue-collar workers (or low-information, low-education).

Low-engagement

All the polls show that most of the people who voted for Donald Trump voted him for “the economy”. Disregarding for a moment the fact that the American economy is actually doing well, and presidents do not order inflation around, nor can the average Joe determine how the economy is doing by checking the gas price, this reply (“I voted Trump for the economy”) is a blunt admittance of a complete lack of morals and red lines.

Donald Trump and his MAGA gang are vocal about how they consider women and people of color having equal opportunities “diversity hires”. They are not hiding that they consider equal rights for sexual and racial minorities “woke propaganda”. They are openly transphobic, misogynistic and don’t hide their plans to implement hateful laws which would aim to make the lives of millions of people harder. Trump is also not hiding that his ideal model of leadership is the Russian and Chinese one, where people who disagree with the leader are silenced.

And yet, the part of the American voter base which granted him the victory did not care at all about that, because “he is better for the economy”. The level of selfishness of this logic is hard to understate. It shows there is no red line they wouldn’t cross, no person they wouldn’t vote for, if they believed their pocket would be fuller. This is how democracies die, and how regimes rise.

Low-education, low-information

Blue-collar workers are the engine of the far-right in the whole West. Their socio-professional group got severely hurt by globalization, the opening of China to the world in 1989 and the outsourcing of the supply chain and manufacturing to Asia subsequently, and they are in an irreversible financial and social standing decline in the West. It’s how the world evolved, and while the transition period could have been handled better by Western leaders, there’s no turning back the clock.

Unfortunately, this group, characterized by a lower education level, and usually a low degree of engagement in the grand scheme of politics, turned to the far-right out of spite, anger and desperation. We saw it in 2016. We see it in France, in former East Germany, in the UK with Brexit.

Media and analysts often imply that this sort of voting behavior is to be expected and when people feel their daily life isn’t getting better, they will vote against the incumbent and the status-quo no matter what the alternative is. This is wrong and dangerous rhetoric. There are also millions of poor people who voted against Trump and will keep voting against far-right authoritarian because they haven’t thrown their values out of the window because of financial hardship.

Why does it happen more and more often lately?

We are in the era of idiocracy. The low-information, low-engagement and low-education voters were always the plurality. But they were herded in the pens of the traditional ideologies, shunned when expressing views that “maybe Mr. A is a felon but he wants to help us with import tariffs”, and ultimately forced to maintain some semblance of red lines.

Nowadays, they can find each other thanks to the power of social media (even before one of them was bought by a certain South African), live in virtual bubbles in which their source of news, entertainment and figures they trust are Rogan or TikTok-ers, and ultimately join a ride of resentment, vitriol, paranoia and tribalism.

The low-engagement voters don’t bother to fact-check, don’t care about anything that doesn’t directly touch them, and are the peak expression of American individualism. The blue-collar voters either delude themselves that a strongman authoritarian will bring back their jobs, or are bitter that some groups (women, immigrants, “the elites” etc.) overtook them in the ladder or benefited from the same global trends that hurt them.

What does it mean for Europe?

Europe has felt the consequences of the era of idiocracy already. Brexit is the most prominent example, but the rise of PiS, of AfD, of RN, are symptoms of the same disease (Italy is a distinct case). Trump’s return is bad news for Europe in multiple sectors: security, trade, rule of law, human rights. The USA has a tremendous cultural influence in European life, and it will be felt one way or another.

There is a small window of opportunity: European leaders still have 2 months to come up with a plan of continuous, robust support for Ukraine so that when Trump stops the aid, Ukraine can still fight. They have the chance to start a restructuring of European defense, with a joint European defense union. They have the chance to decouple Europe from the whims of voters of Wisconsin and North Carolina now that the United States elected someone who openly hates what the European Union stands for and would rather work with Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin.

They also have the chance to tackle the danger of having the fate of Kamala Harris in their own election, devise new strategies to fight against idiocracy, remove their weapons and shield Europe from black pages in its history. Because you can be sure, the groups of people who elected Trump exist on this side of the Atlantic as well.

Idiocracy

It might seem harsh to call this phenomenon “idiocracy”, but it really isn’t. When slogans like “They’re eating the cats and the dogs” are not immediately tanking a candidate, when people think that import tariffs will help their purchasing power (!), when common fraudsters are becoming increasingly influential to millions, when scientific facts become “a subjective opinion”, when the train of thought of undecided voters is “he might like fascism but I don’t like the current inflation”, what else can it be called?

Idiocracy is dangerous. It’s not the justified anger of people who feel neglected by a world that left them behind, nor the natural reaction of a society angry at its detached elitist leadership. It’s not excusable, and it can have dire consequences.

We’re concluding with a quote from author A.R. Moxon:

“Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed.

That word is “Nazi”. Nobody cares about their motives any more.

They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in doing so, they bound themselves to everything that came after. Who cares anymore what particular knot they used in the binding?”