The day after Trump won the 2024 US election, I started watching The West Wing from the beginning. Seeing clever people discuss complex problems felt like an antidote to the hate-spewing, irrational belief systems of MAGA and America’s slide into fascism.
The Trump myth
Three weeks later, I’m about to start season two. Yet I’m none the wiser about how such a cross-section of struggling Americans could believe that an openly bigoted, provenly corrupt man born into money could speak for them. There’s no comprehensible throughline from Trump himself to his following.
It’s my failing. Perhaps you share it: the need to explain our current predicament in rational terms. Why would those whose lives have been hollowed out by rampant capitalism and inequality elect one of their most prominent beneficiaries to redress the balance? The connection between Trump and his supporters is many things, but it’s not rational.
“He’s a successful businessman,” they say. The basis of this belief is the proclamations of the man himself, in direct contradiction to the evidence. Trump’s businesses have filed for Chapter 11 (corporate) bankruptcy six times. The truth is that Trump is simply too rich to fail, unlike the majority of his voters. The dark secret of the American dream is that those with already unlimited means can keep trying and side-stepping the fallout of failure until they hit a success. Most of us are lucky to get one shot.
“He’s not a politician. He tells it like it is,” is another favourite. Yet his lies are so numerous, fact checkers simply cannot keep up. He’s the master of Steve Bannon’s “flooding the zone” strategy. He doesn’t so much tell it like it is, as tell it like they want it to be.
Add in a sprinkling of human fear of the ‘other’- immigrants, people of colour, the disabled, Democrats, women, gay or trans people – and the recipe for cultism is complete.
Grown-up politics
Back at The West Wing, President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) wrestles in earnest with 1990s problems that affect the American people and doesn’t once attempt to aggrandise himself in the process. One suspects even if Twitter had existed then, he would have refused an account. Important people resign honourably for things that wouldn’t raise a headline today. And integrity is the abiding watchword. It all feels so hopelessly naïve.
Bang up to date, on the other side of the Atlantic, Keir Starmer is attempting to do a Bartlett. He’s a serious man for serious times, he believes. And for a short while, his grown-up politics offered relief from the runaway excesses of the post-Brexit, late-term Conservatives.
Solemnity is not enough, however. With the far-right twitching in the wings, Starmer has to buck the global trend and make a real improvement to people’s lives with actual policies, and fast. Easier said than done during late-stage capitalism, on a globe ridden with conflict, the rise of authoritarianism, and climate breakdown.
I confess a weakness for grown-up politics. I believe in science and experts; I want my leaders to be cleverer than me. But I want something else, too: someone to tell me it’s going to be all right.
Just as I sometimes envy believers the faith they have in divine, omnipotent beings, so I have caught myself wishing I could hear “It’ll be fixed… you won’t have to vote anymore” and be comforted not chilled to my core.
World weariness
More than anything, I want to believe the people in charge have it covered. That they can solve the Middle East crisis, the cost-of-capitalism crisis, and the climate crisis without my participation. That the tech bros have more than their own interests at heart. That leaders will make sure another global pandemic doesn’t rip through our populations, killing millions. Like so many others, I’ve been tired since around the time David Bowie died, and I want someone inspiring, principled, and benevolent to take charge.
Currently, we have a political dichotomy between those who exploit this human weariness for their own advancement, and those who neglect it in favour of corporate business as usual. In the battle for voters’ attention, the exploiters who promise easy answers win. People want change – any change. Because what is there left to lose?
Globalism and neoliberalism, usually by design, have ignored the needs of huge swathes of our communities in favour of self-enrichment for the few. Just see Sewage Watch for one among hundreds of examples. Cue the latest crop of populists, along to exploit the anger and resentment born of the very political failures that made them rich. It’s a maddening doom spiral.
Human nature
Humans have a considerable number of flaws. For all our intellectual capacity, we are often irrational and led by emotion. We are quick to take mental short cuts, and to judge and reject others, especially those who differ from us. And it’s true we can be greedy and selfish. We crave the easy answer, the path of least resistance.
Yet we can also be imaginative, creative, empathetic, and altruistic. If this were not true, no one would ever write a book or a piece of music. No one would give up a seat on the train, enter a burning building to save a stranger, or buy a pet from a rescue centre. At the very least, I’d argue, we all want a better future for our kids than this.
We tend to forget in these days of hot-button social media algorithms, that such instincts are as basic and everyday as the destructive ones currently dominating our discourse. Yet they are no longer reflected in our politics. Progressive politics has been too quick to adopt the right’s assumption that voters act only for themselves and that they must be coddled with short-term pacifiers. Voters, for our part, have too often lived up to the expectation.
Common good arguments like those that gave rise to the Home Front, the welfare state and our cherished NHS have been dropped by an embarrassed left as obsolete in our competitive, individualistic society. And look where it got us.
To borrow the famous Aneurin Bevin quote, common good will last only “as long as there are folk left with faith to fight for it.”
Sea change must come
The trickle down growth and competition paradigms have run their course. Something new has to be on the other side. As climate breakdown progresses, more and more people will encounter the evidence of our predicament. They will be scared, and they’ll need something to look to. If they follow their MAGA contemporaries, denial and conflict will reign over our end of days.
Do it right, however, and there could be a sea change in political history. We might finally leave behind our species’ difficult adolescence and stop looking for the grown-ups in the room. Spoiler alert: weary as we are, we are the grown-ups. Yes, we need leaders who will tell us a better story, but they will only do so if we show up and play our part.
If politics has entered a new era of irrationality, it’s time we take on the nihilistic demagogues and weave a more powerful positive counternarrative before it’s too late.
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