Looking from here it is inexplicable that a person as incompetent and repellent as Donald Trump should hold sway the way he does. He was a President who spread the virus and violence and did nothing to help his supporters. He was defeated after one term and impeached for a second time, so, on the day the next man was to formally take over, he sent a bunch of Nazis to trash the Capitol.

Yet his disciples act as if he is still the boss. Worse, his political toadies endorsed the mad stuff that surrounded his defeat. They assume he'll be back in four years for another tilt at the top job, that they'll have to bow and scrape lest next time round they incur his wrath. America, and the world, is in for a rough time ahead. The question now: Are they right? Is Trumpery a passing craze or is it the harbinger of the future? We're used to fashions starting in America and spreading to the world. In office, Trump emboldened like-minded "strong men" in places like Poland and Hungary. Will his virus spread now to others? To us?

Throughout Trumpery it was being repeated endlessly that the demagogue appealed to working class white men in the provinces. For years we were being told that Trump was providing answers for this demographic. In reality he never did a thing for them. His economics was about cutting taxes for the one per cent and imposing tariffs on red state farmers. His Republican mates loudly and persistently resisted providing a robust stimulus to the Covid-hit economy right through to the February 2021 vote when the GOP (Grand Old Party) voted unanimously to reject the higher Democratic sum and thereby condemn their red state constituents to prolonged suffering.

Through months of Congressional wrangling, Trump was silent. At one stage he said he supported the more robust investment package favoured by the Democrats, but that was only because of personal pique aimed at his ostensible mates. The art of the deal guy did no dealing to help out his base. Yet only in the last few months, as the unhinged death rattles of Trumpery commanded attention, have the commentators shut up about his supposed identity with his misled supporters. This shows the power of the "narrative", the power of style over substance, because behind the rhetoric and the vulgarity there was nothing. The so-called "culture wars", Trump's manipulations, distracted attention from real life issues about the economy, the environment - the victim of Trumpian rape - and so many other things.

Trump cannot reflect but his mates in the Republican Party (GOP) would have done well had they considered the era of American superpowerdom They would have found that American wealth stemmed from policies that Trumpery hated. For 30 years after World War Two immigrants helped the economy boom. The working and middle classes emerged from pre-war poverty, largely because manufacturing was bullish and trade unions were relatively strong. American scientists, often those same immigrants, won Nobel Prizes.

The federal Government spent piles on health, education, science and infrastructure. The Marshall Plan that invested in Europe boosted trade between the two continents (and was part of the Cold War opposition to Russia). In the Capitol building Republicans and Democrats agreed on the rules of engagement and often cooperated. Watchdog readers might not have cared for some of these things, but they served American capitalism well.

It's Long Been All About Money

Trumpery reversed course. It hates scientists, immigrants, unions, doctors, democratic countries and other politicians. But it does like (a rather different) Russia. The GOP politicians don't follow these things because they have no care for their country. They're at the trough to ingratiate themselves with their billionaire enablers. Their interest is to be in office, which is why their other need is to stay on side with the Deplorables. Trump? He was there to boost his ego and his family's wealth.

Trumpery has exacerbated the injustices but it did not create them. It's long been all about money. In a powerful indictment of US capitalism, two investigators have outlined the huge scope of American financial injustice. *Since 1974, when the era of post-war growth ended, $US50 trillion, that's $50,000,000,000,000, has been diverted from 90% of the people to the richest 1%. And most of that has accrued to the top 0.1%. Had the relativities within the economy over the three post-war decades merely held steady over the next four decades the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone.

That is an amount equal to nearly 12% of gross domestic product (GDP), enough to more than double median income. It would have increased the pay of all of the 90%, around 300 million people, by $1,444 every single month of every single year. *Nick Hanauer and David Rolf, "America's 1% Have Taken $50 Trillion From The Bottom 90% - And That's Made The US Less Secure", Time, 14/9/20, citing a report by RAND Corporation.

That would have blunted Deplorable impulses. If families feel secure, they won't veer to extremes and irrationality. A less neurotic America could have invested in renewable energy and smart public transport, providing jobs for those who otherwise came to be disaffected. Between 1947 and 1974, people's real income had grown at about the same rate as per capita economic growth across all income levels and all income levels increased at about the same rate. These numbers show wealth within demographic groups. Wealth between groups has narrowed, as women and blacks, while still being paid less than white men, are narrowing the gap.

Poorer white men continue to take home more than blacks and women but the gap has been closing through the 50 years. Another statistic measuring their relative decline is that they comprised 45% of the adult workforce in 2018, compared to 60% in 1974. So, if they think they are not as dominant in the scheme of things as they once were, they are right, but if they think it's because women and blacks are getting more at their expense, they are wrong.

Women and blacks have actually lost more to rising inequality than white men because, starting from a lower base, they had far more potentially to gain. And here we come to the central evil of Trumpery. And the crucial miscalculation that he encouraged among his supporters: "[B]y far the single largest driver of of rising inequality these past 40 years has been the dramatic rise in inequality between white men" (authors' emphasis, but mine too).

This means that the two power sources of Trumpian folly, the top 1%, almost all white men, and the "base", almost all white men ranging across the 90%, should see the other guys as the problem. The Deplorables rage against decency and diversity misses the cause of their anger absolutely. Were they to make common cause with all lower and middle class Americans, they could form a coalition that would demand that the $50,000,000,000,000 be returned. Hey, guys, there would be enough for everyone, even the "elitists" and the "liberals".

It all suits the billionaires because while the millions of the deluded and the deceived are ranting their nonsense, no-one is paying attention to this huge transfer of wealth to the 0.1% from the Deplorables - who are part of the 90%. They are not the only ones who have never noticed the theft, the very wealthy having bribed enough politicians to ensure nothing changes. In society at large the topic does not surface, not because the media want to purvey "fake news", but because the journalists themselves do not look far when it comes to neoliberalism. Its tenets are accepted because it's all that most journalists have ever known.

In the meantime, the pandemic sped up the already hurtling rip off, with the billions of stimulus capital pumping up asset prices while the virus disproportionately hits the poor. A measure of the extent of the exploitation of the poor is exemplified by the debate over the minimum wage. Republicans and some Democrats resisted raising it to $15 an hour, yet were the sum to be equivalent to the 1968 level, it would already be $22 an hour.

Given all the gross and growing inequality, it has sometimes been assumed that the trend has only been for very rich people to benefit at the expense of very poor people. Yes, that is true enough, but it is only one aspect. The malaise affects most Americans. At the median, pay is now less than half what it would have been had neoliberalism not been imposed. That's Middle America, the land of those soccer moms and suburbanites, people who often voted for Trump in 2016.

These days it seems that many normal people regret having been distracted by Trumpery. They need now to go one step further and disown the passivity of the Clinton and Obama years - of all the Governments in fact since 1974 (amusingly, but irrelevantly, that was when an impeached Nixon resigned his Presidency. It's all been downhill since we lost Tricky Dick).

It Is Not About China

The diminished influence of white working-class men is partly due to successive Governments' attacks on unions, and it is also due to the historic "free market" trend away from jobs based on physical labour. But that is only a part of a wider story. This transfer of wealth to the richest few was not - as is usually asserted - the result of globalisation. RAND emphasises that "the $50 trillion transfer of wealth has occurred entirely within the American economy, not between it and its trading partners". It is not about China.

The report suggests what the $50 trillion steal is really about: "We chose to cut taxes on billionaires, to rig the rules to allow monopolies, to erode the minimum wage and labour's bargaining power. We chose to elect political leaders who put the material interests of the rich and powerful above those of the American people". Of course, in the days of Franklin Roosevelt, President from 1933 to 1945, life was pre-social media and everyone listened to the same few radio stations and read the same few newspapers. This is well understood by commentators, leading some to assume that this time round it's the sheer variety of information sources that created the current malaise and all the "fake news" nonsense. But volume of news sources is not, in itself, to blame. Nor, in itself, is the lurch to extremes.

To take another look back: 200 years ago, in Britain, there were scores of weekly and monthly publications in which political events were argued with passion and often extreme prejudice. This was the great age of the essay, the era of the immortal William Hazlitt, whose brilliant attacks on reaction, which he called Legitimacy, were the inspiration for the polemical journalism that still exists today. If not often on social media.

The difference between 1820 and 2020 is that the British population, like everywhere else then, was largely illiterate and uninformed. Most were too poor and isolated, struggling to keep going, to take part in social discussion - or even to be aware of issues. Society was vastly more unequal than that of today. Debate ignored most people, so when the Tories and the Whigs got into a stoush the tone might have been nasty, but the facts were not in dispute because participants agreed on what was real. Conflict was based on actual economic and social division.

Trumpery's Deplorables might not know much and certainly do not think much, but, compared to the average person in the 19th Century, they are somewhat more informed and vastly better off. But, as we know, social media has enabled swift and unmediated exchanges. In Regency England those who might have been susceptible to Deplorable behaviour were nationally invisible. Gossip, superstition, rumour and conspiracy theories were often wilder even than the craziness today, but they could not spread far beyond the village and certainly not into the world of print, the one medium then existing.

In 1820 they were arguing about nationality and religion. Legitimacy excluded Catholics and reviled Jews and feared Republican France, but whether it is 1820 or 2020 the real division is between the very few who have power and the many who do not. Deplorable results like xenophobia or racism or sexism are symptoms of this inequality. They are the poisoned fruit of reaction. The insolence of power is ubiquitous, and, post-print's monopoly, in our world the range of computer technology is instantly global, so the first pressing question might be, could it happen here? At the height of Trumpery's madness, NZ columnists Chris Trotter and Lana Hart, and maybe others as well, answered that, yes, very definitely it could.

Very Much An American Affair

This is almost certainly not the case. Trump's election chaos was very much an American affair. The demagogue and the paranoid have always lurked beneath the surface of American life, whereas NZ has never produced populists like, for example, William Jennings Bryan or Henry George in the 19th Century, or a segregationist like George Wallace in the 20th Century. They are the fruit of the frontier individualism and sheer size of America. Gradualist, pragmatic NZ has never hosted a successful populist politics of either the Left or the Right. And neither has there been a correspondingly compelling champion of progressive causes. No-one in our history could claim to be a Martin Luther King or Woody Guthrie.

American style super sizing and hype has never existed within the modest traditions of NZ society. That's not to say extremist would-be demagogues do not exist. Of course, they do. But they have all come across as ridiculous figures. None has ever garnered even a wisp of the sort of hysterical mass support of a Trump. Celebrity culture here struggles to gain a mass audience. The premise of Trotter and Hart was that both the US and NZ have a history of racism, but the legacy of slavery and the Civil War means that American-style racism is both in degree and in kind different from anything that NZ has experienced. The history of NZ does not justify the extreme language often employed to suggest it does.

The argument that inequality between Maori and Pasifika and everyone else - the default position of liberal intellectuals to explain pretty much any perceived wrongs - will provoke a Kiwi-style storming of Wellington to rival the attempted coup in Washington reverses reality. Trump's Deplorables are white-skinned fascists who say they are mad as hell because people who are brown or black or female are stealing their country. Maori victimhood is predicated on the opposite supposition: that Pakeha have stolen the country from them. Following the Trotter assumption, if there were to be a social breakdown in NZ comparable to what's going on Stateside, it would be akin to Black Lives Matter claiming a right to justice and equality, not like the Proud Boys with their clamour for violence and division.

Unlike the rioters in America, overwhelmingly of a pale complexion, NZ's tiny band of neo-fascists come in various hues, spouting various ideologies. The few who combine the three marks of Cain by being male and old and white do not exist as public figures. And never have. In February 2021 we had the crude racism of the "shock jocks" on talk back radio, but who listens beyond some grumpy and lonely old men?

(The "pale and stale" demographic, that is, comes in several forms. Seeing it as a single, dominant force, as is often the case, fosters misleading comment). Former ACT leader John Banks managed to make an idiot of himself, a one-day news item - and then went on to explain why the dangerously radical NZ government had success dealing with Covid. God was helping Jacinda. Which raises the question: What has God got against Banksy's mates, Boris and Donald?

The paranoid style has historically been influential in American politics (the title of an influential analysis of the country) and is not matched in NZ, where conspiracy theorists have not progressed beyond the margins of society. The Republicans used to be comparable to National. Both advanced the interests of wealth and conservatism rather than God and QAnon. National still does.

Under the influence of Trumpery, the Republicans have come to represent sheer irrationality, irresponsibility and hypocrisy. Most of their federal Congressmen voted to overturn the election. Faced with two outspoken representatives, one a leader of the GOP caucus who agreed that Biden had won and that it was wrong to invade the Capitol - where they all worked - and a loony racist who, amongst other things, had called for the murder of Speaker Nancy Pelosi - and her colleague - most of them backed the loony.

There has never been anything comparable in NZ politics. As we go to press some in the GOP are still denying the election result, leading several of them to alternate regularly between condemning the pro-Nazi insurrectionist Trump and pledging allegiance to the merely Deplorable Trump. We've never seen anything so craven in the parts of the world that call themselves "civilised".

A Cult Of Obstruction & Negativity

As I have previously argued, Trump is more the leader of a cult than a politician, but the cult could not have grown without a nurturing climate. The present phase of malfeasance could be dated to Ronald Reagan, who notoriously asserted that the worst words you might come to hear would be the Government telling you that they were "here to help" (he might not have known that the name of his party is derived from the Latin meaning "a public thing"). Since then, there have been 40 years of Republican politicians entering politics in order to do nothing to help, a trend which has climaxed in Trumpery's abandoning of hundreds of thousands of Americans to die from Covid-19.

During the Democratic Clinton Administration, which came soon after Reagan's span, GOP politicians followed the advice of the then-Speaker, Newt Gingrich, whose explicit tactic was to be nasty and obstructive. Gingrich knew that he had to change the "narrative". Potential supporters needed to be induced not to disagree with Democrats over policy, but to hate them as people. It was Gingrich who inspired the Deplorable mood that has followed. That way the GOP could block reform and ensure the Government could follow Reagan's lead by refusing to help its citizens (I wrote about Trump's "narrative" in Watchdog 151, August 2019, in my review of Joseph Stiglitz's "People, Power And Profits").

That was the background to GOP intransigence during the Obama years. If Obama wanted something, the GOP would oppose it. Of course, Trump needed no prompting. His impulses have always been personal and vindictive. His reign of terror was motivated by the need to upend Obama's legacy - and then make the federal Government his fiefdom. He could rule without restraint, just like Xi and Putin and the Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia.

The sycophants around Trump were always guided by the need to appease by making life hard for the Democrats. A telling example occurred in the last week of Trumpery when on five successive days the Secretary of State (equivalent to NZ's Minister of Foreign Affairs) announced actions on five separate trouble spots, the common motivation being to mess things up for Biden. That it also messed things up for American interests - as seen by all Washington power brokers - was of no concern.

There is nothing comparable in the NZ tradition. Our Parliamentary parties carry on - outwardly at least - as they always have, following conventional processes. When Gerry Brownlee floated a conspiracy theory about the virus, he was ridiculed, and had to withdraw almost immediately. Social media and human nature being what they are, NZ has of course hosted its own outbreaks of hysteria and misinformation, and will certainly host a lot more, but the topics are not often like the serious ones that are plaguing America.

It is instructive that in all the comment about the events that Trumpery has inspired mention is not made about why it is that the conspiracists become addicted. It is taken for granted that, in their millions, they have no access to conventional logic or fact. There are no friends, relatives, workmates - no-one they can talk to? It would take only a couple of minutes' calm reflection to see that the latest "news" couldn't be true, and it would take only a minute or so of calm thinking to reach the same conclusion. That never happens? They have no contact with normalcy?

At the height of Trumpery's campaign of lies a supporter sent me a video claiming election fraud, so for the first time in my life I wasted three minutes viewing part of a conspiracy theory. The video was produced in New York and though the allegations were not plausible, the tone was. But a few moments on Google revealed that the video was funded by a Chinese religious group who want to take down the government in China, which was said to be held up by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Trump has been sent by God to defeat the Communists (is that part of why he likes to blame China for everything he doesn't like?).

If they knew this background, might not even the most credulous ask themselves if disingenuous motives were in play? Would they then not be able to look objectively at the evidence said to indicate election fraud? If so, they could allow themselves to conclude that all the allegations could not be true. How can millions of people living otherwise conventional lives in many instances go for stuff like that? What would happen if a future American President ordered a lockdown to take effect in five hours' time (the situation in Auckland as I write)? The alternative society would not know or they would hear a false account or they would refuse, on principle, to comply. America had better not get involved in any future epidemic or war or natural disaster.

Jim Flynn, Professor at Otago University, who recently died, produced globally significant work on IQs. One of his findings was that, after rising for many decades, IQ scores in rich countries are falling. Flynn attributed this to the fact that fewer people read and, amid all the mindless tweeting, their concentration spans are shortening and their ability to assess connections is diminishing. All the evidence suggests that, if this is in fact the case, the trend can only continue.

In the foreseeable future in both the US and NZ a conspiratorial flight from reality will probably veer ever further from calm consideration. So much depends on what conspiracies are hatched and by whom, and this is unpredictable. The optimistic possibility is that Trump's Republican enablers give the man too much credit. By the time it matters, when they face their next election, he might be in jail or a dementia ward. And won't the GOP split if the loonies get loonier still?

Since the election it has been revealed that Trump's demise was in large part brought about by a secret campaign which united fundamental opponents, US corporate interests and the trade union movement. Corporates feared business losses from Deplorable chaos; unionists feared for their rights and wages. When the traditional standard bearers of both red and blue values make common cause, it provides a basis for Biden and his Government to make progress (Time, 4/2/21, "The Secret History Of The Shadow Campaign That Saved The 2020 Election", Molly Ball).

Hope Of Reverting To Shared Reality

Another reason for hope is that the mess that Biden has inherited could induce him to move leftwards from his preferred centrism, even if he does not talk in those terms. America needs massive public spending. This would allow for cohesive "whole of Government" action and would bind his side into a collective, social ethic, fending off the social media hysterics. America's immediate crises are the culmination of structural failures.

Biden and the Democrats will want to focus on the recovery from Covid, but also on replacing decayed infrastructure and providing long withheld needs like health care, racial justice and electoral fairness. We shouldn't expect soaring rhetoric about social democracy, but just the act of governing sanely in the interests of the 90% could shift policy towards progressive values. Then national debates on policy could revert to being conducted within a shared reality.

It's the "surveillance capitalists" we need to watch. Shoshana Zuboff has pointed out that the already huge power of social media corporations is increasing exponentially. She suggests that the Trump win in 2016, when he defied conventional wisdom by squeaking unexpected, if small, margins in several key states, was enabled by a new method of voter suppression.

Zuboff thinks that the essential factor in Trumpery's success was a GOP targeting of blacks (as likely supporters of the Democrats) through social media, aiming to induce cynicism about the election so that they would not vote. This suggests that the lies and conspiracies, tailored through the harvesting of vast amounts of personal data, will only increase (I reviewed Zuboff's "The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism" in Watchdog 151, August 2019).

Let's see how it goes. In the meantime, just in case, Biden could legislate to guarantee a normal election in four years by changing the way it's done. Official America has always been pompous and ponderous, but it could adapt to life as it is these days and do things the way other, simpler, democracies do. Here are a few suggestions which must have occurred to billions of people around the world.

Appoint a civil servant who cannot be fired by any politician to announce the result of elections. Do so as soon as the votes have been tallied. Strip a defeated incumbent of the ability to issue pardons or executive orders. Shorten the time between the election and the inauguration to a few days. The present arrangement dates from an era when things that are now done instantly took weeks or months (the incoming President was once not in office till the March after the November poll).

The coup this time nearly succeeded. Biden's majority happened to be the same as Trump's had been, that is decisive. Next time the margin could be closer. This time there were no incidents or accusations that could have allowed a pretext for alleging irregularities. What would have happened if the January mob had managed to prevent the Senate from certifying the result? What if Pence had averted the threat of being hanged by obeying his boss and declaring him the winner? An American obsession with ritual does not encourage solutions which might be based on a more flexible common sense. The only way NZ provides - provided - an excuse to foment electoral doubt was if a majority mandate depended on the grace and favour of Winston Peters. But no-one expects Winston to lead a mob into the Beehive.