For the second time in a few months I awoke to an election result that shocked and scared me. America has voted for change, just as Britain voted for change (ironically the one election that didn’t bring change was the Scottish referendum – how odd does that look now!).
What happened was that once again, the opinion people failed to find the real opinion of America, and I suspect that many people who wouldn’t say, were scared of admitting they were voting Trump.
What will happen in America, is that America will pick itself up and accept what it has done and make the most of it. World markets will fall (in the Far East the market is down 6%) and world markets will recover).
The “We” in the title of this blog , refers to the people who think they run things, the liberal establishment , for whom Trump is a blasphemer. But Nigel Farage, when I asked him how he felt about Trump said something which absolutely resonated.
“An imperfect candidate but a necessary agent of change”
There are two ways of looking at the Trump victory
- Could it have been a bigger republican victory had it not been for Trump (the imperfect candidate)?
- Could anyone other than Trump have carried this off?
What is extraordinary to me is that after 8 years of considered and sensitive leadership from Obama, the wrecking ball that is the Donald , seemed necessary.
And that is precisely the reason that people like me need to start listening to the people who don’t talk to pollsters (or if they do- don’t tell the truth!). I wrote yesterday about not understanding how people outside my social circle think about things. I called that blog “out of my comfort zone” and that’s exactly what Donald Trump makes me feel.
If this is (as the BBC is calling it), the greatest political shock ever, then it is because politics has just reconfigured itself toward the people and away from whatever the political elite thought politics was about.
The Washington lobby is being smashed up as surely as Britain’s ties with the EU. Anyone who stands in the way of the populism unleashed by this vote (Gina Miller beware) will be considered a traitor to democracy.
We have – it seems – a white lash.
This reconfiguring of American politics may have been influenced by Brexit but not by much. Trump called upon Farage and held him as a role model for America. But I doubt that many who voted for Trump thought it through- they felt it through and voting Trump “sure feels good” when you are as pissed off as many Americans obviously are.
I went to bed, expecting an “easy win” for Clinton as I had gone to bed expecting an easy win for “Remain”. I have had to rethink things in the UK as Americans are going to have to rethink things in their country.
It is ironic that Nigel Farage saw Trump in Marxist terms, that comment about Trump being a necessary agent for change assumes that had it not been Trump, another agent would have emerged and that it is not Trump changing America but his supporters finding a way to be heard. We thought that Springsteen spoke for white American working class values, how strange to think that that constituency has elected Trump their president.
Well now Trump will be heard and those voters will be heard. People like me, who have considered ourselves immutable, had better look to our foundations, for they are likely to be shaken.