American election result adds to our understanding of US society

HA Hellyer reviews the American presidential election

Donald Trump may now want to claim that he and his supporters saw his victory coming. Mark Wilson / Getty Images

Donald Trump may now want to claim that he and his supporters saw it coming. But the truth of the matter is, few, if any, expected the outcome in the United States. And therein lies a big part of the problem – the lack of political acumen and awareness that so many exhibited, even when the signs were so apparent. Now the question is what the effects of that election are likely to be and what “we” have to do as a result.

Let us be clear – the president-elect of the United States has not won a dignified electoral race. As the days roll on, we will see a revision of two sets of positions.

The first set is going to be Mr Trump’s own political priorities and promises – realising that much of what he promised in the presidential campaign is, from an institutional perspective, impossible to achieve.

The second is going to be the positions of many people who claimed to oppose his candidacy, whether from the Left or the Right. Many of those people are going to revise their positions – which we should read as political opportunism and lack of principle of the highest order.

The revisionists should not cause us to forget a core and undeniable truth: Mr Trump ran, and won, through a discourse of blatant bigotry. There’s much else to say beyond that, but the cultural wars speak to an immensely profound truth. Because in Mr Trump’s victory, the side that supported excluding large groups of people from what it means to be an American, won. And as people now try to water down the profundity of that, in order to cast Mr Trump in the mainstream or make their post-election support of him more palatable, the reality still remains the same.

But it wasn’t simply about racism or anti-Muslim sentiment. It wasn’t simply about the economic failings of the establishment. There are many claims floating around in the world to interpret it all – but as certain as so many want to be, they were certain about Mr Trump’s losing the election as well. A bit of humility and careful examination of the data as it becomes available is probably in order.

But let us see what this all means. First, we don’t know. If there is a basic truth about a Trump presidency, it is that it is unpredictable. He made numerous mutually contradictory promises during the campaign, and no one can predict quite how he will proceed on key issues at all. It may turn out to be rather debilitating for all sorts of reasons, but we don’t know in which ways – not yet.

A few things remain clear, because they have already happened. The first is that domestically, the far-right and the populist right are emboldened. A wide range of opponents of Mr Trump are furious – but ask African-Americans, Muslim-Americans or Hispanic-Americans. They’re not just furious – many of them are fearful for their friends, their families, and themselves. If many liberal white Americans are trying to figure out how they explain to their children how someone who represented the antipathy of their values managed to ascend to the White House, Muslim-Americans are having far more essentialist arguments with their children.

Secondly, in Europe the election has already had an impact, in that the far-right feels incredibly encouraged. Geert Wilders and Marine le Pen are two of the worst politicians that Europe has to offer and both are incredibly pleased that a Trump presidency is possible, because they feel it means their own causes appear more real. They may be right or wrong, but either way, it is bad for the future of societies in Europe that such populist right-wingers feel empowered.

But there is another reality. Domestically and internationally, no one ought to consider that they have the luxury of simply throwing in the towel. Mr Trump’s election ought to be a call to arms domestically, for two purposes.

The first is to try to ensure that if a Trump presidency can succeed in genuinely good ways, it should – because failure to do good helps no one, except in a terribly cynical world. The second is to galvanise those who rightly recognise that better choices must be created and to move constructively and effectively towards that.

And when it comes to the international community, there is, perhaps, a better understanding of the truth that reliance on American power is not always a good idea. Because, just as we have seen now, American power, badly wielded is a pretty bad idea.

Which means doing far more to ensure that with or without it, the world can move forward in making a better world.

If after four years Mr Trump’s presidency has contributed to encouraging an understanding of that, then that will be worth its weight in gold for a very long time indeed.

Dr HA Hellyer is a senior non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington and the Royal United Services Institute in London

On Twitter: @hahellyer