US election has exposed the distaste for democracy among America’s elite

The systematic inequalities at the heart of the United States system have always been there, writes Arun Kundnani, hidden behind diplomatic language. All Donald Trump did was make them explicit

The next Republican president Donald Trump pumps his fist after speaking at a rally in Georgia, United States. Trump’s campaign laid bare the reality behind the diplomatic language of American politicians John Bazemore / AP PhotoShow less

The popular response to the shock of Donald Trump’s election in the United States has been calls for national unity and the healing of divides after the polarisation of the presidential campaign. The desire is for a period of normality, in the hope that Mr Trump’s extremist rhetoric was just an electoral tool.

But there is nothing normal about Mr Trump’s election victory. It represents a break with many of the political and economic orthodoxies of the last 40 years. It brings to power a new paradigm of elite rule that, in the absence of a real insurgency against the establishment, is able to masquerade as a revolt against the elites.

To understand the scale of the shift, think back to the last shake-up of conservative politics in the US, with Reaganism in the 1980s. His “New Right” formula – shared with Margaret Thatcher in Britain – combined a racist law and order politics, attacks on organised labour, privatisation, global trade liberalisation, the expansion of the financial sector, Cold War militarism and the cultivation of consumerism.

This revolution from above shattered the post-war Keynesian consensus in Britain and the United States. When a Democrat returned to the White House, the fundamentals of Reaganism remained in place. Bill Clinton’s only adjustment was to wrap Reagan’s free-market fundamentalism in a corporate multiculturalism that absorbed elite liberals into a new status quo. Tony Blair played a similar role in normalising Thatcherism.

With the end of the Cold War, this new consensus was globally dominant. Market-driven globalisation was assumed to be the destiny of the world. An end to the history of ideological conflict was proclaimed. September 11, 2001, marked not the return of history but an apparent reminder that other parts of the world had yet to catch up.

But the 2008 economic crisis was a catastrophe internal to the system rather than an external attack. It represented a major crisis of legitimacy for the free-market world that Reagan and Thatcher created.

The crisis will not be resolved through the existing formulae of centre-left and centre-right politics that have dominated the West since the end of the Cold War. What comes next will emerge from elsewhere, most probably the margins of the Left or Right.

At present, the far-right has done a better job of understanding the crisis and figuring out how to build coalitions that can exploit the new situation. Mr Trump’s success is one result. The Brexit vote in Britain earlier this year is another.

At the core of both victories are new techniques of political racism that enable coalitions of working-class and middle-class whites to achieve electoral success. In the US presidential elections, across every income category, and across men and women, the majority of whites voted for Trump and the majority of non-whites voted for Hillary Clinton.

This was not simply a white backlash against eight years of Barack Obama or a throwback to Nixon’s “southern strategy” of marshalling a nostalgic bigotry. Rather, it is a technique that thrives amid the hypocrisy of America’s 21st-century liberal platitudes.

Racism in the United States is a social and political system, not simply a matter of individual attitudes. It is sustained not by barroom bigots but by millions of acts of complicity on the part of ordinary people who happen to live in a society that depends on an oppression it publicly disowns.

America tells itself a story of its own exceptional virtue while also systematically maintaining devastating economic inequalities and racial oppressions that only official violence can sustain. It proclaims itself leader of the free world while defending everywhere elites who profit from the lack of freedom of their subjects.

Mr Trump exploited precisely that gap between the polite, liberal values espoused by corporate CEOs and secretaries of state, and the exploitation and violence they actually preside over, domestically and globally. His Islamophobia – signified by his call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States – made explicit what was already implicit in the policies of the war on terror under Bush and Obama. Similarly, his demand for a wall to be built on the Mexican border dramatised what had been the official policy of both parties since the 1990s.

Mr Trump’s message is that only he has the strength to break the normal rules of politics, to strip the veneer of civil society, so that the political game is revealed for the power grab it is. With the rules of political correctness set aside, he implies, all that remains is “them” and “us,” the struggle of race and nation for supremacy.

Under Donald Trump, then, enemies will be named rather than obscured and liberal pieties dispensed with. Waterboarding is “minimal, minimal, minimal torture”, says Mr Trump; he will bring in something far worse. His vulgarity, violence and offensiveness – the very qualities that conventional wisdom saw as disqualifying – secured his ideological victory more powerfully than rational argument.

Even Mr Trump’s boasting in a presidential debate of the size of a body part was more than just an accidental vulgarity. The subtext was that power would be wielded nakedly and without embarrassment. Mr Obama embraced soft power; Mr Trump’s will only be hard. Against this masculinised message, Hillary Clinton could not compete.

That such a candidate could win the support of significant sections of the CEO class tells us two things. First, it indicates they no longer feel the need to pay lip service to the dignity of public office. During the Cold War, the US ruling class, disciplined by a rival ideological force with real political power, still respected the institutions through which the US was governed. The neoconservatives who were so central to George W Bush’s presidency retain some of that old mindset and fear Mr Trump as its antithesis.

But the corporate elite today has abandoned any broader approach to government beyond lobbying for tax cuts and deregulation. There is scant embarrassment at bankers’ multi-million-dollar bonuses, even in the midst of a financial crisis they helped create.

Meanwhile, policymaking in Washington is now so controlled by corporate lobbyists that it lacks almost any correlation with majority public opinion. Such brazen arrogance of power is unprecedented in the modern era; Mr Trump is its emblem.

Second, Mr Trump’s election reflects an understanding among sections of the US corporate class that the globalisation advanced by Reagan and Mr Clinton has had unintended negative consequences. The old assumption was that, in the long run, US capitalism is better off if the world adopts a global system of liberal trade and investment rules. Globalisation looked like Americanisation and US corporations could expect to take special advantage of it.

Today, globalisation looks more like a de-centring of the West. Hence Mr Trump’s commitment to renegotiate or withdraw from the North America Free Trade Agreement, to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and to challenge China’s trade policy. Hence the fear that the world is no longer being won for America, that the best course now is a partial withdrawal from global leadership.

It is too early to declare the end of Pax Americana but the Trump administration looks set to do less global economic firefighting and less “democracy promotion”. The compensation for that retreat from the global stage will be a reassertion of white supremacy at home.

Such are the building blocks of a new far-right paradigm of government. With Donald Trump at the helm of the largest surveillance system ever created and the capacity to carry out extrajudicial killings by drone strikes on demand, the groundwork for a very 21st-century fascism has been laid.

Arun Kundnani is the author of The Muslims are Coming!. He teaches at New York University