People seem to forget how incompetent Trump was the first time around.

It’s not just the mishandling of COVID, which has left more 400,000 Americans dead. There were prices that costing Americans jobs in the industries they were supposed to protect. The trade deficit which significantly expanded. His failure to implement promises like “build the wall” and roll back Obamacare despite Republican control of both houses of Congress. The constant increase in homicide rate And violent crime in the United States under Trump. His destruction of America traditional relationshipsher undermine NATO faced with an aggressive Russia, the unbridled tendency corruption of his administration and that of Trump personal venality. And, most clearly, his attempts to remain in power illegally by inciting and facilitating an insurrection against Congress. Fortunately, the first time around, even Trump’s efforts to become a dictator were undermined by his incompetence.

Clearly, this record of failure does not bother his supporters, whose numbers are sufficient to mean he could become president again.

His incompetence and failures are apparently at the heart of how Trump was able to become president in the first place: He promised a radical new presidency that would stand up for ordinary Americans, so much so that Americans would be “tired of winning.” There would no longer be the status quo, special interests would be eliminated from Washington, and a new America First policy approach would create a utopia. Its spectacular failure to deliver on its fundamental promise should have been a political deathblow.

This is the lesson that progressives learned from Trump, from Brexit, from the shift to populism in the electorates of the mid-2010s: that the bitterness, hatred and resentment, tribalism and xenophobia that many voters – mainly white and male voters – expressed through their speeches. Support for figures like Trump was economic in origin, driven by insecurity and the perception that the economic game was rigged against them. Reduce insecurity, reduce hatred, that was the thinking. The progressives therefore had to demonstrate that the political and economic system could working in the interests of ordinary voters.

Thus, the “Washington Consensus” of the neoliberal era – free markets, minimal regulation, fiscal discipline, free trade and open borders – has been replaced by protectionism, anti-globalism and the desire to use a sector expanded public to intervene much more in the economy. to support industries like manufacturing, which were seen as unacceptable victims of neoliberalism. The Biden administration – and the Albanian government in its wake – has not simply retained Trump’s protectionism; he went further with gigantic industrial programs like the Inflation Reduction Act.

As Trump’s opinion polls suggest, his supporters don’t believe it. Hate and xenophobia are greater than ever.

Arguably, building an economy that operates more demonstrably in the interests of workers requires more time to provide the kind of economic security that will undermine voter resentment. It’s just as likely, perhaps more likely, that the thesis is wrong: fixing the economy won’t solve the resentment.

Instead of blaming neoliberalism for the intense grievances and resentment that characterize Trump voters – as many have done (including myself) – perhaps we can trace this phenomenon back to the 1960s. is when a brief liberal consensus under the reign of LBJ (civil rights, the Great Society) gave way, in 1967, to a growing white backlash, directed against African Americans on issues such as public order and bus transport, and against anti-war demonstrators, a negative reaction. that serial loser Richard Nixon made it all the way to the White House in 1968.

Many of the tropes of white grievance during this era seem familiar — particularly resentment toward civil rights legislation, bureaucrats enforcing desegregation via busing, and programs designed to combat poverty, which were considered in zero-sum game terms as a loss for white Americans. . Anything that benefits black Americans must automatically harm white Americans – and many politicians, including in Democratic ranks, were happy to harbor this grievance.

Today, those who exploit white grievances prey on a significantly larger target group than in 1968. Emerging feminism only began to register as a grievance in the late 1960s; it has morphed into a persistent misogyny that characterizes many Trump voters. Hatred of Hispanics, Muslims, trans people, “liberals,” “elites,” “globalists” has joined mainstream racism, while conspiracy theory politics – once the preserve of a far right that mainstream Republicans have fought hard to keep out of their ranks — has taken over the GOP.

The very idea of ​​an effective government working to serve voters may therefore be misguided. Trump supporters don’t care how bad a president he was. They don’t really care what he did or is doing; they care who he East and how he angers the people they despise. The key is to vote for Trump in the first place, in order to express hatred towards African-Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, women and “liberals”. The more transgressive and norm-breaking Trump is in this context, the better. What he does once in power is not the question.

Rather, the idea that Trump is a dysfunctional leader might be part of his appeal, because it means government won’t work for anyone — not angry white voters who already believe the political and economic system is biased against them, not for the groups they despise and whose system they think is rigged For.

Trump is their revenge against a system they believe has been hostile to them for decades. He will destroy this whole rotten order. He’s their Samson, ready to bring the whole damn temple down on everyone’s heads. The righteous – the white people – will be spared. They don’t need a government in the land of the free. But the rest… not so much. Caeditis eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.

Does Trump’s appeal to white grievances trump everything else? Let us know your thoughts by emailing [email protected]. Please include your full name for your post to be considered. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.