If history, as we are fond of saying, appears first as tragedy, then the reaction to the second coming of Donald Trump appeared more as tedious redux than farce. As in 2016, there were tears, viral meltdowns and the decrying of an out-of-touch liberal establishment: “I’m interpreting tonight’s results as the revenge of the regular old working-class American who has been crushed, insulted and condescended to,” Scott Jennings told an early-morning CCN audience. But had this crack-up not already happened before, and had a corresponding journey to understand this revolt against the elites not already taken place?
The year of 2016 still works as a sort of folk rupture in the memory of the West, Brexit and Trump forming a concatenation that leaked beyond politics and into the culture and manners of day-to-day life. The hysteria and the denial stands out, but it’s also easy to forget the attempt at a quiet reckoning. It was suddenly demanded that the liberal conscience becomes self-aware and doubtful, an awakening that might quell the demons that fuelled the scourge of “right-wing populism”. There were the stock phrases: “The need to have a conversation”; a sense that some people and places had been “left behind” by an “out of touch” elite. All this was the trendy lingua franca for a new way of talking and thinking about politics.
For a while, the aesthetics of such a reckoning achieved something of a hegemony. Book clubs traded in their Booker Prize winners for JD Vance’s bestselling Hillbilly Elegy in the hope of understanding the plight of the Appalachian underclass. Watchers of BBC Two were treated to documentaries about the Leave-voting town of Redcar, part of a national rite that demanded media and institutions pivot to explain why parts of the country had voted Leave. Whisperers for the “left behind” were in popular demand, while critiques of “liberalism” and “globalisation” flourished on bookshelves. Belying this was a comforting myth: the monster of “right-wing populism” could be tamed by some act of selective self-education and civic participation from the polite side of society.
The titles alone spoke to the nature of the task. Listen, Liberal, published prior to the Trump presidency was hailed for its prescient decrying of the corporatisation of the Democratic Party and its corresponding arrogance and disdain towards its traditional voters. The writing of John Gray and other postliberal thinkers became a muse for those disillusioned by both left and right orthodoxy. On the centre left came a soft revival of the blue labourism that had briefly flourished in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. A heterodoxy against “liberalism” was in vogue. And though its ragtag adherents offered little in the way of a coherent platform, the enemy did become more clearer: identitarian politics, technocracy, and career politicians who accepted the trajectory of post-industrial decline.
In 2024, the curiously emptiness of such a reckoning seems ever more exposed. For Trump has been re-elected in an enduring age of “right-wing populism”, and now looks as if he will cement an epoch-defining consensus-shift in politics. The winner of the 2024 US election throws up no real surprises, for the essentials of the pitch that resonated with the American electorate was hardly different to the one delivered at the bottom of those escalators in Trump Tower nine years ago: the threat of China to the US economy, immigration, and the need to revive the income, if not the aesthetic, of a self-confident, mid-century American middle class.
The solutions to these problems have of course divided the Trump camp, though not as much as those who have basked in the illusionary task of shedding the effete and decadent trappings of the “liberal elite”. The actual business of dramatically reducing immigration, deporting illegal migrants and shifting the economic consensus towards a post-globalised vision requires a set of politics still widely regarded as ugly, insane, impossible or all three.
Harris’s campaign fell for this folly too, representing a message reliant on a technocratic continuation of the status quo. They were perceived as indifferent to the border crisis and ambivalent on the economic future of the country, something the Trump campaign, for both good and ill, can hardly be accused of. The politics of a consensus shift were certainly alive: taking his cues from the economic nationalism of journals like American Affairs, Vance spoke of devaluing the dollar to make American exports competitive in a bid to revive American industry, something regarded as an act of kamikaze sabotage to the American political economy. But breaking the consensus always requires acts of madness, something the post-2016 reckoning never seriously grappled with.
Starmer and his team are to some extent products of this period too. His speech to the Labour party conference was drenched in the rhetorical flourishes of this post-2016 world: concerns about immigration were “legitimate”; “markets don’t give you control”. A village in the Lake District was a symbol of how “some things need to change. But some things do not.” Morgan McSweeney has previously baked these concerns into his electoral strategy, regarding places like Ashfield, currently held by Reform’s Lee Anderson, as a canary in the coalmine for the failure of Labour to resonate beyond its metropolitan base.
Addressing the viewers of that liberal-centrist holdout The Rest is Politics in the aftermath of the result, Dominic Sandbrook described the Biden presidency as now a mere “interregnum” within the Trump years. And if that is so, we can see the postliberal moment of 2016 not as a genuine reckoning, but as a failed attempt to shore up the status quo ante. What was a moment in 2016 now looks more like a historical era – and one that is still opaque to the political left.
[See also: Trump’s war on the “deep state”]
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