This election was the meanest, dirtiest and most disgraceful in my lifetime – and it will have consequences. Even before the results began to be reported on late Tuesday night, we already knew who the losers were going to be – the American people and our political culture. The damage done by President Trump’s divisive rhetoric will be with us for a generation.
While Trump’s advisers had urged him to focus on the good news about the economy during the last few weeks of the election, he opted instead to preach a message of fear. His target was the “caravan” of refugees coming northwards from Guatemala hoping to find refuge from the violence and poverty of their homeland.
Reporters covering the rag-tag group of refugees found them largely to be mothers with their children and boys and girls in their early teens. In Trump’s speeches, however, they became more ominous “dangerous violent gang-members” with some “Middle Easterners” thrown in for good measure. They were “invaders” and the effort to enter our country was portrayed as an act of war. And so the president announced that he was sending troops to protect the border. For three weeks, Trump crisscrossed the country, speaking in rally after rally to mobilise his supporters to vote for Republican candidates. He warned of dire consequences if the Democrats won. The central message was always fear.
To drive this home, Trump’s team produced a TV advert that featured a frightening foul-mouthed rant by a convicted serial killer who committed his crimes while in the US illegally. The message was clear, “these are the violent people Democrats want to let into our country. Be afraid, very afraid.” It was its overt racist appeal that caused the networks to refuse to run it. His intervention during the last few weeks of the campaign did make a difference in boosting a few Republicans to victory.
After the final results, it’s clear that Democrats did well. They flipped the Congress from 235 Republican and 193 Democrats to a Democratic-controlled body with 230 Democrats and 205 Republicans. Only in the US Senate, did the Republicans make slight gains, possibly adding two to their ranks.
My concern now is that after two years of Trump and his behaviour in the campaign, the country is more polarised than ever. On the Democratic side are young people, the college educated, and minority communities. Voting Republicans are middle-aged, less educated working-class whites, gun owners, and white “born-again Christians.” It is as if we have become two distinct tribes at war.
In fairness, the attacks in this war have been largely coming from one side. For decades now, Republicans have directed their messaging to white voters by stoking fears of blacks, Latinos, Muslims and Arabs. They have issued ominous warnings about drugs and crime, violence, and immigration using code words to associate all of these with the above mentioned groups.
In response, Democrats have pushed back defending the groups under attack, mobilising them to vote for Democrats, and offering reasoned policy prescriptions to address the issues. What Democrats haven’t done is develop a sustained national outreach campaign directed at the white working-class voters courted by Trump and the GOP. By abandoning them and focusing, at times almost exclusively on “their voters,” Democrats have left the white working class to Trump, indirectly contributing to the tribal war that defines our political culture.
Because I have no hope that in its current incarnation, we can expect the GOP to change, it is incumbent on Democrats to work to bridge the divides that have become so pronounced in the era of Trump. They won’t have to stop doing anything. They will only need to pay attention to a substantial group of voters whose economic and cultural insecurity and fear of the “other” have been exploited by Republicans. Not only will this “politics of addition” help Democrats win more elections, it will also contribute to healing the divide and making America governable again.