All week – ever since it became clear that Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America, was finally done, bar the inevitable sore-loser shouting – I’ve been singing to myself.
Not well, because I can’t hold a tune, and not particularly happily, because America isn’t a particularly happy place right now.
But the song that keeps running through my head is Jimmy Ruffin’s mid-1960s Motown classic: What Becomes of the Broken Hearted
“As I walk this land with broken dreams
I have visions of many things
But happiness is just an illusion
Filled with sadness and confusion…”
I found a video of him on YouTube. There he is, handsome, soulful, dressed in a white, wide-lapelled (pant) suit, swaying and finger-clicking along to his own mournful song.
I wrote last week about the ‘raging sadness of America’; how the heartbreaking, stormy chaos and confusion of the last four years has left exposed the underlying hatred, intolerance, racism and bigotry that, it now appears, is about as American as apple pie, blue jeans and baseball cards.
There are a lot of broken dreams in America. Some of them are better broken; I’d like to see them smashed past all repair.
There’s nothing obviously sinister in the words of the 40th President, Ronald Reagan:
“The dreams of people may differ, but everyone wants their dreams to come true… And America, above all places, gives us the freedom to do that, the freedom to reach out and make our dreams come true.”
Not that is until you look around and realise the freedom – the encouragement – Donald Trump has given to Americans to dream of a country where hatred and divisions are normalised.
I don’t know how we reconcile our differences, our history, our anger, and I’m not sure I’ve learned very much during the grinding, dull misery of the last year and this election. But I have remembered that the disappointed are not the same as the disaffected.
My biggest hope of Joe Biden is that he sees not just the violence and hatred of so many of Trump’s supporters, but their hopelessness; their poverty and fear, their self-destructive bitterness.
The entrenched and destructive racism, the misogyny, the inciting of violence, the language of hate and division, the scorn that has been poured on science, on experts, on journalism, isn’t going to disappear anytime soon. But at least it won’t be coming from the White House; from a president careless of everything but his own power and popularity.
Trump is the most paradoxical of politicians. The last four years – and nothing more than this pandemic – has proved he doesn’t understand, or care, how most Americans live; yet he long ago grasped something that everyone else – Democrats and Republicans alike – failed to.
He called himself an outsider because he felt like one. Treated with undisguised, casual disdain by the wealthy New Yorkers he sought approval from, he looked around and saw a whole crowd of other outsiders nodding behind him.
In other words, he saw the damage the modern world has done to poorer Americans, and he took advantage of it.
The world has changed so much in the last thirty years that the notion of self-sufficiency has become ludicrous to many. It is no longer something to strive for, only a handed-down memory from a glorious past. Progress takes away opportunities as well as providing them. For the unskilled, who have watched helplessly their jobs being swept away by the machinery of globalization, or replaced by tiny microchips, it can only have felt like absolute decline.
Trumpism was born by way of desperation and anger. It’s easy to forget now, looking around at the protests, the lies, the conspiracy theories, that people – decent people, not all ‘deplorables’ – believed Trump when he told them “we’ve got to beat a totally dishonest machine”, and accused the “Washington elite” of fixing the election. They listened when he said he was “running against a rigged system” because it was the same system they blamed for failing them.
Trump did not create the deep sense of dispossession that elected him. He just identified it, and, like any good salesman, convinced millions that he and his wares were the only antidote.
There is a flood of statistics demonstrating the chasm between America’s richest and poorest. But nothing more vividly illustrates the corrosive consequences than a brief passage in social scientist Robert D. Putnam’s 2016 book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis.
Putnam describes his drive down an Ohio lakeside lane, close to his childhood home. On one side of the road, second homes and smart mansions line the shore. Here, there is a child poverty rate of one per cent; the other side is lined with trailer homes and the child poverty rate here is 51 per cent.
Roads don’t get much wider than that, and Joe Biden knows it. Donald Trump does, too. He used it as a way of convincing poorer Americans to vote for him. But the difference between him and Biden is that Trump really doesn’t believe that wide road matters – he doesn’t care about it.
Joe Biden and Donald Trump do have one obvious thing in common. They both know, as George Washington said, that: “Example, whether it be good or bad, has a powerful influence.”
Last week, on stage, the election at last called, Joe Biden said this:
“America is shaped by inflection points, by moments in time. We’ve made hard decisions about who we are and what we want to be. Lincoln in 1860 coming to save the Union. FDR in 1932, promising a beleaguered country a new deal. JFK in 1960 pledging a new frontier. And twelve years ago, when Barack Obama made history, he told us, yes, we can.
“Well, folks, we stand at an inflection point. We have an opportunity to defeat despair, to build a nation of prosperity and purpose. We can do it. I know we can. I’ve long talked about the battle for the soul of America. We must restore the soul of America. Our nation is shaped by the constant battle between our better angels and our darkest impulses. And what presidents say in this battle matters. It’s time for our better angels to prevail. Tonight, the whole world is watching America, and I believe at our best, America is a beacon for the globe.
We will lead not only by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.”
Listening to that, I began to think that Joe Biden, like Donald Trump, is going to be one of the most influential presidents in modern history.
Kath Raymond Hinton 