Fallout from the night of the old white men

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/11/2024 (640 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Roman empire survived for four centuries despite having many rulers worse than Donald Trump (e.g. Caligula, Nero and Commodus), so we should not write off the United States just yet.

We should not even give up hope on the current cohort of American voters. Economic illiteracy, which led them to blame the Democrats for the great wave of inflation just past, is universal among electorates. They all live in national silos, most not even noticing that COVID-19 caused the same wave of inflation in every other country and was almost impossible to avoid.

The other big factor in Trump’s spectacular comeback, the virulent dog-whistle racism that so many older white males responded to, is more specifically American and deeply shameful. However, it is due to a period of demographic transition which will pass.

For many white women, panic at the end of absolute majority status for American whites was counterbalanced by outrage at Trump’s complicity in the assault on abortion rights. Older white men had no such counterbalance, and voted massively against the perceived threat to their status, jobs and privileges.

The driving force of political change in democratic societies is generational turnover. That generation will be politically irrelevant in 15 years and physically gone in 30. The younger voters who will replace them do not fear those changes to the same degree, so we need not despair yet for the future of the American republic.

Let’s just focus on the nearer term, particularly for all the rest of the world (which got little attention in the domestic American debate). How much of Donald Trump’s radical agenda will become reality in the next four years?

Climate is the most important issue for all the world. Trump will pull out of the Paris Agreement once again, but that will have a limited effect on other countries. (The ‘aspirational’ limit of never more than 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than the average global temperature was actually adopted in 2018 when he was in office.)

He has promised to “drill, baby, drill”, but you can’t sell more oil than people are willing to buy and the world demand for oil is going into decline. Moreover, the U.S. has not built a new coal-fired power plant in over a decade because coal is simply not competitive with solar and wind energy. Trump has won the White House and both Houses of Congress and effectively controls the Supreme Court as well, so he is almost a dictator at the moment. He will repeal the massive Inflation Reduction Act, Joe Biden’s big anti-global warming initiative, and there will probably be ugly federal legislation on social and religious issues as well.

The biggest of those issues is his promise (or at least his threat) to deport “maybe as many as 20 million” people whom he believes to be undocumented immigrants, or at least undesirable ones from his point of view.

This would necessarily involve mass arrests and concentration camps to sort out the innocent from the guilty (if these terms are even relevant), and of course a border wall like the one he failed to build during his first term. Bizarre and extreme, but it could happen this time.

In foreign affairs, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza will both end badly for the victims.

Trump will make Ukraine surrender to Russian demands by cutting U.S. military and financial support. He will let Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu devastate and maybe even annex the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, but he will stay out of the war with Iran that Netanyahu also wants to drag him into. He might even let China have Taiwan.

The U.S. economy will probably be all right for a few years: Biden has already put it into recovery mode. Trump’s promised 20 per cent tariff on all foreign imports (and 60 per cent to 100 per cent on Chinese-made goods) will slow world trade and drive inflation in the U.S., but this will all unfold slowly.

Nor will there be a big wave of Americans seeking sanity or safety elsewhere. (Where would they go? Everywhere else is foreign.)

Liberals lament the encouragement Trump’s victory gives elsewhere to autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping and ‘illiberal’ democrats like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and India’s Narendra Modi, but Trump is too ignorant and nasty to be much of an example for anybody. It would be different and very dangerous if Trump’s cognitive decline becomes so severe that vice-president JD Vance takes over.

Bad things happen to good people all the time. The rich have been getting richer and the broad middle class poorer in America for more than 50 years now under Republicans and Democrats alike, but that’s a problem only Americans can fix. In the meantime, the damage elsewhere can probably be contained.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers.