Maybe you saw it online. At a recent town hall meeting, Donald Trump interrupted a Q & A session in Montgomery County, in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, insisting that instead of him answering questions, the event should just play music. He spent the next 40 minutes sitting on stage swaying dreamily to Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, bouncing vigorously to YMCA.
There’s not much value in obsessing over elections we’re ineligible to vote in. In politics – as in life – we should pay attention to the things we have agency over. But this year’s US election has been impossible to ignore. The debate that showcased Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, the assassination attempt on Trump that generated that incredible photo of him splattered with blood and defiantly thrusting his fist into the air, Biden’s withdrawal, the rise of Kamala Harris, her world-historic endorsements from Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. How can our domestic politicians compete with this calibre of content?
One of the many downsides of our social media-mediated world is the globalisation of US politics. America’s controversies become ours, even though our domestic politics is so unlike theirs. Their nation is deeply polarised, while in our last two elections, huge swathes of the population swung towards Labour and then away again. But in the past five years, New Zealand has seen Black Lives Matter marches and anti-abortion protests over US Supreme Court nominations.
The US is deeply implicated in the Israel-Palestine conflict, so our own conspicuously powerless politicians are being rushed by activists, screaming that they have the blood of the children of Rafah on their hands. As Wellington’s local economy goes into freefall and the advertising billboards come down, they’re being replaced by hand-painted Palestinian flags. The boundaries of our politics are becoming blurred. This will intensify in the event of a Trump victory.
Is Trump the dying old world, a morbid symptom, or the strange new world we are rushing toward?
The people are unhappy
One thing common across both nations – across the entire anglosphere – is unhappy voters. Just as New Zealand has failed to take to Christopher Luxon, Australians are unhappy with Anthony Albanese, Canadians disdain Justin Trudeau and, in the UK, a number of scandals have devastated support for Keir Starmer. The US isn’t flirting with a Trump restoration because they’re happy with the status quo.
The conventional wisdom is that New Zealanders are unhappy because of the economy, that we’ll cheer up once house prices recover. Our sour mood tracks with the duration of the recession. Perhaps Luxon is like a lump of seemingly dull ore that will reveal itself as priceless gold once cleaned and polished by a positive per capita GDP result? But in the US, business is booming. Growth is high, unemployment and inflation are low. A recent edition of the Economist declared that the US economy was “the envy of the world”. It has left other rich countries in the dust. And yet Trump sits before them, sometimes swaying dreamily but more often roaring with rage.
Two tribes at war
British political theorist David Goodhart suggests the left-versus-right model of politics is becoming obsolete; that our democracies are polarising into two rival tribes: “Anywheres”, who embrace their nation’s transition into diverse, progressive, multicultural societies seamlessly integrated into global free markets, and “Somewheres”, who are rooted in their local communities and traditional values and who celebrate stability, a sense of belonging, resistance to change.
The Anywheres are a minority of the population but dominate all the political and cultural institutions, creating a vacuum eagerly filled by an opportunist like Trump, whose pledges to impose tariffs on imports, conduct mass deportations of illegal migrants and adopt an isolationist foreign policy speak powerfully to the alienated constituencies Goodhart describes.
In New Zealand, the consequences of a Trump victory could be economic, geopolitical or both. The US is our second-largest trading partner.
His tariffs would reduce demand for New Zealand goods, making our already dire current account deficit even worse. It would probably weaken our currency, feeding inflation back into the economy. His foreign policy could destabilise the already fraught tensions between China and Taiwan, triggering regional instability.
But his true influence on our domestic politics might take years to show itself.
Following the leaders
New Zealand is often ideologically downstream from the larger Anglo-democracies: Margaret Thatcher won office in 1979, Reagan in 1980. Rogernomics wasn’t unleashed until 1984. The triangulated centrism of Bill Clinton (1992) and Tony Blair (1997) was incarnated in Helen Clark and John Key in the 2000s. The faux-progressive conservatism of Barack Obama (2008) took until 2017 to find its vehicle in Jacinda Ardern. If the trend continues, then our future already contains some rough beast slouching towards the Beehive.
Luxon – wealthy landlord, global executive and free-trade fanatic – would be the perfect adversary for a populist disruptor.
Trump could lose the US election. Incidents like the musical interlude will not fill voters with confidence. His attempts to contest such an outcome might throw his democracy into chaos, or they might simply fail, like so many of his political projects.
He would still cast a long shadow: he has remade his party in his image, disciples would emerge to carry on his work. There’s a quote from the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci that is popular among left-wing intellectuals: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” But is Trump the dying old world, a morbid symptom, or the strange new world we are rushing toward?
