The new age of irrationality

The words of Trump were checked and analysed, the daily lie count was tabulated, and serious stories were published that undermined his credibility. And yet it didn’t make a blind bit of difference. Why, asks Raymond Snoddy.

The Daily Telegraph front-page headline on US Election day said it all really. A quote from Donald J Trump, now President-Elect of the USA, predicting: “It’s gonna be Brexit plus plus plus.”

And so it turned out, with an astonishing sense of déjà vu. The polls showing a tight race but with Hilary Clinton leading in many of the battleground states where the Presidential election would be won or lost. The Hilary fans were still smiling.

Then in the UK came the Sunderland moment with the realisation that Brexit was polling better than anyone expected or had predicted.

With Trump in the US it came with Florida and then you started to feel it in the pit of the stomach as Trump racked up a commanding lead in Ohio and it became clear that the pollsters, the experts, the traditional media, the political establishment had got it wrong all over again.

Even the world of conventional advertising has not covered itself in glory. Clinton had generous millions to spend on television advertising and endless ammunition in the words of Trump himself and it didn’t make a blind bit of difference.

Clinton made a key error in deploying a clever and cutting phrase in describing half of Trump’s supporters as “the deplorables.”

It was a politically inept sneer and even inaccurate in a strict logical sense – there were far too many of them to all be deplorable.

In truth they turned out to be the irrationals.

Just as with Brexit, a majority of the American electorate chose to believe flashy optimistic lies rather than the more complex, often ambiguous, difficult to communicate, truth.

There was the paradox that a billionaire with no taste for paying taxes would somehow be the hero of the little man struggling to make ends meet.

That someone who was happy to use bankruptcy laws to preserve his assets would be able to deploy his business “success” to transform the complex problems of the world.

After all he was a man who knew more about Islamic State than the generals fighting it; who could build a wall across the southern United States and persuade Mexico to pay for it; who could breathe new life into rust belt towns with empty steel plants; who could be the first US president without either political or military experience.

And as President-elect, the tax-hating Trump is now promising a vast outpouring of expenditure on infrastructure without any indication of how it is going to be funded.

And yet they believed it and lapped it all up.

Rather like Brexit there was a core support of the ill-informed, the under-educated, the elderly and those who felt dispossessed, unhappy.

But it is not as simple as that. As with Brexit a much wider coalition has been put together with fear of migration – for instance – being felt most keenly by those least affected by its impact.

A study by Gallup based on no less than 87,000 interviews with Trump supporters found that they were not facing worse economic ills or immigration-related fears than Clinton supporters. Something deeper was going on.

There are serious underlying economic factors behind both the Brexit and Trump votes. There has been a growing gulf between rich and poor in both countries and in the US real living standards in the have not risen for 17 years, although there has been a small uptick in the past 12 months.

In his first search for an explanation, John Authers of the Financial Times wonders whether it’s all a delayed reaction to the 2009 crash.

The other winners and the losers

Pollsters have once again a lot of explaining to do. They can reach for the “within margins of error” defence but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that most got it wrong again.

Either they are finding greater difficulty reaching truly representative samples, particularly in cases where large numbers of people are moved to vote for the first time, or more probably too many people are simply lying about their intentions.

The experience, and record, of the media on Brexit-Trump are completely different, though the outcome was similar.

In the UK the Brexit supporting nationals poured out uncritical propaganda even though many of their journalists were more than smart enough to know they were advocating their readers to perform an act of self-harm.

We also had the additional complexity in the UK of the BBC largely in its news bulletins sticking doggedly to a narrow definition of impartiality. The bollocks and lies of Boris Johnson were given an equivalent weight to the thoughts of 20 Nobel Prize winners.

Nothing of the sort happened in the US where in general American newspapers decided that the normal rules of impartiality and balance did not apply when confronted with the phenomenon that is Donald J Trump.

The words of Trump were checked and analysed and the daily lie count tabulated and serious stories were published that undermined Trump’s credibility as a candidate, a businessman and even a human being.

And as we have seen it didn’t make a blind bit of difference. In a divided nation Trump was able to turn it all into just another example of the metropolitan liberal conspiracy.

Leaving aside for the moment the impact of globalisation, and the relative, if not always absolute, sense of poverty or disempowerment, how was support for Trump communicated and magnified?

Part of the answer must come from right-wing shock jock radio and television channels such as Fox News, though Fox was not completely uncritical.

Future analysts will probably find at least one of the smoking guns in social media and Twitter and Facebook in particular.

Trump was an extensive user of Twitter, until his finger was removed from the button in the closing days of the campaign by concerned aides.

A small revealing story came in the closing week of the campaign from the town of Veles in Macedonia where a few wide boys started to make serious amounts of money by posting completely bogus pro-Trump stories on conservative websites and raking in the advertising. Hilary Clinton is about to be arrested. The Pope has endorsed Trump.

Naturally the bogus stories were widely shared in the echo-chamber of Facebook and beyond and, who knows, probably believed.

What can be said as many Americans start to wake up from what for them will be the ultimate nightmare just as supporters, or even reluctant supporters of the EU did on 24 June?

Uncertainty reigns and will continue to do so for years. It is difficult to imagine politics in the post-fact era ever being the same again. And as historian Simon Schama noted in the early hours of the morning, democracies can indeed manage to elect authoritarian leaders or even dictators.

The really scary bit is that the only thing standing between Trump carrying out his irrational promises – or risk disappointing his true believers – is a united Republican Congress.