Heading to America…

 I was warned before travelling to the United States. “It must be an act of masochism to drive through America’s heartland in these dark times” a former Washington Correspondent told me before I left Berlin. “It is hard to keep up your spirits here” a current and disenchanted resident wrote to me from the capital before I arrived. Yet I was curious to find out what has happened to America over the last 30 years, after my six-year-stint as a US-correspondent had ended in early 1995.

Thus, this blog has a history. It started in the summer of 1989 when the Reagan Administration was fading fast and I would soon feel journalistically misplaced in Washington, D.C. with the Iron Curtain coming down in Europe; the gipper’s last hurrah. What followed were years of fascinating encounters and insights into the psyche of a nation between hybris and self-doubt. Torn between admiration and disbelief I had a great time. My history with the US ended when Forrest Gump won the Academy Awards, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, O.J. Simpson was on trial and soon after the Republicans had gained the majority in both chambers of Congress, the first time in 40 years.  

At that time, in early 1995, the new speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, was leading a fresh and aggressive charge against the globalists of the Clinton- Administration with his new batch of Republicans proud to hold no passports because for them travelling to foreign countries was no longer needed. After the Berlin Wall had fallen and Francis Fukuyama had proudly declared “The End of History” engaging in the world went against their adopted stance of “America First”, a slogan rediscovered and tested by the paleo-conservative Pat Buchanan in his unsuccessful presidential candidacy only two years before. But economic liberalism and neoconservative nation-building were still to spread America’s proclaimed virtues around the world for another decade. 

Yet after the scandal-prone end to the Clinton-Presidency in 2000, after the questionable anti-terror wars of George W. Bush, following the financial crisis of 2007 and the foreign policy blunders during the Obama-years “America First” has come roaring back again: in 2016, as a campaign issue and a modestly inflated trial balloon, but now - after the badly handled Biden-interlude - with a vengeance and in autocratic garb. Still, one should not forget, that almost half of the 140 million voters did not vote for the revenge-prone Donald Trump who exercises the systematic humiliation of his enemies and allies alike - and live from the White House as he did once in his former TV-Show “The Apprentice”. 

Thus, I will set out to understand what has happened to America over the span of the last generation. How did people’s lives change? And I don’t mean just the price of eggs. What is different now about their neighbourhood, the schools and universities, they are sending their kids to, the town meeting about local issues? What about race then and now, about old and new immigrants? In what ways did their media and news consumption change? And how do citizens feel today about their job, the welfare system and the role of the state in their lives?  

My questions are not so much about what a narcissistic and unscrupulous president does, but more about why his performance and promises could find such a receptive audience, and why his actions since January 20th have met so little resistance. 

“Bowling alone”, “What happened to Kansas”, “The Unwinding”, “Fantasyland” “Strangers in their own country”, “Wildland”, “Hillbilly Elegies”, “When the Clock Broke”, “Stolen Pride”, “History has begun” - all those books provide excellent explorations and explanations of what has made the United States into the country that it is today - polarized, resentful and angry. But maybe that is only one side of the current state of the States. There must be a lot of life as usual, too, of friendliness, solidarity, and optimism, attitudes and feelings not reported in legacy or alternative media. I just wanted to know. 

So here we go, starting with the elites in DC. And then moving through the heartland all the way down south.  

Prologue – A Review of Explanations

To the surprise of many, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States for the second time in early November 2024. Is this a vibe shift that the liberal establishment missed, the new normal in the America of the new 20s after the ill-fated interlude of the Biden years? And was it a historic transition to a new Republican electoral coalition that led to the triumph of the MAGA movement over the system? What happened here – and how did it come to this?

The Movement

Rebels have always existed in American history, beginning with the Founding Fathers of the Republic. They then quickly mutated into reactionary figures in the country's political conflicts: in the Civil War, during the Jim Crow racial laws, during the persecution of communists under Senator John McCarthy, and up to the Tea Party and Make America Great Again movement. For the well-known historian and columnist Robert Kagan, a moderate Republican, the MAGA movement is just the latest attempt to halt the American promise of equal rights for Black people. "Race not economics" is the driving force behind the movement, with its Christian white nationalism, particularly virulent in the Southern states. So says the historian. Whether this adequately explains Donald Trump's election victory, where almost a quarter of Black men and almost half of Hispanic men voted for Donald Trump on November 5, 2024, remains questionable, however.

Even those who drove through the American hinterland in the early 1990s could have witnessed the harbingers of the latest rebel movement with its racist or nativist messages: the ex-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan supporter David Duke with his white nationalism in the Louisiana gubernatorial race, or the ultra-right candidate Pat Buchanan with his America First ideology in the New Hampshire Republican primary. Both lost and were quickly forgotten. But all the elements of the crisis that had previously been visible in the hinterland, as John Ganz writes in his fascinating social history of the 1990s (When the Clock Broke, 2023), now also appeared at the national level: "racism, poverty, vast income disparities, environmental damage, neglected infrastructure, vanishing industries, systematic corruption, a self-serving elite, political cynicism, and the people's loss of trust in their representatives."

Reporters like George Packer then followed the "unwinding of America" ​​(2014) on the ground for decades in the 2000s. After the Roosevelt era and the Reagan years, Packer described "the reactionary response to the dizzying change, especially the economic and cultural transformations of the last 50 years" in detailed site visits and striking character studies. For Packer and others, the 2008 financial crisis—and its economic consequences for citizens—marked a decisive break in loyalties.

At the same time, sociologists, in a kind of anthropological fieldwork, are reporting on the gradual loss of trust in the American hinterland and are trying to explain the "Great Paradox" (Hochschild) to a head-shaking coastal elite: namely, why the victims of the economic crisis and conservative policies vote for them. What they find there is a "rural consciousness" (Kathy Cramer), shaped by identity, values, and a very personal assessment of the economic situation; and voting behavior determined by "moral interests" (Jonathan Haidt) that are based more on God, community, hierarchy, tradition, and sin than on economic facts or abstract liberal values ​​such as equality or universalism.

All these analysts of conservative movements, from the Tea Party to MAGA, are encountering hard-working white people without college degrees who, in their pursuit of the American Dream, suddenly find themselves at the bottom of society and fear—or feel—they are being overtaken by Black and other minorities in the cities with the help of state welfare. No, they don't want handouts themselves, they say, nor are they racists. But they lack political influence, money, and respect. Decisions are made in Washington, jobs have disappeared from their region, and now they are being accused by a liberal elite of a lack of empathy with minorities. In short, their "pride" (Hochschild) was stolen just as Donald Trump was deprived of his election victory in November 2020.

The System

The slow eclipse of the American Dream since the 1980s has been widely documented: wage stagnation, job losses due to globalization, crumbling infrastructure, and destroyed industrial landscapes. Yet, even under Presidents Bill Clinton (1993-2001) and Obama (2009-2016), the tenets of neoliberalism continued to prevail in business and politics. The Democratic Party relied on free trade, globalization, and the tech industry, thereby winning over educated suburbanites and the new professional class as voters. While, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, pent-up resentment over personal losses—and under a Black President Obama, to boot—erupted in the Tea Party, the urban elites in the Democratic Party turned to new minority and identity-based fringe issues.

In Washington, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, universities, and the media, a (left-)liberal managerial class now ruled. Its members were firmly convinced that they had earned their influential positions and rising incomes through merit alone; and its hegemonic behavior culminated in its desire to quasi-institutionally dictate its rationality, values, and language to the rest of the population.

But this meritocracy has long since ceased to deserve its name, David Brooks recently wrote in “How the Ivy League Broke America” in The Atlantic magazine. Access to knowledge and power no longer works. Over decades, the education sector has evolved from a system of inclusion to a "system of segregation," with elite universities recruiting more students from the top 1% of society than from the bottom 60%. Meritocracy has long since degenerated into a "caste system." "When a society is increasingly divided by education, politics devolves into a war over values ​​and culture," Brooks summarizes his observations.

And this is exactly what has happened when MAGA supporters chant their political mantra into every microphone today: the system is rigged, by which they mean more than just the lack of fairness in the education system. Around two-thirds of the population believes that the political and economic elite are indifferent to hardworking people, that the "experts" don't understand their living conditions, and that "the country needs a strong leader to liberate it from the rich and powerful."

The US media has always been part of a meritocracy. But where in the 1980s, a career from working-class reporter to local journalism to the executive ranks of the press was still possible, today a degree from an (elite) university is considered a prerequisite for a successful career in the country's leading newspapers. There, highly educated journalists determine facts, truths, and expert consensus in a language permeated by their own values, often unaware of their own biases.

The media has always been accused of being part of an out-of-touch elite, by both left and right. Their response was what media critic Jay Rosen called this promise of neutrality, "the view from nowhere." This worked well for a while before right-wing radio hosts and bloggers discovered the appeal of emotions in the news world. They cultivated news as a belief system for a new media audience of like-minded consumers. The popular cable channel Fox TV also applies: news is only what fits the worldview of its listeners.

Authors Matt Grossman and David Grossman call "Polarized by Education" the long-term trend in which the traditional media, with their educated staff, is moving leftward, while voters without college degrees lack the skills, connections, and economic power to influence cultural institutions from within. For them, writes Andrew van Damm in the Washington Post, "there is only one place where their voice counts: politics." Incapable of marching through institutions, the MAGA movement aims to politically destroy them or rather build alternative communication platforms.

And no one has grasped the significance of changing news consumption for politics as quickly as Donald Trump. His messages broadcast on Fox TV and Truth Social may be lies—according to the Washington Post, around 30,000 in recent years—but to his followers, they feel like the truth. By aligning his political messages with the experiences, emotions, and prejudices of conservative voters, Trump offers them validation and precisely the respect that "the elites" deny them.

Trump's distortions and lies serve, especially among young male voters, as a license to unleash their misogynistic and xenophobic instincts. While the liberal public assumed that fact-checking and the portrayal of Trump as a misogynist and a threat to democracy would prevent his election victory, it turned out that half of the electorate appreciated, or at least tolerated, his unhinged performance.

The system, in the form of traditional media and the Democratic Party, is reacting quite helplessly to the new relationship between politics and the public. It was too late to take seriously Donald Trump's creation of an alternative media world, and too late to understand that its inhabitants no longer see politics as a competition between party platforms, but rather as a vehicle for expressing resentment and fear. British commentator Hardeep Matharu calls this "the psycho-social techno-politics of MAGA." And columnist Rebecca Solnit writes in the London Guardian that the crisis of masculinity, the failure of traditional media, and the rise of Silicon Valley are three aspects of the crisis of our democracy, converging in the figure of Elon Musk. The renowned historian Jill Lepore even sees the new media ecosystem as part of an "artificial state... in which powerful tech companies organize political opinion formation with the help of non-human machines, thereby driving the polarization of our society."

Are MAGA rebels and information oligarchs destroying the liberal order?

The upheavals in the American economy following the neoliberal Reagan years gave rise to a nativist wing on the fringes of the Republican Party, whose representatives revived the culture wars of the 1960s. When the previously latent divisions in society along lines of income, education, and geography became visible to all after the 2008 financial crisis – losses for citizens here, government aid for banks there – the Tea Party rallied culture warriors and crisis losers in a fight against "the elites." The Democratic Party's neglect of the concerns of members of the traditional working class (30 million) and the growing service class (60 million) by President Obama brought further supporters to the Republican Party in 2016. And these found in Donald Trump a rebel leader who was better able to exploit the socio-cultural dynamics of the polarized nation than any of his political rivals.

Over the years in Washington and Florida, Donald Trump has succeeded in smearing the Democrats as the party of the establishment and as defenders of institutions that, in the view of many Americans, are no longer delivering and barely functioning. In doing so, he has the structural advantage of all reactionary right-wingers: instead of having to account for political actions, he can point to scapegoats. And he and his movement now have media platforms where anything is possible and there is no longer any negative publicity.

In his recent election victory, Donald Trump succeeded in combining the resentment of the neglected with the ambitions of the new billionaire power in Silicon Valley. And even before taking office, he and his henchman Elon Musk began targeting the so-called legacy media with threats and legal action in his promised campaign of revenge.

After eight years of Trumpism, the liberal order of the United States of America is in serious jeopardy. The president is more likely to be threatened in the US Congress by the faction of right-wing extremist MAGA rebels than by the scattered mob of moderate Republicans. After the 6-3 Republican majority in the Supreme Court recently granted him immunity from prosecution, no further resistance is to be expected from the Supreme Court justices. And at Mar-a-Lago, not only the tech and oil industry executives who helped fund his campaign paid their respects, but also entrepreneurs who had previously been critical of him. They, too, are hoping for a deregulation bonanza after January 20, 2025.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party still has no idea how it could win "the class war over the culture war" in the next elections, as historian Timothy Snyder defines its future task; how it, in turn, could activate emotions for a liberal or even progressive counter-narrative against the coalition of rebels and billionaires. Should the Democratic senators and representatives opt for confrontation in Congress in 2025, or should the Democrats—after warnings about "fascism" during the election campaign failed to help—first appease the impending "Trumpo-Muscovite regime" (Snyder) with a kind of appeasement?

The hope remains for open conflict between the two megalomaniac system-breakers of the new US administration; and an internal disintegration of the movement if Donald Trump fails to keep his radical promises on economic, migration, and domestic policy, if inflation rises again, the mass repatriation of illegal immigrants fails, and the willful destruction of institutions results in bureaucratic chaos.

Behind this lies a long-term question of interest not only for the US: What happens when right-wing populists fail in a political system in which not only the rule of law has been weakened, but in a public sphere that has degenerated into an "information oligarchy" (Shoshana Zuboff), the distinction between truth and lies has also been definitively eroded? Is there still a way back to some form of liberal democracy, or can the chaos of populist failure only be filled with new illusions?

(with the help of google translate)