by SERGE HALIMI
The ox turned butcher ILLUSTRATION from {The World Turned Upside Down} (18th century) Bridgeman
The right, and not just in the US, has managed to turn anti-elitism into anti-intellectualism, to make people resent the smugness of ‘cultural elites’.
At least there’s one country where elections produce swift results. Since Donald Trump’s victory, the Mexican peso has collapsed, the cost of mortgages has risen in France, the European Commission has eased its demand for budget austerity, Japan feels encouraged to re-arm, Israel is hoping that the US embassy will move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, opinion pollsters and proponents of campaign micro-targeting have kept their heads down, what little remained of journalistic credibility is all but gone — and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is dead.
A whirlwind of events and speculation makes many Americans feel as if they are living in a disturbing dream: if a man almost universally described as incompetent and vulgar has managed to become president of the United States, then anything is possible. Global contagion from the US election seems conceivable, such is the worldwide attention its unexpected result has attracted, and not just from foreign policy experts.
In the past decade, there have been many electoral surprises of this sort, almost always followed by three days of soul-searching from the leaders found wanting, and then by the quiet resumption of discredited policies. The persistence of such a lack of understanding — or the repetition of such a sham — is easier to comprehend when so many of the protest voters live far from the big centres of economic and financial power, and also far from the centres of the arts, media and the universities. Hardly anybody voted for Trump in New York and San Francisco; London massively rejected Brexit in June; two years ago Paris returned its leftwing municipality to power in an election in which the right triumphed nationally. As soon as the election is over, the fortunate people feel entitled to go on governing in their cosy clique, ever attentive to the recommendations of the press and the European Commission, always prompt to ascribe to the refractory voters psychological or cultural deficiencies that disqualify their anger. Are they anything but know-nothings, easy prey for demagogues?
This sort of perception goes back a long way, particularly in educated circles. Recent analysis of the ‘authoritarian personality’ of Trump’s blue-collar voters resembles the psychological portrait that cold war guardians of the intellectual order produced of ‘subversives’ on both right and left. Analysing the prevalence of such subversive elements in the working class as opposed to the middle class, the American political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset concluded in 1960 that ‘the lower-class individual is likely to have been exposed to punishment, lack of love, and a general atmosphere of tension and aggression since early childhood — all experiences which tend to produce deep-rooted hostilities expressed by ethnic prejudice, political authoritarianism and chiliastic transvaluational religion’ (1).
Le Monde Diplomatique for more