The ‘Deep Politics’ Behind Trump’s Rise

Almost everyone I know loathes U.S. President Donald Trump—and I don’t even live in the U.S. (I am Australian) They see him as a disaster for America and the world. Some denounce him at social gatherings, confident that no one will disagree. I do disagree—in a way—but I have realized that it is impossible to talk people out of their loathing.

Trump’s achievement was to demolish the political status quo. It was failing before Trump and had been for decades. Trump finished it off, although many within the system still don’t see it. Trump is an intensification—perhaps inevitable, perhaps necessary—of a decline in American society that deserves much greater attention. This decline represents the “deep politics” behind Trump’s success. And it is this politics I want to discuss: not the man, or his policies, but the deeper story behind his emergence and domination of U.S. politics.

Let me be clear about this. I want to transcend the furious debate about Trump and his administration. I am not denying the dangers and risks his election creates. But I want to examine something else that is almost wholly overlooked in the debate: the chance he provides to reassess the capacity of the U.S. political system to respond effectively to the foundational challenges it confronts. Destroying the status quo does not mean Trump himself will provide the answers America needs. More likely, his contribution will be to create the opportunity for others to do this.

Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again” resonated with many people because it acknowledged a sense of loss and decline, whatever the merits of his policies.

An international survey, published early last year, revealed starkly the political mood Trump tapped into, and the Democrats ignored. It found almost two-thirds of Americans believed the country was “in decline” and their society was “broken.” “Trump captures the prevailing zeitgeist as the champion of a broken country,” the report says. “Biden, in contrast, is the quintessential establishment candidate. Which worldview will prevail?” Well, now we know. The Democrats should be ashamed that they were seen as the establishment in today’s fraught world.

They ran a shockingly weak campaign, offering in former President Joe Biden an ailing, old man. What’s worse, they tried to deceive the voters by hiding his cognitive decline, and then replaced him too late with the vice-president, Kamala Harris, who was tied to Biden’s policies. If Harris had won the election, America would have maintained the status quo, its business-as-usual politics.

What were they thinking? How did they fail to see what was happening? No wonder there are reports of “a civil war” within the party. The many thousands who have attended the “Fighting Oligarchy” political rallies of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who is on the more radical wing of the Democrats, suggest the party is being stirred into more effective action.

The world—and the West in particular—is mired in crises it refuses to acknowledge, at least at the political level. I see this because my work concerns human progress, well-being and futures. To me, politics and the mainstream news media are locked in mutually reinforcing cultures that maintain the status quo, largely ignoring—or at least underestimating—our predicament. Politics may claim to be addressing the crises, but it is not. It took Trump to expose the pretence.

Trump’s First Term: a Missed Opportunity

I wrote in 2022 about the social and political antecedents of Trump’s first term as president. I said that the liberal media and Democrats, instead of seeking to understand what was troubling America and lay behind his victory, spent four years trying to remove him from office.

Trump’s relationship with the liberal media became one of mutual loathing and goading; it was hugely destructive. In showing such contempt for Trump, the liberal media also derided his base, deepening the national division they accused Trump himself of provoking. Politics and the media “zeroed in” on him when they should have also “drawn back” to consider the larger social context.

I said at the time liberal commentary took as a benchmark, a frame of reference, the old political status quo. It was as if they had forgotten the legitimate grievances that took Trump into office, and believed the task was to restore politics to what it had been before his election, even though everything had changed and needed to change. Much of the coverage implied that there was little wrong with the U.S. that removing Trump would not fix.

The liberal media embraced Joe Biden’s election victory with sighs of relief over his centrist policies and a return to political normalcy. “Cometh the hour, cometh the man,” The Guardian proclaimed. But the story did not end with Trump’s eviction from the White House. The liberal media’s celebration of Biden’s victory was another aspect of their failure to understand how profoundly things were changing.

Nothing had been settled, I warned. And so it proved.

Environmental writer and activist Joanna Macy expressed the opportunity succinctly at the time: Trump’s election was “a very painful waking up” she said; if Hillary Clinton had won, “we would have stayed asleep.” This was a relatively common view among environmental and leftist commentators around the time of the election. They saw Trump’s victory as exposing the failings of the entire U.S. political system and its pursuit of a capitalist, imperialist agenda. And they were scathing of the Democrats, notably Clinton and former President Barack Obama, for their complicity and collaboration with this agenda.

It looks today like America has been given a second opportunity to “wake up.” Can the Democrats do this? Can they build on the Sanders-AOC rallies?

2024—a Second Chance to “Wake up”

Trump’s resounding election victory should not have surprised us. He has an extraordinary ability to connect with people and to acknowledge their unease about their lives. This unease goes deeper than the issues that the election campaign focused on, such as the economy, immigration, or reproductive rights. These may be what politicians and commentators believe matters most. Even voters may say these are the things that mattered to them. But this is, at least in part, because this is what pollsters, strategists, journalists, and politicians talk and ask about. They set the parameters of debate, which is framed in these terms. But I don’t believe people’s lives, the quality of their lives, can be captured so easily.

In my 2022 essay, I argued there were other ways of thinking about America and the challenges it faced. It was an attempt to consider what was happening from a different perspective. What I sought to articulate then, and seek to do again now, is the need to close the widening gap between a scientific view of the world and the prevailing political one, between a view that demands a transformation in our way of life if we are to meet the challenges we face, and an essentially business-as-usual politics.

Political debate needs to focus on this gap, on opening up the potential for radical changes in political priorities.

America and the West need a rupture or discontinuity in what people want, and who they want to be.

My interest is in why so many Americans voted for Trump, regardless of his character and perhaps even his policies. My analysis falls well outside mainstream media opinion in that it has to do with the entirety of the American way of life, not specific issues—economic, social or environmental. Thus, it goes beyond the domain of policy to embrace questions of vision and narrative. Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again” resonated with many people because it acknowledged a sense of loss and decline, whatever the merits of his policies.

This deeper context also explains the widespread mistrust, frustration, and disillusionment with institutions, especially government, with their specific purposes and inevitable inertia. And it explains how Trump sidestepped this hostility. Most political leaders are “organization people” chosen by their parties to represent their politics. Trump is not a party man; he chose his party, conquered it, and remade it to fit his vision of America.

I said in 2022 that a deep and dangerous divide existed in liberal democracies between people’s concerns about their lives, their country, and their future, and the proclivities and preoccupations of mainstream politics and news media. The cultures of politics and journalism were too constrained and limiting to face up to our predicament. Those working within these cultures can’t see it, or if they can see it, they can’t imagine what it takes to address it.

My story drew on people’s profound disquiet about life in America and the existential challenges America faced, both physical and social. This condition was also true, to differing degrees, of other liberal democracies and beyond. I presented a lot of evidence of this. For example, a 2015 study I co-authored investigated the perceived probability of future threats to humanity in four Western nations: the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia. Across the four countries, over a half (54%, U.S. 57%) of people rated the risk of “our way of life ending” within the next 100 years at 50% or greater. Three quarters (79%, U.S.75%) agreed that “we need to transform our worldview and way of life if we are to create a better future for the world.”

We had to place the fundamental frameworks of how we understand the world at the center of political debate, I said. The interconnected risks facing humanity could not be solved by focusing only on the discrete, specific issues that characterized and defined today’s politics, however legitimate the concerns were in themselves. Trump offered, however negatively, at least a small chance of triggering systemic change.

Existential Risks

Decades of political action (or inaction) have failed to meet the challenges posed by climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution and other environmental problems; declining population health and well-being; growing technological anarchy where we lose or cede control of new technologies like AI; the growth of corporate political power and the concentration of wealth in fewer hands; the risk of spreading warfare, including nuclear war; and the emergence of a multipolar world in which America is losing its dominance.

These and other challenges pose a risk of societal and even civilizational collapse, as I have discussed in recent writing; the collapse may already have begun. America and the West need a rupture or discontinuity in what people want, and who they want to be. This includes politically.

Several reports published in the past two years have highlighted the human predicament. An international team of scientists has provided a detailed outline of planetary resilience by mapping out all nine boundary processes that define a safe operating space for humanity. Human activity affects the Earth’s climate and ecosystems more than ever, which risks the stability of the entire planet. For the first time, all nine planetary boundaries have been assessed, six have now been crossed. These include climate, biosphere integrity, land systems, freshwater, and biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus).

Progressive politics must offer a vision of America that is as bold as Trump’s, but radically different, a vision that is a sort of Newtonian “equal and opposite reaction.”

“This update on planetary boundaries clearly depicts a patient that is unwell, as pressure on the planet increases and vital boundaries are being breached. We don’t know how long we can keep transgressing these key boundaries before combined pressures lead to irreversible change and harm,” says co-author Johan Rockström, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden.

Member nations of the United Nations adopted in 2015 a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals, to be met by 2030. The goals aimed to end poverty, improve health and education, and reduce inequality—while tackling climate change and preserving our oceans and forests. An assessment in 2023, the halfway point, found that the world was not on track to achieve any of the 17 goals.

A major review, “Earth at Risk,” published in 2024, says human development has ushered in an era of converging crises: climate change, ecological destruction, disease, pollution, and socioeconomic inequality. The review synthesizes the breadth of these interwoven emergencies and underscores the urgent need for comprehensive, integrated action. “The imperative is clear: To navigate away from this precipice, we must collectively harness political will, economic resources, and societal values to steer toward a future where human progress does not come at the cost of ecological integrity and social equity,” the review states.

This scientific understanding helps to explain survey findings of public attitudes. For example, the study cited earlier of 28 countries across the globe by polling company Ipsos, conducted in late 2023 and published early in 2024, is especially revealing. It explains better than all the political polling the mood behind Trump’s success (a mood not confined to the U.S.).

The survey found across the 28 countries, 58% (59% in the U.S.) believed their country was “in decline,” 57% (U.S. 65%) that society was “broken,” and 67% (U.S. 66%) believed “the economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful.” Two-thirds (67%, U.S. 60%) believed the main divide in their society was between “‘ordinary citizens and the political and economic elite.” A similar number (63%, U.S. 66%) said their country needed “a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and powerful.”

The Ipsos survey highlights the appeal to populism as a response. But it is wrong—or at least incomplete—to focus, as liberal commentary has, on populism as an illegitimate or bogus political stance. We also need to explore, as I do here, the validity of people’s perceptions about their countries.

Much has been spoken and written about Trump’s billionaire backers. But more billionaires backed Harris than they did Trump; they did very well under the Democrats. Sanders (who is an independent but caucuses with the Democrats) said in a recent CNN interview: “In the Democratic Party, you've got a party that is heavily dominated by the billionaire class, run by consultants who are way out of touch with reality… the Democratic Party has virtually no grassroots support.”

I wrote in my 2024 essay about the powerful influence of neoliberalism, a variation of capitalism that has captured government in the interests of those with money and power. Many of the problems we face began or escalated with the neoliberal ascendancy that began in the West in the 1980s.

Given the scale and urgency of our situation, I said, we needed to use every (nonviolent) means—legislation, legal action, protest, civil disobedience, public humiliation—to reduce, even eliminate, the political power of corporations, especially the huge global corporations, which held so much sway over democracy, government, and our lives, and so often acted against our common interests. This must become the focus of political debate and action.

Transcending today’s turmoil

Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon reportedly said in 2018 that the opposition was not the Democrats, but the media. “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” This is what is happening, much more so now than during Trump’s first term. And it isn’t just the Trump camp. Both the liberal- and right-wing media are wallowing in the muck—in conflict, contradiction, conjecture, speculation and, yes, nonsense and trivia—that makes up much of the public debate about Trump. Part of my Trump watching is via MSN (a Microsoft portal), which scans many news sites, both on the left and right. Trump’s every move and utterance is scrutinized, praised, or condemned; positions have become more entrenched and closed. America seems to be caught in a vortex of mass insanity, with Trump at its center.

What Trump does in his second term depends not only on him, but also on how the people, Congress, the media, and others respond. This response must be different from the way they reacted to his first term. It should accept the legitimacy of the deep-seated unease and anger that swept him into office, however flawed his policy responses might be.

In crushing the political status quo, Trump has broken the center left and center right’s hold on power. He has championed the far-right; in doing that, he has also created opportunities for the left. Specifically, progressive politics must offer a vision of America that is as bold as Trump’s, but radically different, a vision that is a sort of Newtonian “equal and opposite reaction.” Or to quote the poet William Butler Yeats: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

Political debate in the U.S. has become unanchored, untethered, from a shared story, a common cultural understanding of reality, as the Western narrative of progress becomes increasingly contested, and the American Dream fades. The current debate is so awful that it has become further evidence of a country in decline, a society that is broken. It may already be too late to change this situation, but America must keep trying. Out of the chaos of the times, something better might yet emerge.