Trump, like Lincoln, may yet spark a civil war

Searching through US history for a President like President Donald J. Trump, an obvious comparison is with the first Democrat President and seventh US President, Andrew Jackson (President 1829–1837).

Like Jackson, Trump is an outsider, despised, even hated, by much of the political establishment. Like Jackson, Trump is unashamed and blatant in his plebeian appeal. Like Jackson, he draws his strongest support from Greater Appalachia, the borderer (aka Scots-Irish or hillbilly) element of the US nation. Like Jackson, Trump draws wild enthusiasm from his partisans that seems both mysterious and aberrant to his (many) critics. Like Jackson, Trump brings a buccaneering style to politics that clashes with conventional notions of proper Presidential gravitas. While, unlike Jackson, Trump has not ignored the US Supreme Court, he has had some high profile clashes with the judiciary. Analysts of US politics still talk of Jacksonian politics, especially with reference to foreign policy. Trump is the strongest example of Jacksonian foreign policy in decades.

So, lots of similarities and analogies to be getting along with.

On the other hand, the United States managed to cope with a Jackson Presidency just fine. Indeed, so successful was Jackson that he was a key founder of the Democratic Party, the oldest still operating political Party in the world.

Thus, the Trump-Jackson analogies are striking, but not disturbing.

The disturbing analogy is with Abraham Lincoln, the 16th US President and the first Republican President (President 1861–5). Disturbing, because Lincoln is, of course, the Civil War President. It was his election, on 40% of the popular vote, that provoked the Southern States to secede.

Lincoln won the plurality of the popular vote against three major opponents with a clear victory in the Electoral College (180 out of 303). Trump was outpolled in the popular vote 46% to 48% but won a clear Electoral College victory (304 out of 538).

It is generally asserted that the South seceded because Lincoln was an anti-slavery President elected at the head of an anti-slavery Party. Yes and no. The US Civil War was absolutely about slavery. One only has to read the Confederate Constitution or transcripts of the secession debates to see that.

But it was not merely that Lincoln and the Republicans were against slavery that mattered. There had been anti-slavery Presidents before. It was the potential appeal of the Republican platform to ‘poor whites’ in the South that, added to the opposition to slavery, was the dire threat.

The Republican platform included what became the Homestead Acts, opening up landownership in the West to poorer settlers. The 1860 Republican platform also included tariffs and infrastructure projects, offering potential regular employment and higher wages. This was a program likely to be extremely attractive to the landless ‘masterless men’ of the American South.

With control of the Presidency, Lincoln could use federal government appointments to build up a Republican political base in the South. This was a nightmare scenario for the South’s plantation elite. Slavery depressed wages in the South and the status of manual labour. The worst possible outcome for the plantation elite was ‘poor whites’ and slaves (or, even worse, freed slaves) making common cause.

Hence Lincoln’s election sparked the secession of Southern States from the Union.

Fast forward, and the Democrat electoral coalition relies on keeping its extraordinarily high electoral support among African-Americans. If the Republicans can start making inroads among African-American voters, then it is very hard for the Democrats to put together a winning electoral coalition.

Since Trump’s election, his Administration, and his re-election campaign, have been attempting to target African-American voters, seeking to detach a sufficiently large minority from voting Democrat to voting Republican so as to overturn the Democrat electoral arithmetic.

The parade of minority speakers at the Republican National Convention was not some last minute add on, but the high point of an electoral outreach that has been underway throughout the Trump Presidency.

Which African-Americans?

African-Americans constitute three distinct groups. Descendants of Americans slaves, Afro-Caribbeans and recent African immigrants. Barack Obama was the son of a Kenyan immigrant. Democrat Vice-Presidential nominee Kamala Harris is mostly of Indian, and otherwise Jamaican (so Afro-Caribbean) descent.

Neither major US political Party has ever had the descendant of American slaves on their Presidential ticket. The African-ancestry candidates the Democrats have nominated have instead expressed the Democrat’s reliance on support from migrants.

This is an obvious weak point in the Democrat’s appeal to African-Americans. The descendants of American slaves do not noticeably benefit from migration. On the contrary, migrants and their descendants get to claim affirmative action benefits, crowding out the descendants of American slaves. Migrants congregate in major cities with significant African-American populations, where they compete for jobs, housing, and political access. Judged by who has, and has not, been represented on recent Democrat Presidential tickets, migrants have been winning the political competition.

Trump’s migration scepticism is a potential winner among African-Americans.

Another obvious weak point is that a significant number of African-Americans are conservative, and a strong majority identify as conservative or moderate. As the Democrat Party has moved in an increasingly progressive direction, that has widened the potential gap with many African-American voters. One reason why Biden won the Democrat nomination is that conservative and moderate African-Americans voted for him.

If Trump can open up the cultural distance between him and Biden, that is another potential winning point for him, particularly as he does not come across as a conventional Republican, but is very much a media-savvy culture warrior. Experience in the UK with Brexit and after shows that shaking up conventional politics along cultural lines is a way to detach former rusted-on voters, as well as the otherwise politically alienated. Riots and statue-topplings are potentially just such a cultural shocks.

The third potential weak point is, ironically, Black Lives Matter and the defund the police campaign. There is a long history of antagonism between police and African-American communities. But there are many African-Americans who do not want less policing, but more policing (or, more accurately, more effective policing). They are, for very good reason, deeply concerned about what would happen in their communities if police were withdrawn even further.

Fear of the consequences of the defund the police campaign is another potential winning point for Trump among African-Americans. It is true that Biden has explicitly not endorsed defunding the police, but many local Democrats have. Kamala Harris was a tough prosecutor, but that is a double-edged appeal in urban African-American communities.

Trump already has appeal among working Americans. Threatening to create an electoral coalition incorporating working Americans of both European and African ancestry: which President does that look like?

Threatened elites (again)

The networked elites of the major cities find identity politics very convenient. It breaks up citizens, residents and workers into competing groups based on identities that divide citizens, residents and workers. A lot of the metro-elite’s status-and-resource games would be upset if some bumptious upstart started putting together a citizen-worker-resident coalition.

The question is, how upset? How threatened?

The riots and statue-topplings suggest that there is a lot of political anger to harness. Given that the US’s ludicrously expensive university credentialing system leaves a lot of folk burdened with considerable debt and that restrictions on the supply of land for housing, and housing on land, creates ludicrously expensive urban housing markets that also shut lots of people out, there is much economic frustration being generated.

The US in the 1950s and 1960s was very socially stable. The combination of tight labour markets (so rising labour incomes) and loose property markets (so it was relatively easy to purchase middle class stability via home ownership) tends to encourage social stability. Thanks to migration, technological change and globalisation, plus the politics of zoning, aggravated by lockdowns, the US now has the opposite: loose labour markets and tight property markets. This is not a recipe for social stability.

Of course, it is the well-connected metro elites who have largely created or aggravated these problems. Supporting high migration AND land zoning drives up housing prices. Their universities create debt-burdened gimme courses in moral self-congratulation while new graduates in real disciplines have to compete with the educated of the entire globe.

The same well-connected metro elites whose long-term strategy of not providing sufficiently effective policing in African-American urban neighbourhoods results in much higher levels of violence in those communities. Violence that both stigmatises African-Americans and divides citizens, residents and workers from each other.

Violence, by the way, that is entirely an urban phenomena. There is no difference in homicide death rates in rural US between Americans of European and those of African descent.

No wonder the metro-elites love identity politics so much. No wonder also that the possibility of an ignoring-race coalition of local workers, residents and citizens must seem increasingly scary to them.

The question is, how scary? Are they as scared as the plantation elites of the Old South?

Or have they gestated from all this a network of genuinely revolutionary minded folk? A potentially explosive mixture of ideas that de-legitimise the American project with an over-supplied elite squeezed by under-supplied opportunities?

I guess we will find out, if Trump wins in November.