How Could a Person Like Trump Get a Majority of Americans’ Votes?

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has fascist politics and seems to be seriously demented to boot. Why did a majority of American voters vote for him? Few Americans, perhaps 15%, actually share his politics.

A historical analogy is helpful to understand the remarkable election outcome in November. In Germany in 1933 Adolf Hitler won the election for chancellor, despite only a small minority of German voters sharing his politics. Hitler appealed to them by ranting against real and imagined agents of the genuine suffering of millions of Germans that year due to the Great Depression.

Today millions of Americans are suffering from declining economic circumstances. It is commonly said that “we will never reach the living standing of our parents.” While outgoing President Joe Biden brags about expanding American GDP, the lower part of the income distribution has not shared in the rise of the average. This has produced growing anger on the part of millions, and they vented that anger on election day.

Trump is more skilled at running for election than he is at governing. He is likely to find resistance in the Congress and even in the federal bureaucracy.

Yet the lower part of the income distribution is not numerous enough to win a national election. A second fact was a widespread perception that America is headed in the “wrong direction.” Trump’s repeated promises to “make America Great Again” resonated widely.

Despite Trump’s apparent dementia, he realized that in fact the USA is slipping within the global system of states. For 25 years following World War II, the U.S. was supreme in the world. For six years from 1973 to 1979, the U.S. and global economies wobbled in a state of incipient crisis. Then in the fall of 1979 a big financial, and broader economic, crisis erupted. Suddenly the biggest banks in the U.S., along with General Motors, required government bailouts to survive.

The year 1979 marked the onset of a structural crisis, a condition that emerges about once every 50 years or so. There were similar crises in the late 1800s and again in 1929. Progressive economists do not agree about the causes of this long cycle of crisis. My own view is that the work of the Social Structure of Accumulation school (Kotz, McDonough, and Reich, Social Structures of Accumulation: The Political Economy of Growth and Crisis, Cambridge University Press, 1994) best explains this cycle.

Around 2015 a new challenge to U.S. supremacy arose as China rapidly developed. China’s industrialization has been the fastest of any country in modern history, with the possible exception of Japan in the late 19th century. Until the early 2000s the U.S. government supported China’s introduction of private business and was pleased with the rapid economic advance that followed. Then in the early 2000s, U.S. rulers realized that China was on a trajectory to equal or even surpass the U.S. in technology, product quality, and price.

The imperialist hegemon will always resist the advance of a challenger, a process that gave rise to World War I and its sequel World War II. Since the early 2000s that process has been under way again. The hostility of the U.S. ruling class to China has been evident in the major mass media since then.

Trump somehow realized that targeting China would bring him great popularity. Trump’s scattergun approach led to denouncing U.S. friends such as Mexico, but he directs his main fire at the actual threat to U.S. hegemony: China. That stance likely gained him votes from the political middle, thus putting a majority withing reach.

It’s important to note that Trump did not win in a landslide. He won the popular vote by a small margin, 49.9% to 48.4% for Vice President Kamala Harris. However, the electoral vote was not close, 312 to 226. In any event, Trump’s victory was a plausible outcome in light of the above described circumstances.

The world will not end on January 20

While Trump will occupy the oval office as of January 20, he will face obstacles to enacting his program. If he is able to round up and deport millions of immigrants (no easy task!), that would decimate the work force that grows Americans’ food and builds housing in America. Food prices would rise as would rents and home prices. That would hit Trump’s core voting base.

Trump is more skilled at running for election than he is at governing. He is likely to find resistance in the Congress and even in the federal bureaucracy. Some state officials will vigorously challenge his policies with lawsuits and other means. The American union itself will come under strain, as it did in 1860.

It is impossible to predict the future. However, we are approaching a remarkable date—January 20, 2025–and we will soon find out what happens next. Hopefully progressives will be active and effective in fighting against a fascist future.

The last round of fascism ended when Germany was defeated militarily by the USA and the USSR. If the global hegemon, the USA, becomes fascist, it’s not clear that any state or likely alliance of states will be able to challenge the U.S. That is a particularly worrisome aspect of the prospect of a fascist USA.