Trump has known how to take advantage of the impotence of democratic politics and the opportunities offered by the new media system like no one else. In this context, it is no coincidence that Nayib Bukele is now one of the fashion leaders
Every time the Democratic Party loses an election in the United States, debate resurfaces about its difficulties in connecting with the feelings and concerns of average Americans. Since Bill Clinton’s presidency in the 1990s, it was clear that the party had adopted a new paradigm: the acceptance of neoliberal economic policies as the only viable path. This shift relegated the fight for equality as the central axis of the Democratic program, which had defined its identity since the New Deal and, especially, during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s.
Comparing the policies and speeches of that time, marked by the Great Society and a redistributive agenda, with those of the Democrats from the 1990s onwards shows the rightward movement of the American political spectrum. This evolution not only distanced the party from the popular classes, but also contributed to a rethinking of the progressive identity in favor of a more technocratic approach focused on urban elites. Just as Margaret Thatcher said in 2002 that her greatest political achievement was Tony Blair and New Labour, Ronald Reagan might well have said the same about Clinton.
In recent decades, although Democrats have been fairly successful in representing historically marginalized ethnic minorities, they have become primarily the party of what Richard Florida calls the “creative class”: an affluent and highly educated socioeconomic group that predominates in large cities. This transformation has left the Democratic establishment trapped in a kind of ivory tower, distant from the white working classes that constituted the base of its support.
It is true that within the American working population there has always been a significant segment with deeply conservative values, where racism, machismo and other prejudices have had a lot of weight. Ignoring this reality would be a naive simplification of the class struggle. However, so many years of tolerance and legitimization of growing economic inequality, combined with an identity progressivism that segments citizens by ethnic and cultural criteria, renouncing a more integrative approach based on the people or class, and a pattern of development economic system that concentrates prosperity in metropolises integrated into the global economy, have enhanced the growth of reactionary positions. While “entrepreneurs” and billionaires are glorified as a kind of upper caste, whose wealth arouses more admiration than scandal, for large sectors of the middle and lower classes, the main dividing line of society is no longer drawn between capital and work, between large employers and workers, but between whites and ethnic minorities, or between employees and the self-employed versus immigrants perceived as “privileged” by public aid.
The divorce between progressive elites and white Americans with less cultural and economic capital, especially those in small and medium-sized cities and rural areas, is now so pronounced that, judging by some reactions, Trump’s new victory would mean little. less than the arrival of the “barbarians” from deep America, ready for the definitive plunder of Washington. However, in a context where left-wing populism has been absent for decades – despite its historical relevance in regions such as the Midwest, now converted into a Republican bastion for years -, and with social democracy abandoned by those who were called to defend it, What could prevent a majority of the white workers of the interior from finding their main ideological framework and source of collective identity in conservative nationalism and evangelical Christianity? Various agents of right-wing populism, such as the Tea Party, Fox News, Tucker Carlson and of course Donald Trump, have skillfully exploited the feeling of disdain and abandonment that many of these sectors perceived on the part of the Democratic Party, channeling their discontent into a resentment directed at progressive elites, focused on cultural and lifestyle issues.
It cannot be denied that Joe Biden, aware of the danger of this scenario, has tried during his mandate to benefit the working classes and strengthen unions. His Keynesian policies, such as the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, allocated huge amounts of money to direct aid to workers and to projects infrastructure, green energy and technological modernization, creating jobs and improving working conditions in broad sectors. These massive economic stimulus packages and public spending, as well as his gestures toward unions, make his government the most left-wing of the 21st century in the United States. However, these measures were not enough for the Democrats to renew the confidence of the citizens. The stagnation of real wages due to inflation and the hasty candidacy of Kamala Harris certainly contributed to this. But beyond these immediate circumstances, it is essential to understand two structural processes that deeply condition the political landscape: the growing inability of democratic politics to impact daily lives and the fragmentation of the communicative space, which makes the connection between policies as difficult as possible. real stories and the stories that reach the public.
On the one hand, in recent years what Sánchez-Cuenca called the impotence of democratic politics has worsened. We find governments increasingly less effective when it comes to influencing the social and economic dynamics that affect citizens. The existence of powerful actors external to the democratic process, such as investment funds, large companies, supranational entities of a technocratic nature and global technological platforms, has drastically reduced the reach and room for maneuver of governments. Almost all the powers that determine our lives are private and not even huge public spending plans seem to have enough impact to counteract this reality.
In an era of great uncertainty, this weakness of democracy generates frustration among citizens, who perceive that politicians do not respond to their need to provide a certain security and stability to their vital projects, which is why we are witnessing time and again that the parties in government have so many difficulties in renewing their mandates. Politics, which since ancient times has been the space where collective goals are defined and articulated, is now a ship without a rudder, incapable of resisting the currents of global forces, predominantly economic and financial, that escape its control. What can politics do to guarantee access to housing in the midst of a deregulated market with a large presence of private mega-holders such as banks and investment funds? How can you ensure social protection in the face of a precarious labor system, with increasingly unstable and poorly paid jobs? Not even from the White House, where the most powerful person on the planet apparently resides, is it possible to reverse this impotence.
On the other hand, we find the transformation that the media system has undergone in the last twenty years. The rise of digital media and social networks has fragmented into a thousand pieces the common communication space that existed until its appearance. Without idealizing that model, which was deeply hierarchical and restrictive, the existence of a few reference media, with intellectuals and media leaders who emanated great authority, allowed different ideological currents to be structured on a shared basis. Today, the creation of airtight bubbles of opinion fed by opaque algorithms makes the existence of a collective agora where a democratic debate worthy of the name takes place unfeasible. And this situation is a much more acute problem in the United States than elsewhere.
As a consequence, the abyss between real politics, understood as effective management, and communicative politics, has never been as wide as it is today. A very dangerous dissociation, because it allows the creation of alternative realities that have nothing to do with the facts, which eliminates any vestige of rationality in public conversation and breaks all logic of accountability. It is enough to observe the personnel that Trump is choosing for his new cabinet, characterized by a clearly communicative profile, to understand where the shots are going. Trump has known how to take advantage of the impotence of democratic politics and the opportunities offered by the new media system like no one else. He is, without a doubt, the most successful demagogue in American history, extremely astute in the art of turning the frustration of millions of citizens into an attractive anti-political narrative. His strategy aligns with a global trend toward leaders who promise quick and forceful solutions, where the separation of powers and the limits of liberal constitutionalism are seen as useless relics of a past incapable of responding to current challenges.
In this context, it is no coincidence that Nayib Bukele is now one of the fashionable leaders, with levels of approval in El Salvador and other latitudes, totally out of the ordinary in these times of ephemeral governments. Although his results in key areas such as equality or poverty reduction have been disappointing, his ability to demonstrate that politics can work, as he has done in his fight against gangs, along with his ability to communicatively capitalize on that success, makes him have become a global benchmark. The fact that, according to various indices and international organizations, Salvadoran institutions have degraded to the point of being considered today a “hybrid democracy” seems to matter little in this era of the return of strong gods. Replace the gangs with illegal immigrants, and we will soon see clearly that this is the model that Donald Trump intends to apply in the United States: a spectacle policy whose long-term consequences are unpredictable, and that, as in the Salvadoran case, will inevitably lead to a dangerous setback in human rights and democracy.
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