Blaming the Left for Trump is victim blaming

While the Left has received criticism for Trump's rise in popularity, it's important to look at the true nature of the Republican Party and its agenda of inequality, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.

DONALD TRUMP’S political popularity is not a backlash by disenfranchised voters suffering the ills of inequality. Trump’s popularity is a movement based on the aggrieved entitlement of Americans who resent growing equality.

Trump offers these people – White men and often White women, too – the promise of pushing those with less power, women and non-White people, back down the ladder of inequality.

This means Trump is not the Left’s fault. Trump is a reaction to the Left fighting for a more equal society.

It has become a popular trope amongst political analysts to blame the rise of Donald Trump’s far-Right MAGA movement on the Democrats and the Left more broadly. The myth goes that Democratic presidents have not served the interests of the working class, particularly rural White American men, and that the resulting resentment about growing inequality led to the rise of Donald Trump.

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Leigh Sales propagated an example of this myth in a recent ABC analysis of Trump during the Republican National Convention.

Sales wrote:

‘The vibe is always that Trump is standing up for “you” and “us” against “them” — “them” being an abstract, nefarious umbrella covering anything from Democrats to China to universities to gender activists.’

Sales says this divisive message resonates effectively with Trump’s supporters because life has got harder for Americans with free trade disappearing jobs and industries, rising inflation, credit card defaults and bankruptcies, high interest rates and “deaths of despair” from suicide, alcoholism and drug addiction.

Not only does this representation of Trump’s political support wrongly imply that Trump’s base supports him because he is going to solve American inequality, but it also inaccurately implies that the Democrats do not work hard for equality.

Just like in Australian politics, what separates the Left from the Right in American politics is a desire by the Left to solve inequality, whereas the Right works to make it worse. This glaring fact is lost in attempts to blame Trump – a pro-inequality candidate – on those who oppose inequality at every turn.

Another example of attempts to apportion some blame for Trump’s rise on the Democrats came from Stan Grant in The Saturday Paper. Grant takes aim at former President Barack Obama, criticising him for failing to solve race relations and inequality in America and saying Obama ‘bequeathed a country primed for a populist like Trump’.

Big of him, Grant also lays a little bit of secondary blame on Trump, writing:

‘Not all of it was Obama’s doing. Trump didn’t have to dig too deep to exploit racism and peddle “birther” lies.’

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Grant’s argument amounts to a claim that since Obama didn’t solve inequality, particularly race inequality, it was only natural that Trump would exploit racism to win the 2016 Election.

Grant implies that solving inequality – supposedly doable within two four-year terms – is the Democrats’ job and if they don’t do that successfully, voters will naturally turn to the Republicans. These are the same Republicans who we all know have no intention of doing anything about inequality, but indeed are hellbent on making it worse.

As facts would have it, the American Council of Economic Advisors found in 2016 that the Obama Presidency carried out the ‘most aggressive and successful attempt to reduce inequality in half a century’. On the other hand, just like the Right always does, Trump’s Administration worked hard to increase inequality.

Whether he meant to or not, Grant did get close to describing the real reason Trump’s MAGA movement grew out of Trump’s racist, misogynistic promise to take America back to the past. Grant quotes political scientist George Friedman in saying White working-class voters rejected the Democratic “elite” because this elite attacked their churches’ authoritative views as racist, sexist or homophobic.

This claim almost gets to the real reason why people support Trump, but misses a key point. The MAGA movement is not a backlash against “elites”. At the heart of Trump’s support is a backlash against those who fight for equality.

This includes some elites, but also, crucially, the victims of inequality themselves who unite in the movements against racism, sexism and homophobia, alongside struggles by the Left – including the union movement – to reduce income and wealth inequality.

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The vast majority of people in these movements, by the way, are suffering all the ills of inequality that Leigh Sales claims led to voters supporting Trump. What is the difference between them? Democrats fight for equality and Republicans fight against it. The fact is, MAGA is not just a political coalition premised on bigotry and hate, it is a sometimes-violent pushback against those who fight for a more equal society.

Grant might be right that the Obama Presidency influenced the rise of Trump, but he is offensively wrong about the reasons why. The true reason the MAGA base turned against Obama (if indeed any of them voted Democrat to start with) was because Obama was the symbolic face of American equality. MAGA voters could not fathom living in a society where a Black person could become President.

Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again” has always been an unspoken but constantly implied promise to make America more unequal again.

Just as Trump used Obama’s race against him in his pro-inequality movement, he has already shown he plans to do the same to Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris symbolises race and gender equality. The MAGA movement could not accept a Black president and so it certainly can’t accept a mixed-race, Black woman as leader.