Campaign not about ideas and platform, but about identity
By Deborah Gyapong
OTTAWA (CCN)
Canadian observers see Donald Trump’s U.S. election victory Nov. 8 as a repudiation of out-of-touch elites and their institutions, but not wholesale support for the Republican candidate. “I think most people voted against people rather than for people,” said Ray Pennings, the vice president and co-founder of Cardus, a public policy think tank relying on 2,000 years of Christian thought.
“They were voting against entitlement and disconnectedness,” Pennings said. They saw the candidates as “not about us and what we stood for.”
The campaign was not about ideas and platform, “but a campaign about identity,” he said. It revealed that the American people do not identify with the entitled elite and their institutions.
“I think it’s a failure of institutions, not an election about politics,” Pennings said, listing the media, academia, business and government institutions among those that failed.
“The currency of this election was rage,” he said.
“What we are seeing is the rejection of postmodernism and its values,” said John Thompson, an anti-terrorism expert and a consultant with the Strategic Capital Intelligence Group. “The anti-establishments types of the 1960s became the establishment, and they are being rejected.”
This “new left,” that has discarded conventional values and imposed “undefined new values where integrity, respect, and honour don’t matter much,” and replaced them with “tolerance” and “top-down hectoring” and “calling everybody racist” is “being rejected across Europe and in the United States,” Thompson said. “There’s a lot of growling about them in Canada, too.”
“The election narrowly failed to capture the popular vote but did win the tactical battle and showed the alienation of a huge portion of society from the manipulation of the Mainstream Media (MSM) and the strident voices of political correctness which is likely reported by biased media out of all proportion to its genuine support on campuses,” said law professor Iain Benson, who watched the election from Australia.
“America needs deep changes, and Hillary was simply a vote for the status quo ante in which nothing would change where it is necessary,” Benson said. “The Trump vote was a protest vote and as much as anything else showed how out of touch with the ‘common opinion’ pollsters and the MSM are.”
Even after polls closed, pollsters and pundits predicted a Clinton victory, only to be surprised by Trump’s win in traditionally Democrat strongholds in America’s so-called rust belt, a region hurt by the loss of manufacturing jobs.
Benson said the more the MSM “manipulated reality” by only focusing on Trump’s “sloppier expressions” and not his “common man appeals” the more “the MSM pushed people to Trump.”
Jim Hughes, the president of Campaign Life Coalition, agreed the election was “an anti-Clinton vote more than a pro-Trump vote.”
“I have never seen a situation where two presidential candidates in the same election were so poor,” he said. “It was mind boggling. In the end, the people who are stirring the pot were rejected by the grassroots, so democracy is a wonderful thing, whether you agree with what the people think or say– they’ve spoken.”
Trump was able to gain a majority of Catholic voters for the first time since the 2004 election, according to the Pew Research Centre. Catholics supported Trump 52 per cent to 45 per cent for Clinton. President Obama, however, had gained the majority of Catholic voters both times he ran. White Catholics supported Trump 60 to 37 per cent; while Hispanic Catholics supported Clinton 67- 26.
The Obama administration’s treatment of the Little Sisters of the Poor and other faith-based groups or businesses did not want to comply with the Obamacare mandate to provide contraceptive and abortifacient coverage may have contributed to the swing in Catholic support. Hillary Clinton’s remarks that prolife Americans should change their religious beliefs may also have had an effect, Hughes said.
“I think the prolife movement played a huge role in it,” Hughes said. He noted a majority of white women voted for Trump over Clinton, which was a rejection of her support for Planned Parenthood, and promise to nominate pro-abortion Supreme Court Justices. “I have never before seen the prolife movement in the United States so in step with one another on this, very active and vocal.”
“I am happy for them,” he said. “They see this as a step forward.” But Hughes added it remains to be seen whether Trump will follow through with his prolife stance now that he’s elected.
Hughes also saw the Trump candidacy as an “antidote to political correctness.”
“He put his foot in his mouth so many times, but he said it like he felt it,” he said.
His victory is “probably a blow to the manipulators” of public opinion and “a very positive thing for those who believe in democracy,” Hughes said. “It remains to be seen what’s going to happen next.”
Though religious freedom issues might have motivated some who felt persecuted on religious freedom grounds, Pennings said that would be only a “subtext” and “not the main narrative.”
“It reinforced the larger narrative that entitled elites are having a different conversation than what was affecting people on Main St., Peoria,” Pennings said. “They feared for their jobs. They are still dealing with the effects of the 2008 housing crisis.”
“The sense was in all of this that the elites had moved on and were dealing with their own things that were far removed from day to day life: the basic needs of having food on the table and having shelter over your head,” he said.
The election results show a collapse in the Democrat vote; but they also show Trump won, while receiving fewer votes than either Mitt Romney in 2012 or John McCain in 2008. Pennings said both Obama and Trump were able to tap into new constituencies. Turnout, however, was low at only about 50 per cent.
Benson said he is not sure what the implications for religious freedom will be of the Trump victory. If Trump appoints serious religious scholars to the Supreme Court of the United States, “that would be a good indication of seriousness.”
Pennings said both candidates were willing to “stand and say things that were objectively not true,” noting, neither was embarrassed when the facts were pointed out, but “continued to cut a narrative” in what has been described as a “post-truth” election.
Pennings said he found it ironic so many small government conservatives were touting Trump, with his “I’ll fix it,” strongman rhetoric.
“From a Christian perspective the norm of government is justice,” he said. “Trump seemed to focus more on winning,” on winning various trade negotiations, as “America’s negotiator-in-chief.”
“The government is not simply about a set of negotiations,” he said. “There has to be a greater and higher appeal. We certainly did not hear much of that during the Trump campaign.”
“Liberal democracy requires a set of virtues,” Pennings said, pointing to what history teaches and the writings of de Tocqueville. “But democracy itself does not produce those virtues.”
Churches, families that are not democratic in their core essence are the incubators of core virtues, he said. The decline of the church as an institution and its influence on public life and the decline of the family and its capacity to support the raising of generations in which virtue is valued means we are seeing a corresponding decline in democracy.”
“We can’t ask the state to produce virtuous citizens,” he said. “The state is a place in which virtuous citizens behave according to their virtue,” he said. “Virtue is exercised, it is not created through the democratic process.”
