Why I’m not surprised that Trump won- Reflections from my year down the rabbit hole.

I’ve spent the last twelve months reading, researching and talking to people all around the world about power.

Like many people, I had reached a point of overwhelming frustration with our political systems. In the face of a growing crisis, our leaders and institutions seemed increasingly unfit to address the challenges we face.

Beneath the rising and falling agendas, the increasing polarization and hate on both sides of the political spectrum and the pressure of escalating crisis I felt that something fundamental had broken or changed within us and our world.

The warm, fuzzy blanket of our dominant narratives and mythologies was wearing thin and the holes were letting in uncomfortable new realities.?

From interviews with people facing prison sentences for their involvement in the Capitol Hill riots to global research from political think tanks, to feminist science fiction and fifty year old texts predicting seismic change at the start of the twenty first century. I’ve gone deep into the rabbit hole to try to understand our disturbing moment in history.

This morning I woke up to messages of surprise. People ask me how could anyone vote for Trump? Despite my own dismay I am not surprised that Trump won, or that many didn’t feel compelled to vote at all. I don't think they were wrong, evil or even misguided. I do think that our political systems are failing us and that until we recognise the deeper forces at play we will continue to be simultaneously surprised and unable to build a sustainable and safe future for our children.

A New Landscape

Deep undercurrents are forging an entirely different political landscape to the one we are familiar with. The new divide shaping our times is between those who believe that our fundamental systems need to change and those who cling to the status quo either because they benefit from it or still believe in it.?

If you take some time to listen to conspiracy theories, setting out not to debunk them but to listen to the story beneath them, the deeper meaning that people are attempting to communicate or relate to, there is a common thread. The idea that a small elite group is leading the rest of us into disaster. There is a profound lack of trust in the institutions and individuals of the mainstream establishment.?

The traditional left and right wing are increasingly irrelevant in this context. Their agendas pursue incremental changes but continue to support the fundamentals of our current global system and paradigm. Surrounding them is a growing number of otherwise often diametrically opposed groups who believe that we need more radical change.

In this unruly crowd, very different people uneasily rub shoulders but are united around the belief that the fundamentals of the current system of power does not serve their best interests or even respect their democratic right to shape their societies. They feel silenced by the very parameters of mainstream politics, of what is even allowed to be discussed or tabled.?

As Noam Chomsky wrote; “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum…that gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”?

This growing global crowd are no longer feeling passive or obedient. Whilst positions on specific issues vary widely and ideas for what should replace our ailing global paradigm range from a radical path to greater equality to a return to tribal “great man leadership", there is consensus that a system of supposedly benevolent expert elites acting on behalf of everyone else is failing us.?

Once you know how to spot it you see this same frustration manifest in widely disparate places and people. Feminist rhetoric, particularly from the Global South, increasingly calls for fundamental rethinking of global systems of power. They are tired of the top down imposition of Western-centric agendas by a small elite group. Some of the young black men that Kamala Harris failed to win over, spoke of their frustration that democrat politicians thought they had the right to dictate sex and gender norms for everyone else. In my own country, my conversations with many Brexit supporters revealed a fundamental desire to reject the top down instruments of elite agenda setting and control represented by legislative and bureaucratic processes of the European Union.?

These groups are diverse but united by a deep discontent with the status quo.

Diving deeper, this discontent and failing trust is being driven by some profound and irreversible shifts that mark our moment of history. We must understand them if we are to navigate to calmer political waters.

A Failing Mythology

Firstly, the current Western paradigm, a story of ever greater global economic growth and prosperity achieved through capitalism and scientific technology is being fundamentally challenged.

For the first time in my lifetime global indicators of peace and prosperity are almost universally gloomy.? Despite being equipped with exponentially more knowledge about the climate crisis and with ever more innovative technology we remain on track to reach or surpass the critical 1.5°C tipping point by 2035. Even those of us living in the safest corners of the world are now starting to see and feel the escalating harms. Researchers point out that some of the billion people predicted to die because of climate catastrophe over the coming decades, have already been born and are now living as children in the Global South. Our political failures only hasten their demise. Against this backdrop the richest five men in the world have doubled their fortunes as almost five billion people have become poorer. The idea that our current model of global leadership will deliver progress for us all seems increasingly like a fantasy.?

Ultimately, these realities of the climate crisis do for the power couple of scientific technology and capitalism what evolution did for christianity and the church. They are symptoms of a growing gap between the dominant mythology many of us live within and reality that must be bridged.?

A Changing Mind

Interwoven with this unraveling of our dominant global paradigm is a reshaping of our internal world.?

Sixty years ago Marshall McLuhan predicted in his landmark book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, that the age of the internet would alter the way our minds work as fundamentally as the invention of the printing press in the 15th Century.?

Nicholas Carr puts it beautifully in “The Shallows,” his book about how the internet is changing how we think. He says;?

“For the last five centuries, ever since Gutenberg’s printing press made book reading a popular pursuit, the linear, literary mind has been at the centre of art, science and society. As supple as it is subtle, it’s been the imaginative mind of the Renaissance, the rational mind of the Enlightenment, the inventive mind of the Industrial Revolution, and even the subversive mind of Modernism. It may soon be yesterday’s mind.”

Social media in particular amplifies and enables the emotional, story driven aspects of who we are. The outpouring of increasingly diverse human experience and perspective on social media makes the idea we are primarily rational creatures seem like a delusion. The credibility of our conception of ourselves as rational individuals, that has been at the heart of Western identity for five hundred years, is being rapidly eroded.??

As previously suppressed narratives are juxtaposed with those that have held sway within the mainstream- for example the stories of slaves and their descendants amplified alongside those who built their wealth off the back of their suffering- the unraveling of the legitimacy of our current World Order is only accelerated.?

A Way Forward

Politicians (and people from all sectors and disciplines) who recognise this new landscape and either model a more collective form of power sharing with their constituents or exploit this discontent for their own ends are winning popular support and achieving change.

Fundamentally, whatever their agenda, they are all willing to let go of the supremacy of the rational, expert, individual mind and give weight to story based, collective human experience.?

A recent report from The Apolitical Foundation found emerging models of ‘circular power politics’ across the political spectrum and all over the world, many actively harnessing collective forms of storytelling and creative expression within their work.?

On the other hand, those who are blind to these new realities, who replay the old patterns of power and are unwilling to fundamentally challenge or change the system on behalf of their constituents are becoming increasingly unpopular and failing to achieve their goals- regardless of the relative objective merit of their work. At the heart of their position is an unwillingness to acknowledge broader, more subjective, experiential forms of truth and to relinquish or share their position as an expert agenda setter. In short, they don’t want to listen, they want to be right.

Perhaps the two most important things for left wing liberal elites to realise is firstly, that many who have crossed over into our new emerging world feel that time is rapidly running out to build viable alternatives to our current systems. They are willing to make significant sacrifices to compromise on almost everything else in the name of radical change.

Secondly, the two largest organised global groups I have come across who deeply understand our moment in history and are using it to construct alternatives are the alt right and the global feminist movement. Sadly, the alt right is extremely well funded and feminist movements are not. This is perhaps why Trump’s victory is fundamentally unsurprising to me.?

To find a way forward, a position of surprise and disbelief at the democratic choices of others must be replaced by a genuine desire to understand. The act of listening to and understanding each other can topple and reshape global systems of power more quickly than many of us dare to believe.?

As Ursula K Le Guin wrote;

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

So don’t indulge in despair or horror today- instead listen carefully to those who choices you feel you don’t understand, join me down the rabbit hole and you might find your surprise give way to something more hopeful.

References

1. United Nations (2023); The Sustainable Development Goals Report, Special Edition 2023: https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2023/The-Sustainable-Development-Goals-Report-2023.pdf
2. Global Peace Index (2023) https://www.economicsandpeace.org/global-peace-index/
3. Quantifying Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Human Deaths to Guide Energy Policy https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/16/6074
4. Oxfam (2024) Inequality Inc. https://policy-practice.oxfam.org/resources/inequality-inc-how-corporate-power-divides-our-world-and-the-need-for-a-new-era-621583/
5. Marshall McLuhan (1962) The Gutenberg Galaxy.
6. Nicolas Carr (2011) The Shallows, 2020 Edition.
7. Apolitical Foundation (2023) Circular Power Politics. https://www.apolitical.foundation/report/circular-power-politics%3A-a-politician%E2%80%99s-guide-to-five-opportunities-to-lead-with-and-for-the-people