'The people united will never be defeated': How Trump's victory showed the power of sowing division

His point was brief and straightforward. Harris, he said, was a candidate who would defend your right to disagree with her, and would vigorously defend all of your rights, whether you agreed with her or not; whereas Donald Trump’s stated intention was to crush those who do not share his views, to criminalise, exclude and malign them.

And although some might raise doubts about Harris’s willingness to defend supporters of a man whom she latterly took to describing as a fascist, Trump’s actions since his election victory strongly suggest that he intends to be as good as his word. His appointees to high office so far are all people willing to bend the knee to his hard-right policies; and some, including future Secretary of State Marco Rubio, are people who once strongly opposed Trump as a man unfit for office, but have changed their tune as he moved closer to a return to power.

Obedience and patronage

Trump, in other words, is the kind of politician who often talks the talk about freedom, but in fact is interested in no one’s freedom but his own. This is perhaps why he is choosing to surround himself with aides and Cabinet members more notable for their obedience, and their absolute dependence on his patronage, than for their ability, experience, or character; and why the right to disagree with him, his policies, and his agenda will become ever more essential for the future of democracy and freedom in America, and will have to be supported, cherished and protected, wherever people are able to make a stand.

If the right to disagree is sacred, though – and it is – then we must also observe another feature of 21st-century politics; and that is the increasing weaponisation of disagreement, by some of the most powerful and malign actors on the global stage, to disempower and paralyse what might otherwise be strong political communities, and to leave them hopelessly divided.

In a sense, the recent presidential election in the United States is a prime example of that polarisation, since despite the widespread narrative of a Trump “landslide”, in fact he won by a margin of only 50 to 48 per cent. The UK’s Brexit vote was similar, with the Leave campaign prevailing by 3.8 per cent; and the same tightly polarised politics is visible in nations across the West, from France, Poland and Germany to Canada and Brazil.

Far too many feel left behind

In every one of these cases, there is little doubt that the vote for hard-right causes and parties, including the vote for Trump, has been inflated far beyond its historic level by the sustained and effective use of media and online campaigns of disinformation and misdirection, funded by some of the most powerful people on the planet.

This is not to say that the parties of the centre-right and centre-left, so long dominant in Western countries, have played no part in creating the current impasse. Far too eager, over the last 40 years, to collude with a socially and environmentally illiterate form of unchained capitalism, they have often failed in their fundamental duty as regulators of economic activity and protectors of the people from harm and exploitation, leaving far too many feeling left behind, and deeply insecure.

In the absence of a robust social-democratic response to these fears, though, the snake-oil salesmen of the far right have moved into the void, offering those under economic stress false explanations for their feelings of fear and dislocation, and blaming immigrants, trans people, advocates of green politics, and increasingly – in some cases – the entire female sex.

They also offer fake solutions to these problems, in the form of crackdowns on those groups which will at best offer nothing more than a distraction from the further economic immiseration of most Americans implicit in Trump’s policies, and which at worst may devastate the rights and ruin the lives of a whole generation of Americans, particularly the most vulnerable.

A radical consensus

And the point about this rabid and paralysing politics of division, so carefully cultivated by those with most to gain from the failure of politics, is that it has little in common with a genuine culture of free speech and vigorous debate. In order to combat the increasingly unabridged power of plutocrats like Elon Musk and tyrants like Vladimir Putin, and to resist the lies perpetuated by their compliant media, groups of ordinary people at every level urgently need the kind of robust, in-person human exchange over areas of agreement and disagreement that eventually leads to consensus; not the wishy-washy, top-down consensus that voters have increasingly come to despise from mainstream political parties, but a radical consensus based on a true recognition of the profound problems we face, and a serious plan to deal with them, developed from the grassroots up.

These are paradoxical times, when we need to defend freedom of speech and the right to different viewpoints with our very lives, while at the same time working harder than ever to develop the kind of consensus, across and through those differences, that will enable ordinary people as citizens and voters to act together to counter the worst excesses of corporate and plutocratic power.

“The people united will never be defeated,” runs the old socialist slogan. And now we can surely see, in the aftermath of Trump’s victory, how peoples divided – by lies, by online manipulation, by the language and politics of hate – are unable to defend themselves, in these frightening times, and to link arms and move forward together, against the dark.