At the centre were big money, big business and corporate power. The Reagan counter-revolution was configured by the coming together of three forces. It is worth unpacking the anatomy of right-wing representative politics in America today, and the dangerous and untenable contradictions it faces. On the other hand, the differences between the factions of the Republican Party are threatening to tear it apart. While divisions between these factions in the Democratic Party are substantive, they are also for the most part civil. In each case, these are constituted by a plutocratic establishment that is in tension with a politically engaged and demanding populist grassroots base. This election will instead be decided by the power centres within the two parties. The mythic “independent” voter considered pivotal to elections in the 1990s and early 2000s is today largely irrelevant, even if s/he exists. Most likely voters are already committed to one party or another, a function of the complete polarisation of American politics over the past two decades. Electoral political dynamics in America today are not thus constituted. While these are genuine concerns, such poll-driven analysis overestimates white, middle-class voter preference, and assumes a rational voter weighing issues, strengths and weaknesses of different candidates.

This is based on Trump’s consistent poll numbers through the Republican primary campaign, Hillary Clinton’s ability to polarise an electorate, and the boost that a Trump candidacy would receive in the event of an Islamist terrorist attack in the United States in 2016, which would potentially broaden the anti-Muslim sentiment that he is preaching. I will first elaborate upon the anatomy of right-wing politics that leads to Trump’s popularity, before reflecting upon the progressive, alternative trajectory that Sanders represents.Įven as political pundits dismiss Trump as being unelectable in a general election, there is a segment that worries about the possibility of a Trump presidency under certain circumstances. There is a second more hopeful trajectory that this confluence results in, which is playing out in the equally meteoric rise of Bernie Sanders as a serious candidate for the Democratic Party nomination. Trump’s candidacy is the ugly confluence of these three trajectories. While Trump’s campaign has been cynical and his core constituency deeply xenophobic, understanding its success must go beyond romanticising or vilifying the candidate himself to accounting for the articulation of three historical movements: first, the transformation of America from an industrial to a service economy that has privileged the educated elite and limited the possibilities of social mobility for those without higher education second, the growing economic and political power of corporate and financial capital, leading to levels of economic inequality and inequality of opportunity that have not been seen since the Great Depression and third, the massive demographic transformations in the country, which will see America become a Hispanic-majority nation within the next three decades. The Trump candidacy is by now a real enough political phenomenon that one cannot discount the possibility of a Trump presidency and all its attendant consequences. Not only did Reagan sweep to the Presidency, he changed the contours of American politics for a generation to come. A more apt parallel might be with Ronald Reagan, who at the end of 1979 was considered too right-wing for the American mainstream and a bit of a buffoon. Few people, even in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), expected the mandate with which Narendra Modi came to power in 2014. This may be naïve: right-wing politicians who project themselves as strong men often do better than conventional wisdom expects. There is a consensus amongst political pundits that even if he was to win the nomination, Trump’s views are too extreme to win a general election. Even as George W Bush was commencing his aggressive wars after 9/11, he was emphatic in his public statements that Islam as a religion was not to blame and that Muslims in America should not be targeted.

Such rhetoric was unacceptable in American public discourse. Yet he has become the frontrunner for his party’s nomination by engaging in explicit racial demagoguery, calling entire groups of people rapists, terrorists or criminals. When Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination last summer, many dismissed him as a joke.

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