America’s age of anger is just getting started

A nightmare began with Donald Trump’s victory in November 2016. It has just been extended indefinitely with his narrow loss and wild allegations of electoral fraud.
In his 2016 campaign, Trump prospered by challenging the legitimacy of America’s political and economic system, arguing that it was rigged to benefit a few elites. Over the next four years, he demonstrated, in diverse and ingenious ways, his profound unfitness for high office.
Still, nearly 70 million voters plainly wished to keep him in the White House, confirming that Trump’s self-presentation as an outsider despised by political and media elites had gained broad and enduring acceptance.
Trump will have to vacate his official residence in January and begin grappling with numerous legal and financial difficulties. And the coalition of interests he provoked in opposition to him will be formidable in the years to come. But there seems little doubt that his anti-system politics of anger and resentment has acquired a long lease of life in American politics and society. Much analysis since Trump’s shock election of 2016 depicted him as a radical aberration. The many repellent aspects of his personality helped cement a narrative in which he posed an unprecedented threat to democracy and liberalism.
In fact, he was always a symptom of the breakdown of both democracy and liberalism: a belated but calamitous political consequence of the financial crisis of 2008 and even such older phenomena as uneven growth, diminished social security, extreme social and economic inequality and, most crucially, loss of faith in political representatives.
Trump himself doesn’t seem so unprecedented or singular when he is examined together with fellow “outsiders,” from Brazil to India, who successfully exploited disaffection with political elites grown unresponsive to ordinary distress.
Like Trump, these pseudo-mavericks were successful because they alchemised a long-felt helplessness among many voters — the despairing sense that nothing can or should be done before the forces of the market and technocratic governance — into a craving for performance, no matter how crude or destructive.
Take, for instance, Indian PM Narendra Modi, who rose out of political disgrace in the early 2010s on the back of an ostensibly apolitical anti-corruption movement aimed at India’s then-ruling party, the Indian National Congress. Even before India, Italy revealed the strength and persistence of an anti-system insurgency.
The political status quo there was radically disrupted as early as the 1990s by the exposure of incredible levels of corruption in all major parties. Since then, one self-proclaimed outsider after another has flourished in Italy — from the business and media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi promising “a new Italian miracle” to the comedian Beppo Grillo, who rose to political prominence in 2007. This unvarnished mode of politics — performative and explicitly destructive in intent — turns off many voters. But many others prefer it in the absence of better choices. They remain susceptible to anyone who can colourfully articulate their frustrations and resentments and identify suitable enemies to crush.
Joe Biden will eventually replace Trump in the White House. But, a loyal functionary of the old order is hardly the man to restore faith in it. And
so this almost certainly won’t be, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, the end of Trumpism, or even the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

—Bloomberg