The chaos candidate got 75 million votes in the US presidential elections earlier this week, but Donald Trump’s stunning across-the-board victory has nonetheless triggered deep gloom across his country and the world, embodying so many of our worst fears come alive in a single moment. 30 years ago in 1984, another Republican candidate won re-election with the slogan “it’s morning in America” but Ronald Reagan’s party is now heading directly to darkness.
They are intent on mass deportations, trade wars and broken treaties, and will put extremist conspiracy theorists in charge of health, education and climate policies, but even worse is surely just around the corner. Remember that John Kelly – who was Trump’s longest serving White House chief of staff – has bluntly warned his former boss is “a fascist” who “prefers the dictator approach.”
How did this catastrophe occur in an ostensibly developed country which postures as “the leader of the free world”? The numbers are straightforward: millions of people who supported Joe Biden in 2020 failed to show up, and Donald Trump turned out a similar number of additional voters this time around. We must also factor in systemic racism - the Democrats have not won the majority of so-called “whites” since 1964 - plus rampant voter suppression. However, there is another unprecedented phenomenon, which is the dramatic shift of young Americans to this candidate: 56% of men between the ages of 18-39, and an even more surprising 40% of women in that bracket voted Republican.
“I was not in any way surprised by these results, nor were most of the people I know,” says Nicole-Ann Lobo, the sparkling 27-year-old Goan American writer and PhD candidate at Princeton University with whom I exchanged emails earlier this week: “The only thing that surprised me was how quickly and decisively the victory happened. I was unimpressed by either candidate, and though one was heralded by many as the lesser of two evils, she was the same candidate whose current administration represents the mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands, and displacement of nearly two million Palestinians, so it strikes me as difficult to make that claim.”
Lobo has volunteered for the outspoken liberal Bernie Sanders in the past, but says at this juncture “people are completely disillusioned with the status-quo liberalism, which offers little material benefit and much in the way of virtue-signalling and moralism. Speaking from the progressive point of view, it is absolutely appalling to me that we cannot have universal healthcare because it is "too expensive," but the US proudly bankrolls billions of dollars to Israel each year. It's estimated over 70% of the current genocide in Gaza has been funded by the USA, to the tune of approximately $23 billion dollars. All of this while the Supreme Court blocks any efforts to forgive measly amounts of our student loans, while social security is being dismantled, and the climate crisis rages. The political establishment, and to some extent the broader social contract in the US feels very broken.”
What happened to young men in her generation that led them to succumb to hate politics? Lobo says “their status in society has been increasingly destabilized since the 1970s/80s, when the idea of the nuclear family was (rightly) dismantled as the only option for young people to aspire to.
The fact that women no longer needed to rely on them for their material security threatens young men whose value and purpose feels suddenly challenged. This has left a lot of (predominantly white) men with a sense of bitterness given the residual discourse around masculinity and its entitlements - we saw this a few years ago with the rise of the "incel" in American culture. A new generation of social media influencers, from Joe Rogan to Andrew Tate, are targeting men on these very points, encouraging them to take back what they feel is rightly theirs. Trump, whose unabashed misogyny has become almost hackneyed in mainstream culture, represents the return of that promise ("the forgotten man will not be forgotten again," he famously campaigned last time). But it's cemented by Democrats offering very little to young men in return. I would also argue this phenomenon is not exclusive to the US. You definitely saw it in the last UK election, with the rise of Nigel Farage along with anti-immigration sentiment. Opposition to the far-right needs to rely less on moralizing lectures, and instead offer meaningful material solutions.”
The artist, filmmaker and Pratt Institute professor Suneil Sanzgiri is another thoughtful and politically engaged Goan American in that crucial demographic which jumped to Trump, and I also emailed the 35-year-old to ask how we should understand what happened in the US elections. He wrote back that “Kamala Harris ran one of the worst campaigns I’ve witnessed in my lifetime, berating crucial Arab voters in Michigan and around the country, doubling down on her support for the genocide in Gaza, siding with Republicans and billionaires instead of working people, and offering absolutely no substantive policy other than “I’m not my opponent.”
Meanwhile, people are desperate for true change because their basic needs (food, housing, clean water and air, education, etc.) are not being met, and Democrats do not represent any substantive change in that situation.
Despite Biden being fairly pro-Labor, all of the “good” things his admin might have done have been wiped away by a year of live-streamed genocide, where we have seen women, children, and babies being shredded to pieces by bombs paid for with our tax dollars. There was low voter turnout for Democrats because Biden’s approval ratings were astonishingly low throughout his entire presidency [and] Harris decided to side herself with a sinking ship, taking campaign advice from Hillary Clinton of all people. People vehemently rejected that.”
Breaking down the 2024 results among his age cohort, Sanzgiri says “there is a virulent reaction to so called “woke” culture right now, that is spear headed by white supremacist chauvinists like Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk and the like, that is majorly appealing to young people. I think a lot of young people voted for Trump both as a repudiation of Biden/Harris and the Democratic establishment, and because a lot of them are falling for this white supremacist, patriarchal, homophobic, anti-trans, anti-woke nonsense because these people are appealing to young kid’s alienation from society that they don’t see themselves fitting in to. They offer something different. If the left wants to offer an alternative, we have to get out into our actual communities, talk to our neighbours, build an actual mass movement, and stop insulating ourselves. This needs to mark the end of the current order of the Democratic party, but they will not learn any lessons from this massive loss. They will think they need to get more racist and appeal to more angry white supremacist voters. Appealing to the right-wing does not work. 96% of Republicans voted for the Republican candidate, and Democrats lost millions of votes from people staying at home and not voting. If they want to win, they will need to abandon their billionaire, war mongering, AIPAC-bought, professional managerial class obsession, and actually provide a solution to the crisis of people’s every day struggle.”
(Vivek Menezes is a writer and co-founder of the Goa Arts and Literature Festival)