An 18-month long, bitter and dispiriting campaign
for the US Presidency finally ended in the wee hours of Wednesday, November 9,
in a stunning upset sure to have reverberations around the entire world. Donald
J. Trump, the real-estate billionaire and former reality TV-star, rode the
sense of frustration and disempowerment of the common man — mainly rural and
working class whites —  to knock off the
favourite, Hillary R. Clinton, and become the President-elect of the United
States. His victory is a startling repudiation of long-standing US government
policy on globalization and trade. The result confounded polls and pundits, and
has ushered in a period of uncertainty and unease about the direction of the US
domestic and foreign policy.

In many ways, the election of 2016 has been one
about looking back rather than looking forward. Writing in The Statesman from
the US to report on the 1960 election, Chanchal Sarkar observed that the
Presidency had “skipped a generation” in going from Eisenhower (age 70) to
Kennedy (age 43). This time around, the mantle of leadership is being passed
from Barack Obama (age 55) to Donald Trump (age 70). Donald Trump’s campaign
slogan, “Make America Great Again,” is a throwback to an earlier era of a less
polychromatic and less multi-ethnic America. Hillary Clinton’s response,
“Stronger Together,” is not very forward-looking either, evoking a sense of
consolidation rather than leap. Her appeal partly rested  on nostalgia for the prosperous days of the
1990s when her husband was the President.

Up until the day of voting, most polls had Clinton
modestly ahead of Trump —  both
nationally and in states where the contest was tight. So, in the evening on
election day, the Clinton camp felt confident of victory while the Trump camp
was subdued and contemplating defeat. As the evening wore on, however, and the
vote tallies came in, the picture changed and the moods shifted: Trump’s became
ebullient whereas Clinton’s became glum. By midnight, it was getting clear that
an epic upset was in the making, that the oft-forgotten folks in small towns
and villages of rural America were going in droves for Trump to register their
protest against the status quo and handing Clinton a stinging defeat.

In an eerie echo of Brexit, it was the revolt of the
so-called Middle America that propelled Donald Trump to an unlikely victory.
The revolt was against both the reigning economic orthodoxy of international
free trade agreements, which these people felt had taken their jobs to other
countries, and the noble-minded liberal concept of multi-culturalism, which had
turned their neighbourhoods from simple black-and-white to incomprehensibly
multi-hued. They sought redress for their economic and cultural anxiety in the
simple-minded rhetoric of Donald Trump — a nationalistic pitch based on
“America First” that was openly xenophobic, vaguely racist, and occasionally
absurd.

The narrow electoral defeat of the first serious
female contender for the US Presidency will be analysed for days and months to
come. The immediate causes include the FBI’s investigation of two of Clinton’s
practices when she was the Secretary of State: her use of a private e-mail
server with the potential for mishandling classified information; and
allegations of official favours given to foreigners who made donations to the
Clinton Foundation. She was cleared of any criminal wrongdoing in either case,
but then a related problem surfaced out of the blue. Some of her e-mails
addressed to a trusted aide, Huma Abedin, were found in the laptop of the
latter’s estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, who was under investigation for
sexting with a minor. This caused a flurry of well-publicized FBI scrutiny
right before the election. Although she was again cleared, additional damage
had been done to the public’s perception of her.

Beyond the proximate causes mentioned above, there
were two other deeper reasons that combined to thwart Hillary Clinton’s bid for
the Presidency. One was the long shadow cast by her husband, ex-President Bill
Clinton, over the campaign. The other was the wholesale desertion of the
Democratic Party by its erstwhile bulwark of support —  the white working class voters of the now
de-industrialized towns of America’s Midwest.

Bill Clinton’s shadow loomed over Hillary’s campaign
and adversely affected it for both personal and policy reasons. On a personal
level, Bill was a reminder that Hillary had already spent eight years at the
White House, albeit as a First Lady, and so was hardly a change agent. It was
also a reminder of those prosperous but turbulent times in the 1990s when the
couple were involved in myriad Congressional investigations, ending with the
impeachment of President Clinton for perjury regarding sexual liaison with a
young intern. Although the political motivation of many of the investigations
cannot be discounted, the Clintons always seem to carry a whiff of scandal with
them. Furthermore, Bill’s history of sexual peccadillos prevented Hillary from
a full-throated assault on Trump as a low-level sexual predator.

On a policy level, two signal achievements from her
husband’s tenure as President came back to haunt Hillary’s campaign because of
their negative long-term impact. The first is the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA), which was approved by Congress, with considerable Republican
support, and signed into law by President Clinton. NAFTA and similar
international trade agreements came under withering criticism in this year’s
campaign — from both left and right — for causing the disappearance of
American jobs. Faced with revolt from her own party’s left wing, Mrs. Clinton
could not extol the positive aspects of NAFTA, and was forced instead to remain
silent when Trump ripped it apart in speeches and debates.

The second policy issue from the past was the
Violent Crime Control Act of 1994. While it contributed to a drop in violent
crimes in the country, an unintended consequence of its mandatory sentencing
provisions was the mass incarceration of mostly African Americans. This
resulted in many broken families and consequent hardship to citizens. Hillary
Clinton’s vocal support of the law when the bill was enacted left a question
mark about her in the minds of many African Americans and diluted her support
in this group.

The other major reason for Hillary Clinton’s defeat
was the defection of the working-class whites in America’s one-time industrial
heartland — states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan —  from America’s left-leaning party, the
Democrats, into the arms of a wealthy businessman representing the
right-leaning party, the Republicans. This is indeed a remarkable and somewhat
unforeseen turn of events. The working-class people were drawn to Trump because
he gave voice to their economic anxiety and offered ameliorative measures with
simple-minded rhetoric (renegotiate or scrap trade deals) and simplistic
solutions (impose stiff tariffs) to bring back jobs. With his overtly populist
appeal, Trump has scrambled the philosophy and political affiliations of the
two major parties, and may even redefine the direction of the Republican Party
in the years to come.

To me at least, Hillary Clinton’s defeat is
reminiscent of the electoral defeat of Atal Behari Vajpayee and the BJP in
India’s 2004 parliamentary election. At that time, with the “India Shining”
slogan and plans for the “Golden Quadrilateral,” the BJP appeared invincible
ahead of the polls. It was brought down, according to many analysts, by the
revolt of India’s urban and rural poor who felt left out of the country’s
economic progress. Similar forces in the US might have been at work in Trump’s
favour.

In any case, with the election over, the crucial
question now is: how will Trump govern? Nobody has a clear idea as they parse
the candidate’s many statements on the campaign trail —  some probably unconstitutional (temporary
Muslim ban), others borderline fatuous (Wall on southern border paid for by
Mexico). The wait will be over, and the world will find out the answer, soon
after January 20, when Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated and finally become
the 45th President of the United States.

— Amitabha Bagchi

(The writer is a physicist settled in New Jersey, US.)