Trump’s Triumph: The Failure of Clinton’s Progressive Politics and the Demise of Liberal World Order

Trump’s election represents primarily the failure of Clinton’s brand of progressive politics. Her courting of Wall St, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood celebrities alienated the forgotten men and women (the one memorable phrase in Trump’s victory speech) of America’s industrial working class. Whereas Obama carried places such as Wyoming River Valley in northeastern Pennsylvania and Youngstown in Ohio, Clinton’s neglect of the Democrats’ working-class base came back to haunt her as the industrial ghost-towns across Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa went with Trump. It was not simply white men but also a majority of white women – those without college degrees – as well as about 30 per cent of Latinos and around 8 per cent of African-American voters who together with the Republican core support ensured Trump’s triumph.

The reservoir of resentment that the Trump movement has tapped into is closely correlated with the contempt in which the leadership of the Democratic Party holds working-class people. In the former heartlands along the Rust Belt and in the south, Clinton and her clique on the Democratic National Committee are viewed as arrogant, snobbish, uncaring about ‘ordinary people’ and mostly serving the interests of their friends at Google and Goldman. There was a palpable sense that the Clinton campaign did not care about the party’s traditional base it took for granted. Her ideology betrayed the very people it purported to represent. Clinton’s liberalism of the ‘professional class’ is empty, and this void is now occupied by Trump’s insurgency.