Antonio Navalón
Frankly, to attempt reelection as president of the United States at the age of 81 was madness. However, it seemed that the only one who had not heard about it and did not want to hear about it was the person himself. Officially, Joe Biden is out of the presidential race, thus initiating a process in which it will be fundamental to know who will be the Democratic Party’s choice. However, this will only matter a little since achieving victory will be challenging. If not, it is almost impossible. As if anything was missing from the success and momentum obtained by Trump after the recent events, the departure of the still president and leading Democratic contender could not be more favorable to him. Two lessons can be drawn from what has happened: it is one thing to be old and another to the decrepitude that old age brings. What we have all been able to see is not about an older man but the effects that old age can have on our movements, on our behavior, and the resistance produced not by the effort to keep trying but that which arises naturally when someone wants to do everything simply because they want to.
When Victor Hugo wrote “Les Misérables”, the world did not have the complexity, crises, technology, or unique characteristics defining our time. What there was in his time was a sector of the population – and it was the majority – outside the circle of development and, therefore, of hope. What has happened with the so-called deep America is the creation of a new legion of wretched, the New Miserables. Consequently, it is essential to indicate that everything happening now is not just an actualization but a reflection of problems that we have had for a long time and that, for one reason or another, we have not wanted to see. The weight of history is palpable in our present political landscape.
If one analyzes carefully the 39 years of life of Donald Trump’s vice presidential aspirant, James David Vance, one will realize that the route of the so-called “Rust Belt” – that is, what remains of the disappearance of industrial America in the states of Ohio, Pennsylvania Michigan, Virginia, among others – corresponds to places where an entire white generation predominates, of excluded and where all the red lights of a country’s survival have been lit.
The so-called “Rust Belt” is not like other regions of the United States where vandals, illegal immigrants, or social destroyers predominate, but rather, in this series of states, which also include vital sites of the American socioeconomic structure such as New York or Illinois, it is made up of citizens who have graduated from the most prestigious universities in the country and businessmen from the highest economic spheres. Stories of the “living dead,” also known as “zombies,” became popular long ago, with William Seabrook popularizing the term after a trip to Haiti in 1927. Today, this seemingly idyllic region has become one of the areas with the highest rates of fentanyl overdose deaths, seeing in many of its citizens the popular image of zombies.
Much of the impact of the first great American crisis – that of 1929 and the sociological implications for the reconstruction of the country that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal entailed – was because, faced with a crisis of values and market rules that controlled the social and industrial fabric, the full force of a State had to be produced. This was done to impose, from the government, the creation of a future based on industrial strength.
With the first Internet bubble, the accelerated death of the great American industrial companies began. In the decade of the 80s and 90s, there was no major project in the world that did not have among the bidders and executors names like Halliburton, Bechtel, or other large industrial consortiums that – despite the military and financial speculative decline that had become part of the control habits of the US economy – continued to be of enormous importance. These companies gave jobs, economic stability to families, hope, faith, and much charity to the miserable of the time in a way that sought to create development to ensure that those who had nothing could have something and thus avoid an uprising.
The first internet bubble began to produce a two-fold crisis; on the one hand, the mutation of industries, capabilities, and assessments of which companies were creating and managing America’s industrial capacity. On the other hand, the awakening and industrialization of China, along with the seizing of opportunities to move manufacturing from corresponding U.S. industries to Asia, gradually caused Pittsburgh’s iron and the industrial needs of the so-called rust belt to be an accurate reflection of what it meant to have lost not only a job but a place, importance and above all a need to take care of them. It wasn’t until 2016 that Donald Trump, curiously a New York City real estate speculator, realized that victory could lie not on the two coasts – California and New York – but in the states with the most electoral colleges within the Rust Belt region.
While this was happening, also in 2016, a Yale Law graduate was publishing a book that would help understand Donald Trump’s triumph. Like many Americans, J.D. Vance grew up under less-than-desirable conditions. With a childhood marked by poverty, his mother addicted to drugs, and raised by his grandparents, Trump’s candidate for Vice-President of the United States began his political career when, in 2003, he decided to enlist as a Marine, becoming today the first Marine veteran to be nominated for Vice-President. After his experience in Iraq, a consequence of the invasion decreed by George W. Bush and above all by Dick Cheney – who curiously came from being CEO of Halliburton – J.D. Vance saw firsthand his country’s capacity for destruction. Few people represent better than him what it was like to live and grow up in the “Rust Belt,” characterized by poverty and drug addiction. So much so that even the Washington Post came to call him “the voice of the Rust Belt”. His personal struggles and triumphs make him a figure of empathy and connection in the political landscape.
Vance is a character who has dared almost everything, even going so far as to refer to Donald Trump as a moral disaster and label him as the “Hitler of America”. Besides that, his book “Hillbilly Elegy” talks about his own story and all those American citizens who are victims of their realities and contexts. This text inadvertently coincided with the confabulation of different social crises precipitated mainly by the appointment and election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president in American history. It was only a matter of time before, just as the assassination of George Floyd sparked the “Black Lives Matter” movement, the idea that “white lives matter” would also take hold on U.S. soil.
Today, the historical owners, the whites of the Rust Belt, are in the process of being eliminated, first, because of their social failure. Secondly, the United States’s industrial transformation – due to the migration of the primary industries out of its territory and the mutation of power based exclusively on technology and financial capacity – has exiled them and left them without the industrial and productive heritage that had lasted for many generations. Not only that, they were also deprived of the possibility of building a life based on work and development, turning that region into one characterized by the destruction caused by drug abuse, family disintegration, and the lack of any sign of hope for that minority – which was once the majority – and which is characterized by having white skin.
The United States has already witnessed the bloodthirsty experience of plantations, slavery, and unfortunate social events that unleashed movements such as “black lives matter”. Now, it is seeing the paranoia and unreality of being enemies of immigrants being a country of migrants. Donald Trump is returning to the same fundamental issues and themes that once got him into the White House.
As the great executive that Trump was and is, his entrepreneurial capacity has facilitated his way back to winning the U.S. presidency. He has recently gained the participation and support of directors such as Joe Lonsdale or Peter Thiel and companies such as Palantir – which in turn is one of the Pentagon’s main contractors in technology and artificial intelligence issues, with applications for military use – which in turn cause a change in the rules of the game. Since last month, Donald Trump’s political action committee has managed to raise millions of dollars with backers such as Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Marc Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz – founders of Andreessen Horowitz – or as Doug Leone, the founder of Sequoia Capital, the latter being two of the most important venture capital firms in the United States.
The decision to use all U.S. weapons against the Mexican cartels is prompting a change in culture and a change in the direction of the national political leadership. It should not be forgotten that in the past, George H. Bush chose a young politician, Dan Quayle, as his vice president. However, Quayle had neither the preparation nor the life and survival skills that J.D. Vance has. More importantly, Quayle did not have the relationships that Vance has with the cutting-edge technology industry serving military needs.
Further Reading: