I Will Take One Tie and One Baseball Cap Please: Musings on American Political Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century

What is remarkable to me about the 2020 presidential election is that despite the coronavirus pandemic and despite the protests about police brutality and racism in the United States set off by the murder of George Floyd and others, a sitting president, who has bungled the responses to both, still has a chance of being re-elected president of the United States. As I write Donald Trump, though he is behind his Democratic Party competitor Joe Biden nationally by eight to thirteen percentage points, is within three to four percentage points of Biden in Florida, within eight percentage points of Biden in Michigan, within three percentage points of Biden in Ohio, within three to eight percentage points of Biden in Pennsylvania, and is tied with or behind Biden by 3 percentage points in Wisconsin, the only states that really matter given the geographical realities of American political culture.

There are a number of reasons why Donald Trump is still competitive in the 2020 presidential race despite his manifest incompetence, greed, lack of sympathy, lack of empathy, and narcissism. First, his opponent Joe "Don't Hand Me No Neil Kinnock Lines and Keep Your Hands to Yourself" Biden is a mediocre candidate who is occasionally touched by foot in mouth disorder though to a much lesser extent than Trump, and who has, like Trump, though again to a lesser extent, engaged in ethically and morally questionable activities throughout his public political career. Second, and this is central to Trump's political (and economic) success, the Donald is a brand and the Donald is a celebrity.

Trump is a charismatic figure in Weberian terms, and an object of worship to the devotees of a relatively new religious movement or cult--I call it the Cult of the Orange One--a cult, by the way, that has consumption at its heart since late modern and postmodern celebrities are themselves consumer brands to be bought and sold, consumer brands that help feed global capital and help capitalism maintain its dominant position in the economies of the core countries and around the world. It is no accident that Brand Trump has been successful at marketing itself through sales of nouveau rich brow, middle brow, and low brow items such as baseball caps, t-shirts, whiskey glasses, pint glasses, flags, buttons, beverage coolers, straws, wine glasses, gift wrapping paper, Christmas ornaments, puzzles, wood train sets, cuff links, label pins, mugs, tumblers, dog collars, bandanas, posters, fine tip markers with the presidents signature on the side, playing cards, red plastic cups (shades of country singer Toby Keith's song "Red Solo Cup"), and colouring books to his devotees and fellow travellers at his website and at his rallies.

Trump's devotees literally worship him and for them he can do no wrong. He is their sacred symbol and he is the key symbol at the heart of Trumpism and its Cult of the Orange One. For Trump's devotees every word out of their totem's mouth is sacred and every word out of his mouth makes sense to them even though they often don't make sense to those who are not members of the cult or Trumpian fellow travellers. Brand Trump, like other fundamentalisms, is literalist, misogynist, and nationalist (this is where the Whiteness of the Cult of the Orange One reveals itself), nationalism, of course, is a meaning system which has been able to nationalise the universalist religion of Christianity and the universalist meaning system of socialism. It is, to digress a moment, worth remembering that the only comparable brand in the Democratic Party was and is not Joe Biden, but was and is Bernie Sanders, something Elizabeth Warren didn't recognise to the detriment of her presidential campaign. Biden is simply, for most, the anti-Trump or non-Trump. He is, in other words, a negative symbol and it is hard to build a brand on negation.

Brand Trump and its Cult of the Orange One has been able to feed into and feed off of, rather like a ravenous vampire, the culture war that has long divided America and which continues to divide the country. It is a culture war centred on identity and on the question of who is a "real American". For many on the increasingly radical right, including those in the Cult of the Orange One, the only "real Americans" are White, neoliberal capitalist, pro-life, right wing, and America first, Americans.

Where this culture war is going I do not know. It seems to be heating up once again thanks to the pandemic and to the murder of Blacks by America's militarised police forces which too often have a manichean us versus them meaning system at the heart of their culture. Personally, I think a divorce between the more nativist and the more cosmopolitan subcultures and countercultures of the United States is worth contemplating and considering before the right wing meaning systems with their notions of nationalistic purity do what other utopian movements throughout the twentieth century have done, attempt to purify the "race".