It was the beautiful old library building of a university in southern California and it was hosting one of the smaller award ceremonies that lead up to the Academy Awards. I was beside a woman whose book club had read my novel Brooklyn. She and her husband, a man as pleasant and friendly as his wife, had also seen the movie. They could not have been more charming.
Over the main course, the woman remarked that things had been bad in America. Since I thought she meant the involvement in wars and the economy, I replied that maybe they were improving. She was not sure, she said, and then added: “You see, Obama has been very good for the Muslims and very bad for America.”
I looked at her in wonder. She was dead serious.
And then her husband began lamenting the recent death of US Supreme Court judge Antonin Scalia. “You see, he knew the law,” the man said. “The other judges don’t know the law.”
As the night wore on, I noticed how popular this couple were, how many came to the table to greet them, how generally normal they were. In everything they did and said they exuded not only privilege but intelligence. By the end of the evening, I wondered what a close study of them would show – what television they watched, what newspapers, if any, they read, what radio stations they tuned into, what political discussions they had, for them to be so outlandishly stupid and prejudiced when it came to their own country’s politics.
Postgraduate degrees
I found out that they both had postgraduate degrees. Exit polls tells us now that 37 per cent of people with such qualifications voted on Tuesday for Donald Trump. The couple were also significant donors to the university, giving me the clear impression that their income was well above $250,000 a year. Forty-eight per cent of such people voted for Donald Trump.
I remembered another dinner in California more than eight years earlier when Hillary Clinton was running for the nomination against Barack Obama. The table had only one woman; the men were writers and university teachers. All were white. Not one of the men supported Clinton. When one said that in his house the rule was that the television had to be turned off when she came on, the others nodded.
When I asked them what were the policies Clinton espoused to which they especially objected, they looked at me like I was mad. It had nothing to do with policies, they said, they just didn't like her. There was a moment's silence as I looked around at them all. It struck me forcibly that they did not want a woman to be president of the United States. It was as simple as that.
After the first debate between Clinton and Trump on September 26th, it was presumed that Clinton had won. Trump had interrupted her too many times, it was said, and spouted too many inaccuracies and exaggerations. To the commentators, he seemed unstable and preposterous and utterly unprepared.
But for the first 15 minutes, he spoke about the trade agreements – Nafta and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – and how much damage they had done to the US economy and how many US jobs they had destroyed and endangered.
He made it seem as though Clinton was the architect of all of this. When he accused her of stating that the TPP was “the gold standard” for such agreements, she denied she had said this.
Later that evening, over and over, even CNN showed a Clinton speech made in Australia when she had, in fact, used those very words. Trump was not as badly briefed as he had seemed. While the fact-checkers had called Trump out on many matters, nothing loomed as large as this one.
Thus if you were a white (58 per cent of whites voted for Trump), male (53 per cent of males voted for Trump), suburban (50 per cent for Trump) or from a small city or a rural place (62 per cent for Trump) who had a high-school education or less (51 per cent for Trump) or a degree from a community college (52 per cent for Trump), and you felt your job was under threat because of these trade agreements, then it seemed that Clinton was trying to deny her support for them, while Trump promised that they would be scrapped.
Polished but jaded
Watching Clinton in the debates and looking at her stump speeches, it was not immediately clear what she would do as president. She had many progressive and rational policies, but none that captured headlines or anyone’s imagination. Her tone was polished but jaded.
She let Trump set the agenda. When he came on television, it was hard not to watch him. He dominated the screen. He was all novelty, surprise, menace and excitement. He suggested that he was leading his followers towards the next frontier. She, on the other hand, was all decorum, reason. There was not a word out of place, but there was no flavour in her language. Nothing she said stayed in your mind.
She wore her own privilege with ease and a sort of archness. She gave the impression that Bernie Sanders and his followers were a minor affront to her. She was, as Obama said, the candidate with the most experience. That might have been the most unhelpful thing anyone has ever said about her.
Trump, on the other hand, made his privilege into shiny, brutal, bar-room roughness. He made his inexperience a great novelty.
He was unembarrassed about his own ugly feelings. He delighted in his own big boastfulness. He was a loudmouth, a know-all.
Dangerous parody
What is strange is that his rhetoric, his outsiderness, his unwillingness to play by the rules, the mad look in his eye, set the agenda in this election as a dark and dangerous parody of the way Obama captured the imagination of the electorate eight years ago.
Trump made the election all about him. His problem now is that he cannot deliver on many of his more outrageous promises. There will be no wall built between the US and Mexico. Trump will empower no one who feels left out because of multiculturalism and globalisation. There will be no new manufacturing jobs created in the US during his time as president.
But, like George W Bush, Trump has people around him who know how power can be wielded. In the debate between the two potential vice-presidents, Mike Pence was polite and reasonable. But he is an extreme right-wing politician. Trump's misogyny and racism will seem like bluster against Pence's determination on matters such as abortion rights, gay rights, equality and the rights of the rich to have more money and the right to carry guns.
While Trump will be entertaining the cameras with more of his ill-informed and offensive views, Pence and others like him will be quietly, effectively and ruthlessly setting America back 50 years and creating an agenda will last into the next generation and have a deep and serious effect on the rest of the world.