A Fresh Look at the US

When Donald Trump was elected U.S. president in 2016, it caught many people off guard. His win at the time came down to a Electoral College and not the popular vote, leaving many people, liberals, in particular, with the sense that their surprise might be short-lived. But in 2024, Trump won resoundingly, as battleground states swung in his and the Republican Party’s favor. For liberals, and especially for America’s traditional allies, this is deeply troubling.

After all, since World War II, American liberals and their allies have always taken it for granted that U.S. world leadership is natural and aligns with their interests and values. However, the 2024 election forces us to consider Americans’ other side, their tribalist side.

Westerners and the world have traditionally regarded the U.S. as a liberal democracy. Even though there’s a brutal side to it, the United States is basically still willing to take on the responsibility of leading the world and pay the price for doing so. But with Trump’s remarkable victory in 2024, the world has no choice but to rethink America’s dual nature.

The U.S. is a large country with a great deal of soft power in academia, the mainstream media and entertainment, much of which liberals control. The New York Times, The Washington Post, or academics at various universities, often publish biased reports and commentaries that, over time, lead people to believe they are portraying the true face of America. In the 2024 election, for example, the mainstream media press published commentary and polls that led people to believe Kamala Harris would win, but in the end, the Democrats and Harris suffered a crushing defeat. Evidently, then, mainstream academia and the media didn’t just mislead people — they also misled themselves, falling into a trap of their own self-righteousness while ignoring the other facts.

In fact, anyone who studies the U.S. knows that the country is full of contradictions, like its Constitution standing for the principle that all men are created equal, when American society in fact harbors serious racial discrimination. The U.S. is the world’s premier economic and military power, yet its domestic infrastructure has long been in a state of disrepair, and homeless have been living on its streets for a long time. Paradoxically, the U.S. has long accounted for about 40% of worldwide defense expenditure although it is home to 4% of the world’s population.

Many an astute observer has criticized the U.S. for this ironic deviation. The U.S. neglects its democracy and infrastructure back home while it wears on the leader and hero’s mantle around the world. At the same time, to consolidate their support, the U.S. has opened up its economic and trade markets to its allies, even allowing an exodus of American multinational corporations, the better to spark peaceful change around the world and spread U.S. values and way of life.

Domestically, liberals have a penchant for political correctness, marginalizing those on the right whom they deem to be backward-thinking, especially the religious right. While there are praiseworthy aspects to such political correctness (such as freedom, democracy, human rights, tolerance, pluralism, equality and inclusiveness), it also distracts from the other side of the U.S., and from the other side of right-wing liberalism, in particular.

Conservative Liberalism

Liberalism is complex and ever-changing. Originally, classical liberalism was an ideology that emphasized individual rights and market freedom, but since the 1960s, the liberal left in the U.S. has come to dominate academia and the media, thus marginalizing right-wing liberalism, especially conservative liberalism.

Right-wing liberalism, particularly the religious right, is often ridiculed by liberal elites as consisting of ignorant and small-minded hicks. But from the perspective of right-wing liberalism, many of the elites who dominate mainstream academia and the media are softies who are lacking in virility or are even a bunch of sentimental sissies. This polarization is also known as the “culture war.”

Generally speaking, right-wing liberals oppose multiculturalism and feminism; they are also anti-abortion, anti-homosexuality, anti-bisexuality, anti-immigration, anti-sexual liberation, and so on. They see themselves as America’s true patriots, espouse the Puritan orthodoxy of family values and traditional virtues, claim that they are the moral majority, and insist that the cultural hegemony of white-dominated Western civilization should be retained in the U.S. These were the very views expressed in late, renowned political scientist Samuel P. Huntington’s 2004 treatise, “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity,” in which he worried that the U.S. could lose these traditions.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., another renowned historian, even wrote a book, “The Disuniting of America,” reminding the American elite (especially liberal elites) to take seriously the role of multiculturalism and immigration in dividing the U.S. In fact, prominent Republicans have been claiming that “the white man is dead” as early as the 1990s, arguing that the white man is dying of self-inflicted wounds in the same way that the Roman Empire was occupied by barbarians.

In addition, with globalization moving apace, the 1990s in the U.S. saw a not insignificant number of anti-globalization campaigns emerging; many in the middle class believed that globalization had hollowed out U.S. industries, thus depriving workers of decent employment opportunities and turning them into the radical bourgeoisie. But liberal elites in the U.S., particularly the political elite of the Democratic Party, never took these reactions seriously. They implemented their self-righteous policies as they had always done, and the result, of course, is the polarization and radicalization of social conflicts.

Americans and foreigners who are accustomed to following mainstream American academia and media have overlooked the other side of the U.S. They imagine it to be a liberal society full of freedoms, democracy, human rights, pluralism, tolerance and inclusiveness, and they urge their own countries to follow the path of American freedom.

A Liberal Comeback?

In other words, Trump’s victory has its own social underpinnings, and as to whether there will be a liberal president in the White House four years from now, only time will tell. All we can say is that the polarization of U.S. society has deep-rooted cultural, social and economic factors, and even if a liberal president is in power in four years’ time, it will not change the country’s social structure and ideologies.

It has to be said that the U.S. did contribute a great deal to the world in the aftermath of World War II, but those contributions also led to the emergence of Cold War interest groups and especially of arms dealers. These Cold War interest groups are also powerful lobbying groups that have never cared whether the U.S. undermines its national strength through over-expansion and overspending. On that basis, Trump can insist on “America First” as much as he likes, but he will still have to accommodate those interest groups to some extent.

Trump will therefore be more likely to demand that his allies share more responsibility for their spending and national defense, thus creating business opportunities for American Cold War interest groups. This is in keeping with Trump’s businessman nature: Businessmen talk business, are more focused on practical benefits, and eschew high-profile issues like freedom, democracy, human rights, pluralism or tolerance.

In short, the U.S. will become more realistic and less ideological. To the American public, any ideological struggle is more an exercise in futility than in pragmatism. After all, average Americans do not care whether other countries are democratic or autocratic. What matters to them is that they keep their jobs, especially in this critical era that is seeing artificial intelligence replace human labor.