I've lived in America for almost ten years now, and one of the recurring pleasures of living in this country is observing the ongoing, repeated subtlety in the differences between living here and living in Ireland. It's been so long now, and my life has changed so much, I'm not sure how much I have in common with other Irish people my age; as the husband and father of Americans, and as someone who has come to love baseball, I feel less a visitor but not yet native. Not formally, and not yet culturally. So perhaps I can consider myself an embedded foreigner: someone who can bring some sense of external interpretation, muddled as it must be by years of living among the natives. Nowhere is this more evident than in politics, and perhaps never quite so evident as this year. At home for Christmas a few weeks ago, everyone wanted to know about Trump. How can someone so awful be doing so well? Could he win it?
The answer to the second question I felt was rather easy: no, he can't. Trump benefits from an overly crowded field, full of candidates who, had they any meaningful sense of public service beyond personal ambition, would step aside in favor of someone to mop the majority of support among Republican primary voters. Also, no one has actually voted yet (though they may have done so by the time you read this) and it will be interesting to see how much of the support Trump currently receives in the form of attendance at rallies and eager tweets will manifest as actual support in the ballot box. There seems little doubt that he would simply change his tune on any number of issues in the general election as required, but this would surely undermine the core of his appeal. His strengths in the primary become terrible weaknesses in the general election.
The answer to the first question is considerably more difficult to answer. Many outside the US and some within are prone to conclude the country is riddled with unrepentant racists and simpletons. I fear one of the legacies of this year will be that such simplistic views are given further oxygen. Clearly, a significant portion of the American population feels marginalized. We should all perhaps think a little bit about our media landscape, too; if a reality star can come this close to becoming president, at what point do we stop blaming the people who like him and have a look at the intellectual diet we feed ourselves through television and radio?
Still, all of this folds into a political reality this embedded foreigner finds bizarre: the primary system. When I still lived abroad it was something of which I was vaguely aware, though you miss out on the shared assumptions, that candidates will swing harder one direction or the other before reclaiming ground closer to the middle in the general election. This has always seemed odd to me, though the risk of upsetting the people you spent months trying so hard to impress seems offset by the continued benefits of partisanship to America's two party system. The argument in favor of the system is that is fundamentally democratic, and though I find myself in agreement we are seeing how such a well-meaning system can go awry. America is not unique in this; in Britain the Labour party has found itself more or less taken over by a wing of the party's broader constituency that claims a fundamentally democratic imprimatur despite a sometimes chilling adherence to a unilateral moralism.
That democratic ideal, of going state to state, is further complicated by the timing of primaries that results in Iowa and New Hampshire acquiring such enormous importance. Thus Ted Cruz, with his optimistic theory that he represents a voting bloc that stayed home last time and would win him this election, soars despite some pretty clear issues with his general electability. Iowa itself is idiosyncratic in the way that it chooses its delegates, particularly on the Democrat side, where the commitment to discursive politics sometimes results in a political fish market where supporters haggle and cajole to and fro. Still, the caucus is such a clearly identifiable characteristic of Iowan politics as to become almost definitive, and why not? Surely in a country such as the US there should be this kind of political diversity. It unfortunately results in candidates rushing to be the candidates they believe the Iowan electorate to want, with public assertions of their religious bona fides that often cause European observers in particular to guffaw.
I have an alternate theory as to these particular confessions work; the evangelicals and others to whom such entreaties are aimed are not stupid, they do not actually believe Donald Trump reads the bible nor do they melt in the face of Ted Cruz's painfully deliberate piety. They do, however, appreciate being courted. Who doesn't? I wonder if perhaps this element of sophistication is glossed over a little too easily, if not ignored, on both sides of the Atlantic. Of course, the primary voters of Iowa and New Hampshire really do believe, fervently, that candidates such as Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders represent the best candidates for leadership of the country. I have to believe that what looks from the outside to be a cannibalistic and self-destructive endeavor employs some method in its madness.