Steve Rose writes:

[Gabriel] Gatehouse suggests two factors why Trump won. The first and most obvious, speaking to the Cuban Americans in Little Havana [in Miami], was the cost of living. “A lot of them told me, ‘My grocery bills have gone up exponentially.’ It’s not clear to me what policies Donald Trump offers that will solve that, but it’s quite clear that this is a problem the Democrats haven’t adequately addressed.”

For the other reason, he points to the New York Times/Siena College poll of likely voters in late October. Its top line was that Trump and Harris were neck and neck in the race, but somewhere near the bottom came the question: “Which comes closest to your view about the political and economic system in America?” Only 3% thought the system was working fine and 38% thought it needed “minor changes”, but 51% thought the system needed “major changes” and 7% thought that “the system needs to be torn down entirely”. “So you’ve got a nearly 60% block who are like, ‘The system sucks, it’s fucked,’ and Trump is attracting those voters. Because, for better or for worse – well, for worse, actually – the Democrats have kind of become the party that defends the system.” The terms “left” and “right” no longer apply in US politics, he says. “I frame it as pro-system and anti-system.”

This is what unites the coalition around Trump, from the ostensibly Democratic anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr, to the anti-“legacy news” crusader Elon Musk, to edgelord manosphere podcasters and wealthy politicians smashing it to “the elites” – they’re the anti-system option. This is also where conspiracy theory comes in, says Gatehouse: “Conspiracy theories are, by definition, anti-system.”

Gatehouse’s attitude to conspiracy theories is “you don’t take them literally, but you take them seriously”, he says. “A conspiracy theory tells you something about society, and the fact that so many Americans believe that the people they elect are not really in charge: hidden hands pulling the strings behind the scenes, all this kind of meta, QAnon stuff about elite cabals. It’s telling you the same thing as that Siena College poll was telling you: belief in the system is catastrophically draining away. And Trump is the guy who promises to rip it all apart, to tear it up, to ‘make America great again’.”

Gatehouse does come close to positing a conspiracy theory of his own in The Coming Storm, and it’s a terrifying one. It stems from a book called The Sovereign Individual, written in 1997 by the American investor James Dale Davidson and the former Times editor William Rees-Mogg – yes, Jacob’s dad. The book is uncannily prescient about the emerging internet age: cryptocurrency, disinformation, nationalism, the gig economy and wealthy individuals free from the authority (and tax laws) of nation states. Their vision of the future, says Gatehouse, is “a post-nation-state world in which a few individuals – sovereign individuals – have become so powerful that they rival the gods of Greek myth”. Certain sections of big tech saw the book almost as a route map; it was reprinted in 2020 with a new preface by the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. [Continue reading…]