By Olu Fasan
There are two views of human behaviour. One is that people are primarily motivated by self-interest – what’s in it for me? The other is that people are primarily influenced by deeply ingrained moral values – what’s right and wrong? The first view comes from the rational choice or game-theoretic school, the second belongs to what scholars call constructivism.
Now, Europeans are generally believed to privilege high principles over narrow self-interest. By contrast, Americans have long been seen as mostly self-interested, individualistic people, to whom moral values are secondary considerations. That caricature of the Americans played out powerfully last week when they overwhelmingly returned to power Donald Trump, president from January 20, 2017 – January 20, 2021, notwithstanding his deeply flawed character and untoward past behaviour!
Think about it. How many
countries will elect a convicted felon, someone convicted of 34 criminal
charges, as president? How many countries will re-elect a president who tried to
overturn an electoral defeat and incited an insurrection against the
legislature? Yet, that’s what the majority of US voters did on November 5 when
they helped thrust Trump back into power in a resounding victory. In Britain
and in most other European countries, a politician like Trump would not even be
nominated by his party, let alone be elected by the voters. But in America, the
saying that there is no morality in politics is more than a slogan; it’s a
truism. Americans shrugged off Trump’s past and returned him to power.
The Financial Times said in an editorial: “In voting Donald Trump back into the White House, the electorate appears to have concluded that his record as a convicted felon, his unpredictability and his reputation for disdaining the norms of democracy matter less to them than his crisp ‘America First’ prescriptions.” Another writer said: “Americans elected Trump with eyes wide open: They know him and his past, but those didn’t matter.”
And one dejected US voter told the FT. “Trump hasn’t put forth
anything that he’s not. He hasn’t tried to fool us: he’s a racist, a
misogynist, a liar, a cheat. He’s an all-round bad man and he’s not tried to
hide any of that – and yet the population still picked him. That blows me
away.” The question is why? Why did most Americans plump for Trump, knowing
what they knew about him?
There are three main reasons, but the most critical is the economy. Indeed, as someone put it, “it was the economy first, second and third.” Most Americans believed life was better for them during Trump’s first term, whereas high inflation made life unbearable under President Joe Biden. And because Kamala Harris, Trump’s rival in the presidential election, is Biden’s vice-president, she was punished for the economic pains their government inflicted on ordinary Americans.
Instead, most
of the voters wanted Trump to return to power and make the economy work for
them again! It is a classic self-interested calculation. When moral issues like
Trump’s criminal conviction, several criminal indictments and two impeachments
were put alongside economic issues, such as the high cost of living, millions
of Americans decided their economic well-being was more important than Trump’s
moral failures.
Of course, being the world’s preeminent populist politician, Trump ruthlessly exploited the people’s resentments as he did against Hillary Clinton in 2016, when he seized on declining standards of living and the anger of the economically marginalised. Biden defeated Trump in 2020 mainly because of Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and also because most Americans believed Biden, vice-president under President Barack Obama, was instinctively pro-workers and pro-the middle class and would fight for them.
However, four years later, more than 75 per cent of
Americans believed America was on the wrong track under the Biden/Harris
administration. Biden prides himself on his $1.9 trillion stimulus package, but
spraying money around simply pushed up prices. What’s more, ordinary Americans
felt poorer despite the stimulus and the so-called economic growth it
created.
The second reason is
uncontrolled immigration. In the nearly four years of the Biden/Harris
presidency, illegal migrants in the US rose to 9.4 million, more than thrice as
many as under Trump. As president, Trump signed several executive orders
imposing immigrant visa bans on many countries, including Nigeria, which he
described as “posing the highest degree of risk” to American security. However,
when Biden took over in January 2021, he revoked all the executive orders.
Well, Trump has vowed to reinstate the executive orders and, indeed, to carry out “the largest deportation operation in American history”, targeting up to 20 million undocumented immigrants!
Interestingly, most Americans voted for Trump because
of his promised mass deportation. They were untouched by the moral issues
raised by such deportation, which would see parents taken away from their
citizen-children. Rather, most Americans loathed the Biden administration for
spending money on illegal immigrants, thus limiting the resources available to
them as citizens. It was a self-interested consideration.
Finally, Trump won because the Democrats prioritised “woke liberalism” or the culture war over the concerns of working-class Americans.
They were more interested in protecting abortion
rights, gay rights and transgender rights than caring about the economic
well-being of ordinary Americans. The Democrats believed that identity politics
encompassing women, Latinos, Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, Muslims, etc., was a
vote winner. But Trump mercilessly exploited the folly, showing that most
Americans were socially conservative and cared more about bread-and-butter
issues. He won massively among the various demographics. For those groups, class
or economic well-being mattered more than race, ethnicity or religion!
Surely, all of this must invoke
a comparison with Nigeria. What shapes voting behaviour in Nigeria? Morality?
Absolutely not. Economic performance? Certainly not. Well, it’s mainly ethnicity
and religion. In 2023, the 36.6 per cent of the electorate who made Bola Tinubu
president knew the well-documented controversies about his past – his
drug-related property forfeiture in America, his unexplained wealth and the
miasma of dubiety surrounding his age, education, true origin, etc.
Yet, they voted for him mainly because of his
ethnicity or his Muslim-Muslim ticket. And if economic performance is a major
factor in winning or losing an election, as it is in developed countries,
Tinubu would not have become president after his party destroyed Nigeria’s
economy under President Buhari. Yet, even now, despite the high inflation and
cost of living decimating ordinary Nigerian lives under his administration,
Tinubu might still win in 2027, thanks to factors totally unrelated to his
performance.
But around the world, the lesson of Trump’s historic
comeback can’t be ignored: governance matters! Economic prosperity matters! If
an angel can’t govern well and improve people’s lives, the electorate will turn
to a devil who they believe can. Thus, owing to Biden’s governance failures,
America will now have a convicted criminal as president. Shocking!
*Dr. Fasan is a commentator on public issues
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