Our highways and bridges are falling apart
Merle Haggard, “America First“
Who’s blessed and who has been cursed?
There’s things to be done all over the world
But let’s rebuild America first.
“Let’s get out of Iraq and get back on the track.” Donald Trump’s vice president pick, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, addressed the Republican Convention last week to one of Haggard’s lesser-known songs, from the Bush years. It was a personal pick of the former venture capitalist and author vying for the right to labour for four years in vice presidential obscurity.
The choice was at least three levels of ironic. First was that one of Trump’s longest-running lies is that he opposed the Iraq War. Second is that the day before Vance spoke, Biden administration transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg — who, in a slight change of scenario, might have been the Democratic nominee himself right now — had announced another US$5 billion in ongoing grants for major bridge rebuilds across America, as part of Biden’s 2021 infrastructure law that is investing US$40 billion in crumbling US infrastructure, including around 10,000 bridges.
Third, the Trump-dictated Republican platform only mentions infrastructure once, and that was to play tough on protecting “critical infrastructure” from “malicious cyber actors” (hint to the GOP: on malicious cyber actors, the calls are coming from inside the house). Certainly no mention of bridges and highways — but thereis an iron dome: the platform commits to “ensure our Military is the most modern, lethal and powerful Force in the World [sic — Trump has an 18th-century tendency to randomly capitalise Words].”
“We will invest in cutting-edge research and advanced technologies, including an Iron Dome Missile Defense Shield.”
Maybe they can build the missile batteries on bridges.
Of course, Trump’s GOP don’t need none of your facts, or your irony, thank you very much. You need to take the man seriously but not literally, his right-wing defenders insist; just because Trump supported the Iraq War and isn’t interested in fixing infrastructure doesn’t mean he isn’t a 1930s-style isolationist Republican who will put America first on every decision made and every dollar spent.
But not even Merle Haggard thought things were as simple as a Merle Haggard song. Let’s stick with bridges. Assuming you only have limited funding and tens of thousands of bridges to fix, how do you allocate the money? Do you work with states and therefore their priorities? Do you look at the business case for each project or allow local politicians to pick them? Do you choose projects that deliver economic benefits in terms of better freight corridors, or projects that cut the road toll? Do you spend the money in swing states you need to win the next election? Do you use local materials only, or allow only local bidders, or do you save money by sourcing everything as cheaply as possible, delivering best bang for buck? And, of course, who pays for a new bridge in Peoria, Illinois? Peorians? Illinoians? All Americans? Rich Americans? American corporations?
Ugh. Such annoying questions are the stuff of banal but crucial policymaking and implementation, because getting things done well, accountably, with public money, in a democracy, is hard. The world is complicated and people don’t agree and most people don’t really have the national interest at heart, just their own interests. And they vote. We’re not in a strong position to deride Americans, either — we’re too busy wasting tens of billions on jokes like the inland rail, while country people die on sh*tty local roads.
Needless to say, that’s not what Trump and the Republicans are offering. They offer a world in which things can get done not because Trump has some magical ability to deliver complex policy solutions but simply as an act of will. Trump is different because he wants to deliver for (white, male) Americans. The central story of the GOP platform is:
For decades, our politicians sold our jobs and livelihoods to the highest bidders overseas with unfair Trade Deals and a blind faith in the siren song of globalism. They insulated themselves from criticism and the consequences of their own bad actions, allowing our Borders to be overrun, our cities to be overtaken by crime, our System of Justice to be weaponized, and our young people to develop a sense of hopelessness and despair. They rejected our History and our Values. Quite simply, they did everything in their power to destroy our Country.
In this world view, the bridges never got repaired not because America’s ruling class was preoccupied with the War on Terror, nor because its political system is controlled by businesses and the super-wealthy who have prevented US governments from taxing them enough to fund decent infrastructure and social services, but because America’s leaders were trying to destroy the country. Difficult things weren’t done because there was an elite conspiracy, not because they required difficult decisions and clashed with vested interests. It just requires someone with the will to do these things, and they will be done. As Trump said in 2016, “We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning.”
(Perhaps this is part of the reason why The Lord of the Rings seems to pop up so frequently as an influential book among Trump-supporting tech billionaires and Vance, given it offers a simple black-and-white world, agreeably devoid of women with anything to say and run by benign white male authority figures, fighting evil dark-skinned subhumans, where everything is resolved by destroying an unwanted piece of old, centralising tech.)
That this pitch of simple thinking — one of the most repeated phrases in the platform is “common sense” — is a scam isn’t particularly noteworthy. The great American political tradition is of elites (and they don’t come more elite than Donald Trump) devising ways to convince ordinary Americans to vote against their own interests. The Democrats did it for generations after the Civil War with racism, then the Republicans stole that trick in the 1960s and have been making hay with it ever since, adding resentment towards women, LGBTIQA+ people and migrants in recent times.
It’s an appeal to a nostalgia for simpler times — a confected nostalgia, for an America that not only didn’t exist 30 or 50 years ago or within the lifetime of any living American, but never existed at all, because America was always beset by the problems of partisanship, of conflicting interests, of race, of colonisation, of immigration, of religious conflict, of elites and masses, of economic and financial disparities.
American politics and policy have always been complicated, to the point of mass political violence and civil war. They were complicated when Washington’s cabinet was divided bitterly over national debt and economic policy and relations with revolutionary France, and they only got more difficult as the frontier expanded and America became an empire and then emerged as the dominant global power — let alone basic rights for African Americans and women.
At a deeper level, across Western democracies, it’s now a regular theme. Simplicity versus complexity; blaming someone for the problem versus working out a solution; demonising someone versus working with them; blunt assertions of authority versus the messy compromise of democracy.
The right has embraced simplicity and ridden it to success across the West, and nowhere more so than in the US. It’s also the reason right-wing governments have proven, time and again, so spectacularly incompetent: when you think problems haven’t been solved because other people want to destroy the country rather than because they’re hard to solve, effective policymaking — as opposed to blaming other people or enriching yourself and your friends — becomes very difficult. Americans lived it under Trump the first time; Britons endured it under a succession of Tory prime ministers who drove the nation into the ground.
And if anything, Trump’s message this time is even simpler. Merle had it right: who’s blessed and who has been cursed, indeed.
