Post-election reflections

Well, it's all over, and we can breath a collective sigh of relief.

The outcome of the Presidential election has obviously been a major shock and to some people has been a source of dismay and indeed profound despair. It feels all too much like what prevailed on the morning after the EU Referendum was declared. A nasty chasm opens up, in which we find that we are capable of thinking about each other quite differently from what we ever imagined. When I was a school kid, we were taught that the great virtue of the United Kingdom was its homogeneity! From one end of the islands to the other, we were all pretty much the same! Yes, honestly! We've come a long way since then, but even so we did not quite understand how utterly different we were from each other until the ground began to quiver beneath us. Difference, and how we come to terms with it, seems to me to be the great issue of our time.

I'm left with a myriad of impressions of the whole vast stretch of the election, which is so long and laborious for the Americans that I have always wondered how they can bear it. And even now, the handover process will take up unconscionable quantities of press and TV and social media discussion and analysis, and it won't be until a cold January day in Washington that the lid is finally sealed on the whole episode.  American friends say, "You don't understand. It works for us." Ok, I believe them, but I also think we understand only too well! Actually the people of these islands are in many cases better informed about American politics than the Americans are. I was astounded to hear one highly acclaimed US pollster remarking in an interview that the polls got it wrong because they had not really drilled down to the backyards of the rust belt and deepest south properly, to the ordinary folk going about their lives. Frankly, I have seen dozens, if not hundreds, of such interviews over the period of the campaign. Maybe they didn't, but we certainly did!

One response from such ordinary folk that stays in my mind is the frequent remark, "He (meaning Trump) knows how to get things done." Competence, it seems, is part of what Sir Harold Evans strikingly called 'the deep ache' in the American psyche - a longing for change that is real and not just cosmetic, and a conviction that nobody in their system knows how to achieve competence in political terms. This is a particularly startling perspective, coming from the nation we have always thought of as the 'can-do's' of the world. Aren't Americans famous for their competence? They get on with solving problems, with dealing with things, not vacillating in the backwoods of denial and polite indifference. If an earthquake tears down their bridges, they build them again practically overnight - don't they? The highly educated, thoughtful, rational US liberal intelligentsia, on the other hand - people whose minds we can only admire for their ability to scope, evaluate and analyse - seemed relatively unconcerned about this same question. There was an assumption that nothing was really broken in the system - yes, it might be unwieldy and gridlocked at times, but essentially the vision of the founding fathers had got it right, and success, justice and truth would be delivered down the line somewhere.

It is obvious that US society is working for some people and not others. Like our own society, it appears that if it seems a bit wacky but basically competent and sound to you, you belong to a different class from those to whom it appears to be messed up big-time. I was rather struck by Mr Trump's acceptance speech at the end of a long night of results pouring in, in which he spoke about the immediate need to 'rebuild the infrastructure' of the nation - roads, bridges, hospitals, airports, and so forth. 'Infrastructure' chimed with me psychologically - raising, as it does, images of the deep psychological underpinnings of the human mind. We sometimes speak of analysis as the means by which we 'restructure the personality.' It implies that a few cosmetic behavioural changes will not do it - there is more wrong than this, which will need more than the cosmetic to put right. Things inside us have got into the wrong places or are too powerful for our good, or are too weak to sustain us and need to be rebuilt. Patients often dream about infrastructure, I notice - about buildings, houses, rooms, old homes, new homes, missing furniture, roads they are travelling on or parked on or lost on - or of being 'off the beaten track', in a dark wood or on a foggy hillside, out in the wild, travelling down a winding river. The possibilities are endless, but these images seem to be deeply ingrained in the human psyche, representing very different archetypal worlds. The Paleolithic - the Stone Age - was characterised by being always 'off track.' Infrastructure was not unknown, that would be wrong to suggest, but it was limited by our standards. Our current world is mostly infrastructure, on the other hand, even if you happen to live out in the wilds of Montana or the far north of Scotland. You will still take a road to get there, and more probably an aeroplane, and you will not be cut off in any important sense from the rest of the world around you - linked by a thousand overhead wires and invisible underground pipelines, or by cyberspace itself, that strange no-land which so many of us now seem to inhabit a lot of the time. These three different worlds - 'off track', 'on track' and 'nowhere land' seem to represent levels of human psychological development, which it is apparent do not go away. New experience does not override old experience, so far as we can tell - it is simply added to the sum total of humanity's extraordinary experience of marching through the planet and carving a route through it as it goes, until 'the world' as we know it is unrecognisable as the world we started out from, in some deep valley in Africa. And each of us can still access those worlds through our own internal experience, through dreams and art and culture and the many varieties of imagining that we espouse.

So the urge to rebuild the infrastructure, which is talked about well beyond America, resonates with me symbolically - it brings with it the flavour of 'putting ourselves right' - reframing ourselves in a cleaner, clearer, less cluttered place, so that we can think to some greater purpose where we have got to as humanity, and where we would like to go from here. I found this hopeful to a degree. When you are coming out of depression, some of the first things you want to do is to tidy the front room, repaint the kitchen ceiling, put the broken catches back on the cupboards. It's often a declaration, that you now see yourself as having a future living here! Not just existing, and putting up with whatever you find around you, but actually 'doing it up' a bit. It also involves some investment in ourselves, however little we may have to begin the process. It doesn't matter that the new rug came from a garage sale, or the colourful vase from a charity shop. What matters is that you have invested a small portion of your energy and resource in it. It matters to you.

And there is a community and a commonality about this process, I think, which might be better at helping us to deal with difference than we think. I doubt, myself, whether difference can be argued away, protested over, or otherwise somehow neatly erased. I don't believe in the wall. 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall,' said Robert Frost, one of America's greatest poets. Perhaps so. The question is not whether the wall can be built - walls have been built around the entire planet, remarkable feats of engineering, from the Great Wall of China to the Iron Curtain, and we can build them for sure. The question is: do walls do what they are expected to do?

'Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out
And to whom I was like to give offence.'

The wall sneakily manages to undermine and get undermined, Frost points out. There is an interminable process of rebuilding this particular infrastructure that goes on forever. It is never final, never completed, always needing attention. And do he and his neighbour really need a wall? His neighbour replies,

'Good fences make good neighbours.'

But Frost thinks this mantra is one that his neighbour learned from his father, and might do well to question.