Trump is an embarrassment – ​​to himself and to the right

Who would have thought that after a generation of consensus on the role of government – ​​a pax populi in which there seemed to be tacit agreement on the function of the state – we would see a return to a real dispute over basic principles? And yet here we are, debating in often aggressive terms questions that were thought to be all but resolved except for details. There is now a life-and-death struggle between those who insist that this heated debate is necessary and those who believe it is risky. Much of the deeply dissatisfied electorate finds itself in the first camp, while a large number of professional politicians find themselves in the second camp, losing touch with their own supporters.

Suddenly, the terms Right and Left have come roaring back into Western politics, after seemingly disappearing in the complacency of a new post-Cold War world order. This is the great illusion that maintains the faithful members of the Center Ground: the pact drawn up after the explosive 1980s, which anyone who wanted to be taken seriously had to accept, was that capitalism had won the ideological battle, but that it had to be tempered with democratic measures. socialist interventions to make it palatable. All that remained for elected governments and plausible opposition parties to do was to adapt the mechanisms that could achieve the optimal balance between free markets and social ‘justice’. This was all there was – and ever would be – in democratic politics, which is why it became so managerial and technocratic.

That era has come to an end. Perhaps because the idea of ​​democratic government as nothing more than an exercise in marginal manipulations and risk avoidance, balancing the interests of one social group or economic lobby against another and avoiding mass discontent, was too uninspiring to attract first-class people. Democracy is the embodiment of a great idea: if you are really passionate about it, why would you want to be anything other than the nation’s chief accountant and administrative officer?

Either way, a new dawn has dawned. Political parties and their leading voices now speak in the fundamentalist terms of right and left, which were once assigned to the outer fringes of political life, often to the hinterlands that lay beyond the confines of the electoral process. Today, right-wing parties in Europe have disrupted a seemingly smugly satisfactory arrangement. Their alarming historical significance is unmistakable and completely alien to our own experience.

But it is the American phenomenon that risks causing serious confusion among British political observers, because the American discourse is widely believed to be translatable to our own. So if Donald Trump in the US represents a rising right consumed by the migration issue, then British politicians who express concern about immigration must be Trump’s soulmates. But Trump’s campaign is making nonsense of the vocabulary: his statements—or perhaps “statements” would be a better word—are not actually political at all. They are so arbitrary and downright narcissistic that they are not even really populist. At worst, it is talk that is literally meaningless.

Sometimes they are outright lies, such as his repeated claims that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) diverted hurricane relief funds from Florida residents to migrants in what he described as “the worst response to a storm or hurricane disaster in American history.” (Everything in Trump’s childish language is “the worst” or “the greatest” or “the biggest” in history.) His latest outburst was inspired by the broadcast of an interview with Kamala Harris on CBS’s current affairs program, 60 Minutes in which of her answers has been edited to make it shorter. This is a well-known procedure in televised political interviews, but Trump considered it deliberate falsification because it made them appear more concise.

His account of this on his own social media site (including all caps): “A Giant Fake News Scam by CBS & 60 Minutes. Her REAL ANSWER WAS CRAZY OR STUPID, so they basically REPLACED it with another answer… to make her look better. A FAKE NEWS SCAM that is completely illegal. TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE.” He later called this the “biggest fraud in broadcasting history” and then demanded that all national broadcasters have their licenses sold because they are “just as bad – and maybe even WORSE”.

As I said, this is not politics – at least not as it is done in democracies. It’s absurd to the point of technical insanity, but it should be taken seriously because this is the man who may yet run the country that leads the West. But it must be made clear by everyone involved in Britain’s new game of Right versus Left that this kind of thinking – if ‘thinking’ is the right word – can never be any model for our own strangely healthy electoral process. The new reform warriors on the British scene might argue that Trump and his team are saying what has been made unspeakable by conventional politicians and the mainstream media, and that this is a position that can legitimately be emulated. But British people (unlike Americans) have a particular – and well-founded – aversion to narcissism and grandstanding in politicians, which they regard as ridiculous.

As loud and mean as Trump’s British fans may get when this is said, it cannot be repeated often enough. It would be extremely dangerous for the respectable right in this country (whether Tory or Reform) to think that there could be any possible representation of this frothy selfishness that would suit a British electorate well. President Biden described Trump’s latest statements as “un-American,” which may or may not be true, but anyone who tried to sell them here would find they were decidedly un-British.

The right’s ideal Anglo-American political alliance was, of course, that of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who together presided over the end of the Soviet empire and the emerging settlement in which freedom and capitalism were seen as inseparable. Are there leaders who can recreate that moment of clarity?

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