Donald Trump

The Republican Party’s Cynical, Anti-Obama Hysteria Created The Monster That Is Donald Trump

Samuel Hooper6 Comments

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If you trawl for votes by quietly suggesting to people that their country has been taken over by a socialist, foreign-born, America-hating Muslim, don’t be surprised when they gravitate towards a politician who plays more effectively to those fears

The Republican Party has a lot to answer for when it comes to the rise of Donald Trump.

As a British conservative who has lived in America, knows the country (and not just the coasts) well and is married to a Texan, I have a sense of perspective lacking in many American conservatives. I come from a country with a far more left-wing political climate, in which edifices of the post-war consensus – the welfare state, the NHS – are idolised and often exempted from nearly all meaningful criticism.

I grew up in a culture which is a lot more suspicious of conspicuous success and achievement, more collectivist (though less so than continental Europe) and generally more expectant that government will play a hectoring, overbearing role in our lives. And therefore, when I see Republicans rending their garments wailing and rending their garments about the intolerable left-wingery of Barack Obama, I know exactly how whiny and entitled they are being.

The Republican Party reacted to the election of Barack Obama as though his presidency was going to usher in the end of the Republic. They acted as though a suite of rather workaday centre-left policies were part of a sinister conspiracy to turn America into a socialist country. Needless to say, they barely uttered a peep when their own side was busy ratcheting up the size of the state under the “compassionate conservative” Big Government presidency of George W. Bush, in which massive Medicare expansions – heck, even entire wars – were placed on the national credit card, and fiscal conservatism was put through the shredder. No, it was Obama who represented an un-American step too far, according to this false narrative.

And of course it was all nonsense. As Barack Obama’s second term reaches its end, the size and scope of the federal government is still stubbornly large, but America has by no means transitioned into a Soviet-style planned economy. Even the hated (in right-wing circles) ObamaCare has only tinkered around the margins, funnelling a few million uninsured into some form of health coverage, inconveniently disrupting the existing coverage of a number of other people but otherwise doing nothing to change the private insurance, private provision model of American healthcare. The Second Amendment has not been substantially undermined, let alone repealed. Defence spending may be misaligned but still eclipses the rest of the world, and the US military has not been decimated. In terms of domestic policy, in other words, the world has not ended.

Has America become a libertarian paradise under President Obama? Of course not. But that’s because a Democrat won the White House and focused (as much as he could, given a spineless Democratic congressional caucus and entrenched Republican opposition) on the kind of centre-left priorities you would expect from a Democrat. And crucially, neither has America become a socialist dystopia in that time.

That’s not to say that the Republicans did not often have a point, or that they were perpetually in the wrong – in many cases, their opposition to Obama’s agenda was justified. But at all times this opposition was carried out in a shrill, alarmist and hyperbolic manner – much as British left-wingers are currently mirroring the American Tea Party with their “pass the smelling salts” horror at the thoroughly unexciting, centrist government of David Cameron.

And when you go trawling for low information votes by feeding on prejudice and stoking up concerns about the personal motivations, the loyalty and even the American-ness of the president in a childishly obstructionist scorched earth strategy, you can’t really feign surprise when the sentiments you unleash give rise to a populist demagogue like Donald Trump. And people should call you out for doing so if you even try, as many Republicans are now doing as part of their cynical #NeverTrump movement.

Bill Maher – whose politics I often disagree with, but whose criticism of the Right is usually depressingly accurate – was on to something when he said on a recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher that Republicans had “made a Faustian bargain with the racist devil years ago”, and are now paying the price.

During the panel discussion on his show, Maher said:

So let’s get right to it – the Republican Party, having an existential crisis. They are very upset that half their voters wanna give nuclear weapons to a guy who gets into Twitter feuds with D-list celebrities, and we understand that. I almost feel bad for them, except I really don’t, because they brought it on themselves. They made a Faustian bargain with the racist devil many years ago, and now those chickens are coming home to roost.

Let me read what Paul Ryan said this week. He said “if a person wants to be the nominee of the Republican Party they must reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry. This party does not prey on people’s prejudices”. LOL.

To which I would say to him: what about voter ID laws? What about once defending the guy who gets shot – the black guy, unarmed – instead of the cop? Y’know, I mean who are they kidding? This is the party they are, and Trump is just the latest.

And then the killer line:

They always say that it’s a big tent. To me it’s more like a house – think of it more like a house. And they let the racists have a room in that house. They didn’t go in that room with all the memorabilia, but they made a very comfortable room in there. And now they took over the house, and the regular Republicans are afraid to go to the kitchen at night to get a snack.

Ouch.

To be clear, while this blog does not support Donald Trump’s candidacy, neither does it subscribe to the idea that Trump or the majority of his supporters are racist. Certainly criticising illegal immigration in America is not racist, despite the cynical attempts by many Democrats and those on the left to suggest otherwise. Building a wall is not the solution, but the idea of properly enforcing the perfectly reasonable existing laws about illegal (the leftists love to leave out the word “illegal”) immigration is entirely defensible. Similarly, Trump’s nationalist, protectionist policies may well also be very counterproductive were they ever implemented, but this does not make them – or him – evil.

(One thing that does put Trump beyond the pale, in the view of this blog, is his lack of commitment to the constitution or to US treaty obligations, including those relating to torture. The First Amendment is not a plaything to be wielded like a weapon and undermined to snuff out criticism of a thin-skinned president, as Trump has suggested doing, and torture and reprisal killings were and are abhorrent and un-American).

As with many of Trump’s left-wing critics, Bill Maher is wrong to make this all about race. But he is quite correct in pointing out that in their desperation to win back the White House, the GOP tolerated all manner of crazy squatters and couch-surfers sleeping under their party’s roof. And while they did not explicitly add these people to the deeds of the house, they certainly left the front door wide open and stood on the street corner beckoning the crazies inside with a wink and a smile.

It is therefore exquisitely hard for me to feel sorry for the modern Republican Party as they are devoured by the very monster they kept as a pet and fed – particularly as I hail from a country which is planted a couple of steps firmly to the left in terms of the political centre ground, and have first-hand experience of the kind of “socialism” that the GOP cynically pretended was about to be unleashed on America.

I don’t want to see Donald Trump become the Republican Party nominee – though I feel much sympathy with many of his supporters – but if it does happen, as now seems increasingly likely, I cannot say that it was undeserved.

 

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Could The Media Have Prevented The Rise Of Donald Trump?

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

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There is no longer an Edward Murrow or Walter Cronkite to stand up to Donald Trump

Could mainstream television, radio, print and internet journalism outlets have done more to prevent the rise of Donald Trump? And should they have done more?

Glenn Greenwald thinks so:

Actually, many people are alarmed [by the rise of Trump], but it is difficult to know that by observing media coverage, where little journalistic alarm over Trump is expressed. That’s because the rules of large media outlets — venerating faux objectivity over truth along with every other civic value — prohibit the sounding of any alarms. Under this framework of corporate journalism, to denounce Trump, or even to sound alarms about the dark forces he’s exploiting and unleashing, would not constitute journalism. To the contrary, such behavior is regarded as a violation of journalism. Such denunciations are scorned as opinion, activism, and bias: all the values that large media-owning corporations have posited as the antithesis of journalism in order to defang and neuter it as an adversarial force.

[..] This abdication of the journalistic duty inevitably engendered by corporate “neutrality” rules is not new. We saw it repeatedly during the Bush years, when most large media outlets suppressed journalistic criticism of things like torture and grotesque war crimes carried out by the U.S. as part of the war on terror, and even changed their language by adopting government euphemisms to obscure what was being done. Outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NPR refused to use the word “torture” to describe techniques long universally recognized as such — which were always called torture by those same media outlets when used by countries adversarial to the U.S. — because to do so would evince “bias,” lack “neutrality,” and “take sides” in the torture debate.

Contrary to what U.S. media corporations have succeeded in convincing people, these journalistic neutrality rules are not remotely traditional. They are newly invented concepts that coincided with the acquisition of the nation’s most important media outlets by large, controversy-averse corporations for which “media” was just one of many businesses.

I’m not so sure.

While Greenwald is absolutely right to chastise mainstream media outlets for clinging desperately to an “appearance of objectivity at all costs” dogma which routinely sees them humiliate themselves by speaking and writing about the utterly ridiculous as though it were merely an equal and opposing side to an argument, the idea that prestige nightly news anchors could have killed Trump’s candidacy in the crib either by initially declaring it ridiculous and mocking it, or by waging an Edward Murrow or Walter Cronkite crusade against him, seems to be wishful thinking.

It’s wrong because it underestimates the anti-establishment surge now underway in America (and in Britain too, as we saw with the rise of UKIP and the SNP). Suppose that mainstream news outlets like the New York Times, NBC, NPR and others had come out strongly to argue that Donald Trump’s ideas were outside the Overton window of “acceptable” political thought in America, and that he should henceforth be ignored by the media regardless of how many people were attending his rallies or how high he climbed in the opinion polls. What difference would it have made?

Political journalism is scorned by the public as much as Washington politics itself, and often for quite valid reasons – the incestuous, back-scratching relationship between the two is often entirely self serving and actively prevents the holding of government to proper account. Trump’s candidacy is fuelled in significant part by the opposition of those opinion columnists and TV talking heads who have come out to criticise him. If they were joined by everyone else, including news anchors and print journalists whose material does not appear in the opinion section of their television shows or newspapers, it is hard to see it doing anything other than confirming the suspicion of Trump fans that the “establishment” is out to get them, thus driving his poll ratings even higher.

This is important. Trump is riding high partly because of a small group of “let it burn” conservatives who believe that Washington is so corrupt that an authoritarian outsider beholden to no one is as good a choice as any to sweep out the garbage, but mostly because Trump supporters feel ignored and patronised by almost everybody else. And frankly, the opposition to Trump in the media has not helped, tending toward hand-wringing “ooh, isn’t he evil” editorials and one-sided accounts of violence at his campaign rallies rather than granular deconstructions of his policy proposals (such as his policies exist). Increasing the frequency and volume of the existing anti-Trump media coverage will not fix the problem, because it does little to tackle the sentiments and ideas which drive his support.

But more to the point, if we are to set arbitrary limits on our political discourse, beyond which any candidate promoting “unacceptable” ideas is rounded on by the corporate media as it is currently comprised, who gets to set the limits? Who gets to decide which ideas are okay to debate, and which are traps which will bring the entire media establishment crashing down on the person who dares to raise them?

There is almost nothing as infuriating as watching high profile journalists discuss an issue where one side obviously has the moral and intellectual high ground in terms that suggest that it is a finely balanced debate – witness the debates on torture, climate change, Brexit (UK secession from the European Union)  and more. But even worse than this would be a collusion between media outlets to freeze out certain ideas or candidates from being mentioned altogether because they are “evil” or contradict prevailing orthodoxies.

I’m sure that this is not what Greenwald has in mind. As a consistent advocate of free speech, I’m sure that he would prefer a brash and lively media landscape of much more fractured ownership, in which a multitude of independent news outlets are free to carry out the kind of unabashedly partisan campaigning journalism that Greenwald (and to some extent this blog) advocates. Greenwald would likely be fine if some outlets produced coverage very supportive of Trump, so long as other outlets were equally free to oppose him.

But we do not have such a media landscape right now, and moving in this direction would be a process taking years, not months – certainly too long of a timescale to have any impact on the rise of Donald Trump. The difficult truth is that given the hysterical, rabble-rousing behaviour of the Republican Party over the course of the Obama presidency – in which they chose hyperbolic, apocalyptic scaremongering over principled opposition to bigger government – there was nothing that could have prevented the monster they created from coming to life, breaking free of its chains and devouring them, as Trump is now doing.

It may feel good to imagine an American media landscape filled with luminaries like Edward Morrow and Walter Cronkite, journalists who would have taken one look at Donald Trump back when he launched his presidential bid, and masterfully snuffed it out in the course of one withering nightly news broadcast or newspaper column. But that is not the world we live in. Any attempt by major media outlets to scrutinise or inveigh against Trump in these anti-establishment times would only have fuelled his campaign even more than his many critics already have.

“Compelled journalistic neutrality” is not to blame for the rise of Donald Trump. Though corporate media has many faults – witness CBS chairman Les Moonves enthusing about the ratings Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is bringing to his network – they did not create the Trumpian monster, and nor can they stop it.

Far more deserving of blame are the Republican Party establishment, who shamelessly and hypocritically rode the anti-establishment, anti-Obama tiger for seven years before finally it turned on them. And also at fault is an entire remote and self-serving political establishment which in many ways thoroughly deserves the kicking it is now receiving – just not by Donald Trump, the opportunistic and undeserving current beneficiary.

Would it be a cathartic experience to witness more mainstream media types casting objectivity aside and coming out against Trump? Quite possibly. But would it have done anything to stop his rise? Let’s not kid ourselves.

 

Postscript – The following is an excerpt from Edward R. Murrow’s famous report on Senator Joseph McCarthy:

Earlier, the Senator asked, “Upon what meat does this, our Caesar, feed?” Had he looked three lines earlier in Shakespeare’s Caesar, he would have found this line, which is not altogether inappropriate: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

No one familiar with the history of this country can deny that congressional committees are useful. It is necessary to investigate before legislating, but the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one and the junior Senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly. His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind, as between the internal and the external threats of Communism. We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully. Cassius was right. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

Good night, and good luck.

 

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Could Social Justice Warriors Hand Donald Trump The Election?

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

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Social Justice Warriors for Trump!

For those who insist that all of this concern over the resurgent authoritarianism and intolerance for free speech on our university campuses is a gross right-wing overreaction to harmless student activism, I present Donald Trump’s aborted rallies in Chicago and St. Louis yesterday.

Because this kind of mob rule – and the populist pro-Trump backlash which it will now inevitably generate – is the inevitable consequence of the on-campus infantilisation of students and their disregard for freedom of speech leaching out into wider society.

For context, from the unimpeachably impartial Guardian:

A Donald Trump rally in Chicago had to be called off on Friday evening amid scenes of violence and chaos unparalleled in the recent history of American political campaigning.

The scrapping of the Republican frontrunner’s appearance due to what his campaign cited as “safety concerns” led to uproar and fights inside the University of Illinois Chicago Pavilion and in the streets outside.

Scuffles broke out between Trump supporters, protesters and police, and a number of arrests were made, including of at least one reporter. As the mayhem took hold, Trump was reduced to complaining about the situation on the air, telling MSNBC: “It’s sad when you can’t have a rally. Whatever happened to freedom of speech?”

Having successfully forced the closure of the rally, the protesters were quick to gloat about how they had successfully halted the campaign rally of a man who (no matter how ignorant and odious some of his policies may be) is still a major presidential candidate whose ideas and pronouncements need to be heard and debated.

Not caring in the slightest that their actions served to suppress (and therefore fuel) bad ideas, the protesters celebrated their success:

Then it was announced that Trump wasn’t coming – and the arena erupted into chaos.

College students shouted “We shut it down” while loyal supporters of the Republican frontrunner shouted “We want Trump”.

Fights and scuffles broke out as protesters swapped blows with Trump supporters and activists eager to celebrate their apparent victory shouted “Bernie, Bernie” and “Si se puede” (“Yes we can”), while waving signs supporting the Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders.

To be clear, when all of the overwrought wailing about Donald Trump bringing Nazism back to America is set aside: what we witnessed yesterday was the first time in recent history when the campaign rally of a major presidential candidate had to be called off because of the threat of violence from protesters – people who believed that their fundamental disagreement with the candidate on policy and rhetoric gave them the right to prevent those ideas being expressed in public.

Rod Dreher’s analysis of the whole sorry situation is spot-on:

These left-wing demonstrators tried to shut down an American presidential candidate’s speech during the campaign — and they succeeded, through an implicit threat of violence. People who support Trump drove hours to hear him talk, and they were denied their constitutional rights by left-wing hotheads who believe that they are so righteous that they don’t have to observe basic civility. You come to a Trump rally and you start flipping people off? You should not be surprised if you get a sock in the face.

What happened tonight in Chicago is why we need Trump, as obnoxious as he is, to keep going. I am not a Trump supporter, and I reject much of his rhetoric. But he has a right to give a speech, even an obnoxious speech, without it being interrupted by demonstrators. All of us do. Trump is revealing how impossible it is to have a normal democracy with the activist left, who think their crying need for “safe spaces” gives them the right to silence their opponents.

No. This political correctness needs to be opposed, and it needs to be opposed with force. I don’t know why the police couldn’t handle this situation, but they had better be on it in the future, because many Americans will not stand for this. What those protesters have done tonight is create a lot more Trump voters out of people who are sick and tired of privileged leftists using thug tactics to silence their opponents.

Like Dreher, I do not agree with Donald Trump on most issues and have no wish to see him and his half-baked, reactionary political ideas catapulted to the White House. But also like Dreher, when I see the virtue-signalling More Moral Than Thou anti-Trump protesters gloating about how they shut down an exercise in democracy, it gets my hackles up and I inch ever closer to empathising with Trump supporters.

Dreher rightly goes on to insist that he would feel just the same were it right-wing protesters trying to shut down a Clinton or Sanders rally:

Protest all you want, but do it outside the venue, or silently inside. Do not silence the speaker, because if you do that, you legitimize your opponents trying to silence the speakers from your side. Thuggish, illiberal tactics like this from the left call forth the same kind of thing from the right. When right-wing white nationalist types show up and make trouble at Democratic rallies, or BLM rallies, and get them cancelled, on what grounds will you on the left have to complain?

For me, it’s all about the mob. I despise the mob. Any mob, which I define as a crowd that acts in force to silence people by intimidation or actual violence. We have seen over the past few months how left-wing mobs on college campuses have gotten away with outrageous things, because men and women in authority on those campuses lacked the guts to stand up for the liberal civic order.

[..] This has gone too far. When an American presidential candidate has to cancel his rally in a major city because protesters have made it too dangerous, we have a serious problem in this country. It’s infuriating. This is not America. Those disruptive protesters need to be made to understand that this is not how America works.

Is all of this enough to push Donald Trump over the finishing line in a presidential contest against Hillary Clinton or (less likely) Bernie Sanders? It remains unlikely – although in a political climate where Sanders is even competitive and Jeremy Corbyn leads the Labour Party in Britain, nobody can make cast-iron political predictions.

But at the same time, Dreher is right – those scenes from Chicago and St. Louis last night, beamed into millions American homes on the nightly news, will have created thousands more Trump supporters. Many existing Trump fans will be hardened in their resolve to vote for him, if only to give the preening liberal “fascists” a good kicking, while other wavering conservatives will be moved to take the plunge and come out as Trump supporters.

And this is why what is happening today in our schools and universities really does matter, and is not some fringe right-wing obsession.

Because these violent protests at Donald Trump rallies are what happens when a generation of young people – and looking at the protesters, the ones causing the most violence and disruption on the anti-Trump side are overwhelmingly young – are raised to believe that they have the right never to have to hear a contrary idea or an offensive opinion. This is what happens when young and impressionable minds are taught that if they do not like something, or it it hurts their feelings, that they are a “victim” and have the right to suppress the speech or behaviour to which they object by any means necessary.

Inside the sterilised bubble of campus life, these protesters would make loud and angry appeals to a higher authority (the university administration) to come crashing down on the person or people saying things that upset them. But in real life there is no Student Welfare Office or malleable university hierarchy to bend into submission. There are only other adults, to be intimidated with the threat of force.

Again: this blog has no time at all for Donald Trump. But you don’t need to support the man’s presidential bid to recognise that if the pre-emptive shutting down of his campaign rallies by political opponents continues, American democracy will suffer. Either it will feed into a persecution complex narrative which fires up Trump’s supporters and carries him to victory, or (far more likely) it will hobble his candidacy at the expense of creating massive resentment from his supporters, and merely burying his ideas rather than properly debating and discrediting them.

The inability of the Social Justice Warrior to think in public – to use their words rather than their fists, to debate using their minds rather than vandalise with their hands – means that the threat of violence is one of their only remaining weapons.

And now, together with the American Right – whose inability to neutralise Trump with a compelling mainstream conservative message is equally at fault – the virtue-signalling Left must shoulder their portion of the blame for actively fuelling the Donald Trump juggernaut.

 

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Douglas Carswell Warns Against The Allure Of Protectionism

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Douglas Carswell makes the short and eloquent case against protectionism:

The prosperity we take for granted today couldn’t have happened without free markets and free trade. That doesn’t stop people – even presidential candidates – saying we’d be better off starting trade wars, and only buying goods made at home. But the fact remains: protectionism is the route to poverty.

Globalisation gets a bad press. When manufacturing moves from Britain or the US to China and India, it looks like we’re losing out. But the result is that we get our clothes, shoes, computers, phones, and televisions much more cheaply. And lower prices don’t just make us better off. They also increase demand, and create jobs.

As Adam Smith and David Ricardo realised 200 years ago, prosperity comes from specialisation. If each of us tried to be self-sufficient, we would all be living in prehistoric penury. Instead, we specialise in what we’re best at, and exchange the product of our work for what we need.

The same applies to countries. Today, Britain’s comparative advantage is in services. Other countries are best at heavy industry or agriculture. By specialising in services, we get more and better manufactured goods and agricultural produce than we would if we diverted our resources into making them ourselves.

Protectionism might seem like the solution for people who have lost out to globalisation. But its effect would be regressive – like the poll tax. It would force prices up, and employment down. That would hit the poorest hardest.

Carswell goes on to argue that protectionism does not bring prosperity, but rather leads to inefficient, monolithic corporations like British Leyland, churning out low quality product that nobody really wants – and even then, only at the cost of massive subsidies from the taxpayer.

The case against protectionism cannot be restated enough at a time when globalisation and free trade is under sustained attack on both sides of the Atlantic – by the otherwise polar opposite Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in America, and by the worst elements on both sides of the EU referendum debate in Britain, who believe that we should retreat either into mercantilist isolationism or protectionist euro-parochialism.

There is an important debate here to be had among advocates for smaller government. Clearly the state is presently far too involved in our lives in all manner of ways, but surely one of the things that a smart, lean and effective small government absolutely should do is watch out for its citizens when they are impacted by massive changes to the way that the world trades and communicates.

Labour’s solution has been to park people on welfare and then forget about them, which is remarkably immoral for a group of people who love to endlessly brag about how virtuous and compassionate they are. The intelligent Right should come up with something better. And that means doing something more than simply aping Labour policy by raising the minimum (or “national living”) wage to £9 an hour so that the most tedious of low-paying McJobs keep people just out of working poverty.

The new permanent majority will not be secured by the Cameron / Osborne strategy of enacting Tony Blair’s fourth term of New Labour governance. It will come about by radically rolling back the state in all manner of areas where it should be doing less, while also giving citizens the tools and opportunity to prosper in the new economy.

Less protectionism, less pretending that the old jobs will come roaring back if only we leave the EU, embrace the EU or otherwise throw up barriers to global trade. Less shooting for the middle all round, and more empowerment of British citizens to pursue high value-add, high-wage, twenty-first century careers.

Now put that on a bumper sticker.

 

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David Cameron And Donald Trump – Promising Security Over Conservatism

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

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Donald Cameron and David Trump. Or is it the other way around?

In many ways, you couldn’t imagine two politicians more different than Donald Trump and David Cameron.

The British prime minister (despite his best efforts) exudes an air of privileged, private school entitlement at all times, and has a reputation for making withering (if cruel) put-downs of his opponents in the House of Commons. The increasingly presumptive Republican Party presidential nominee, on the other hand, takes pride in being brash and boastful, and his claim to “have the best words” is as laughable as it is factually inaccurate.

Furthermore, David Cameron was quick to weigh in against Donald Trump when Trump made sweeping and inaccurate generalisations about Britain and Muslims, stopping short of the shrieking and hysterical calls for Trump to be banned from entering the UK, but still condemning him in strong words.

And yet, the two politicians – one seasoned in Westminster politics, the other making a virtue of his inexperience in the ways of Washington – are more alike than it first seems.

In seeking to understand the persistent appeal of Donald Trump to a large and broad swathe of the Republican Party base, Einer Elhauge argues that Donald Trump wins because he promises to be The Great Protector, keeping Americans physically safe and financially secure in an uncertain world.

Elhauge writes in the Atlantic:

The message of his Republican opponents has effectively been: We are more faithful to conservative principles. Trump’s message has been entirely different. He essentially says: I will protect you. I’m conservative, but if protecting you requires jettisoning conservative ideology, I will do so. Protecting you is the prime directive. This message has powerful resonance, especially for voters who feel the Republican Party has failed to protect their interests.

You see this pattern in all of Trump’s deviations from conservative orthodoxy. Take the debate over Planned Parenthood. Like all conservatives, Trump opposes abortions. But he stresses he does not want to stop funding their wonderful work protecting women from cervical and breast cancer. The other Republican candidates simply express a desire to destroy Planned Parenthood outright. Trump’s message to voters: The other candidates will adhere rigidly to ideology, even if it needlessly fails to protect millions of women from cancer. I won’t.

[..] Trump’s signature policy is to build a wall to protect his voters’ jobs. What could evoke protection more than building a huge wall? His opponents quibbled about its feasibility but ultimately adopted the same position. Trump’s message to voters: I care about protecting you enough to propose huge historic projects. The other candidates begrudgingly agreed, but their heart is not in it, so they are less likely to follow through.

Free trade is great, Trump says, but it has to be fair. His opponents just adhere to pure free trade, which does increase the economic pie. But economic research shows that free trade harms some subsets of voters, particularly the working-class voters flocking to Trump. The message to his voters: I will favor free trade only to the extent that I can protect you from harm, perhaps by compensating you using the gains of trade. My opponents will favor free trade even if it harms you.

And as it goes for policy, so it goes for style. Trump consistently eschews the hard-headed statements of fidelity to conservative principle or the Constitution which voters hear from Senator Ted Cruz, focusing instead on cultivating the same “your safety first” narrative:

Trump talks endlessly about his polls, because the polls stress that he is strong enough to protect his voters. He speaks extemporaneously and often crassly in a stream-of-consciousness way, which has many pitfalls but emphasizes that his views are unprepared, authentic statements of his views and that he will thus carry out his promises to protect his audience. He responds aggressively to every attack, no matter how minor, conveying the sense that he will also aggressively protect his voters.

It is hard to deny the success of this approach. Many voters, feeling let down by the stewardship of both President Obama and the reactionary Tea Party dominated Congress which followed in 2010, have lost faith in politicians selling explicitly ideological remedies for America’s ills.

Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum got nowhere this election cycle, suggesting that the public’s flirtation with Constitutional libertarianism and social conservatism respectively are not the vote-winners they once were. And the same goes on the Left, with Hillary Clinton now pulling clear of Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, despite the huge achievements of Sanders’ campaign.

The situation in Britain is strikingly similar. David Cameron’s general election victory – at Labour’s expense and despite the rise of UKIP, the SNP and Green Party on the radical Right and Left – suggests that while a minority of voters (this blog included) crave stronger ideological differences and a move away from consensus politics, a larger number of people looked at the two main parties and went for the option which they believed would deliver them the most security.

Having secured his coveted Conservative majority government in the general election, David Cameron declared in his victorious 2015 party conference speech:

I tell you: our party’s success in growing our economy and winning the economic arguments has never been more vital.

Nothing less than the security of every single family in our country depends on it.

Before concluding:

And now with couples married because of us, working people backed because of us, the NHS safe because of us and children in the poorest parts of the world saved because of us, everyone in this hall can be incredibly proud of our journey – the journey of the modern, compassionate, One Nation Conservative Party.

This was not the speech of a flinty-eyed ideologue yearning to roll back the frontiers of the state. It was the speech of a leader who calls himself a conservative, but is perfectly willing to use the machinery of government to deliver the social and economic outcomes that he wants – in Cameron’s case, building an election-winning coalition by promising physical, social and economic security over and above freedom and individual liberty.

Ed Miliband, to the extent that his weak leadership stood for anything, ran on a platform of fairness and equality, emphasising entitlement over strength and security. And it got him absolutely nowhere.

David Cameron and the Conservatives, by contrast, ran on a platform of stability and security as the only objective. It wasn’t thrilling, inspiring or glamorous, but given the weakness of his opponents, it was enough to deliver a parliamentary majority that almost nobody predicted.

You can argue that David Cameron represents everything that is ideologically vacuous and wrong with modern British conservatism – as this blog does, loudly and often. But what you cannot do is deny the fact that Cameron has hit on a winning electoral strategy.

That’s why David Cameron ran for re-election with a manifesto pledging a creepy, statist “plan for every stage of your life”.

That’s why the Conservative Party talks about creating a strong economy not as an end in itself, but only in the context of generating more taxes to pay for ever more public services.

That’s why there is not an ancient right or civil liberty that David Cameron and Theresa May will not gladly crush in their effort to be seen as strong in the fight against terrorism.

Sure, they may look and sound different – almost complete opposites, in style and temperament. But both Donald Trump and David Cameron are both essentially playing the same trick – or perpetrating the same fraud – on their respective electorates, depending on your outlook.

Donald Trump was once a Democratic Party supporter and donor, talked up his great friendship with the Clintons and held positions which are diametrically opposed to his current conservative stances. David Cameron, meanwhile, calls himself a Conservative but is busily implementing Tony Blair’s fourth term New Labour agenda.

Neither man is what he publicly claims to be. And certainly neither Donald Trump nor David Cameron can fairly be described as small-c conservatives.

 

Donald Trump - Make America Great Again - Hat

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