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There is not much that Donald Trump gets right. When he is not suggesting disgracefully that pro-gun campaigners might shoot Hillary Clinton if she becomes President, as he did this week, he is wittering on endlessly in the most surreal manner about his supposed greatness and toughness.
The Republican nominee’s bullying narcissism and trainee demagogue status also means that he loves strongmen leaders and does not care even if he is compared to a Communist such as Hugo Chavez, the former leader of Venezuela. Trump thinks it’s a compliment because Chavez was popular, before his policies predictably ruined his country.
In an interview this week with the Miami Herald, Trump was asked what he thought of academics who view him as the American equivalent of the populist Chavez. “He had some feelings, some very strong feelings, and he did represent a lot of people, and he represented a lot of people that had been left behind,” Trump said.
Chavez had some very strong feelings. That’s one way of putting it. Venezuela post-Chavez suffers basic food and medicine shortages, as Trump acknowledges elsewhere. It is in a tragic condition, ruined by policies of the kind that Jeremy Corbyn – leader of the UK Labour party, and on the verge of being re-elected – wants to introduce in Britain.
But it was a subsequent insight by Trump in the same interview that was valid. It helps explains his rise in the last year, even if he is running such a crackpot campaign as the Republican nominee that he is gifting the Presidency to Hillary Clinton. Speaking of the contemporary US he said:
“We have people that, honestly, they’ve been left behind. I call them the forgotten man and woman… because we have people that are making less money than they did 18 years ago in real wages, substantially less. They’re working two jobs. They’re older and they’re working harder… and it’s very, very unfair… and I see it. And I represent a lot of people.”
He is right there and those who are anti-Trump – me included, on the basis that I would rather like the world not to end – are extremely lucky that Trump is such an incompetent crazy populist. A calculating and competent crazy populist capable of avoiding unnecessary gaffes would win the US election by a landslide right now on the back of economic and social dislocation.
Trump’s diagnosis on employment is open to exaggeration, of course, and different economists draw different conclusions about what has happened to those on low to moderate incomes, in term of wage stagnation, and to those who fear being sucked down by ill fortune or technological change. Heavy industry has been hammered, of course, by the rise of China, and job security weakened, but open economies have in recent decades been good at creating new employment. Life expectancy has increased and there is much that has been banked and taken for granted, including cheaper clothing, travel, communications and technology for example.
But however you cut it, those people Trump is talking about in the US are finding it tougher and more bewildering than their parents did, and are concerned that they cannot see a path to improvement for them and their families. Smarty-pants metropolitans in the UK and those in the ultra-mobile elites on the two coasts in the US can as much as they like to tell those people who are struggling or anxious that, hey, it could be worse and they should be grateful, but unsurprisingly this is is not an optimum message in Ohio, in the US, or in Newcastle in the North East of the UK.
Indeed, forgotten America has its equivalent in parts of forgotten Britain that voted to leave the European Union. Even if the parallels between Brexit and Trumpism are wildly over done by pro-Remain extremists, Brexiteer ultras cannot deny that there are echoes. Many Leavers wanted to give a sharp kick in the shins to the elites who had produced a financial crisis and mass uncontrolled immigration without ever seeking permission, all the while branding people with concerns stupid. Note the continuing implication in the complaints of those who seek a second EU referendum to get the “correct” result that those who delivered Brexit are idiots susceptible to lies.
What is happening here – in the US and the UK – is much more than just a spasm of post-financial crisis angst. It constitutes the unravelling of the post-1980s, post-Cold War Western orthodoxy in relation to free trade, markets, globalisation and the dominant forms of international cooperation.
After the centre-right’s financial revolution of the 1980s – which has its origins in the post-war spread of technology, financial innovation, the abandonment of the Bretton Woods system and the dramatic expansion of access to credit – it was the the mainstream Left that capitalised, in the persons of Bill Clinton in America, Tony Blair in the UK and Gerhard Schröder in Germany.
The deal in the US and the UK was that markets would be celebrated, and market makers wooed, in return for the lovely loot – tax revenue – that could be spent by government. Meanwhile, the super-structure governing world trade and the interlocking inter-governmental arrangements that emerged in the West during the Cold War, grew until policy-makers, big business and organisations with acronyms (EU, WEF, WTO, IMF) became from the 1990s the dominant global elite. The template was the post-Second World War construction of multilateral organisations – the ineffective United Nations, GATT on reducing trade tariffs and the highly successful defence alliance Nato.
Once the wealthy West had won the Cold War, militarily and ideologically in the triumph of markets, the winners extended their dominance. In 1994, GATT, the old organisation dedicated to reducing tariffs and regulating trade, was transformed into the World Trade Organisation. The IMF policed reforms, and in the euro the European branch of the global elite created the ultimate elite experiment.
The offer to developing economies was that in joining the global economic system they would enjoy dramatic gains in trade and economic growth if they reformed. Globalisation and the spread of trade duly contributed to a dramatic reduction in poverty that should be celebrated. In the West, the combination of cheap consumer goods and booming credit made it feel for a while as though a domestic miracle was taking place.
But in the US and the UK, it had created a dangerous imbalance, even before the credit bubble burst. Millions of people felt they had been discarded in the creative destruction, or exposed to insecurity, and many more feel they were never consulted or warned about the potential side effects of this new order. In the European Union there was an added source of stress, in that free movement of people (designed in an age when few travelled) had been built in as an organising principle, creating potential in the UK for social tension.
Even the (understandable) response by policymakers since the financial crisis has ended up helping to create the conditions for crazy populism. Cheap money policies and QE, designed to stave off recession, have created asset bubbles that are hugely to the advantage of the global elites. London house prices have more than doubled since the worst financial crisis in 70 years. Those who have not benefitted are entitled to be sceptical of this racket and to view politicians from a previous era who two decades ago trumpeted an economic new world order, alongside Bill Clinton, with some contempt.
It is, then, highly appropriate that Hillary Clinton should be the fag end (cigarette end) of history candidate in 2016. It is only because Trump is so flawed, so appalling, and getting all the attention, that she is getting a free pass on being a poor candidate from another age.
In the interests of balance, having listened to a large number of what passes in Trumpland for his speeches, I tried to listen to a Hillary speech last week. It was like a poor photocopy of a photocopy of the stuff that Bill Clinton used to say when he was seeking re-election in 1996. She got excited, she said, thinking about “all the jobs we’re gonna create.”
Those forgotten and angry people are quite justified in being a little sceptical of that claim. How is she going to “create jobs”? What kind of jobs is she talking about exactly? Will they be skilled and well-paid? Can everyone get a multi-million dollar Clinton-style gig speaking at Wall Street conferences? One suspects not.
Trump’s rhetoric is crude – and he is a menace – but he is onto something potent. The questions he raises on behalf of those forgotten Americans about Chinese trade are legitimate. It gets called free trade but it takes place on nothing like a level playing field. Chinese state-owned industry gets all manner of aid, backing and breaks from government, that eclipse Western subsidies, and then dumps the resulting cheap products on the West, whose elites call this free trade, when it is a highly unequal battle and the voters Trump attracts have come to know it.
With that Clintonite compact on trade and cooperation which has sustained the West since the early 1990s broken, what might replace it?
There is good news. While the UK’s vote for Brexit is hardly on its own a solution, it is – at a pivotal moment in global affairs – a rather interesting choice made by the British to reject the EU powerblock and an entire way of thinking about pooling sovereignty. Of course, it does not mean the instant evaporation of every multilateral organisation, and nor should it, but we are overdue an international rebalancing away from the outdated mantras of 1990s globalisation.
Rather than begging from the Chinese so blatantly, the British might in addition to trading with the EU choose to develop closer links with countries with which we share robust legal systems, cultural ties and information gleaned from intelligence about the Islamist threat to the West. The democracies need new, flexible ways to stick together that do not turn into the equivalent of the sovereignty-sapping, anti-democratic European Union.
If those who are in favour of markets, who value true free trade for its liberating possibilities, do not start to think creatively about what follows the ongoing collapse of the old system, and do not address the concerns of the forgotten in our midst, the danger is that the next crazy populist in the US or Europe will learn from Trump’s mistakes and win.
