talk till morning
For the Love of Ideas
trump: how did he do it?
Politics has changed. Centrism, third way politics;call it what you will, it has had its day
Vice-President Mike Pence joins President Donald Trump for the signing of an executive order
In many regards, this is something to be celebrated. Over the years at party conferences we've seen more and more lobbyists and special interest groups and fewer ordinary, grassroots party members. Party membership has been in chronic decline, as the battles of mainstream politics became more distant from the concerns of ordinary people. But now the tectonic plates have shifted.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the United States. Across America ordinary people, some who hadn't voted for years, queued round the block to see Donald Trump speak. Why? Because his messages on jobs, amongst other things, connected with their lives in a way that arcane left-right political discussion had ceased to do. Most importantly, for those who heard the same rhetoric time after time, but saw nothing improve, he offered hope.
I share many of the widespread concerns about Trump. But it is not hard to see how his arguments are beguiling to communities who feel that economic change has left them behind. Pro-business policies combined with cheap energy and import tariffs will once again make it beneficial for businesses to locate in the US. His aggressive corporation tax cuts are an easy win (America has one of the highest corporation tax rates in the world), and will go a long way to incentivise business with only a small dent in tax intake. So too will Trump's cheap energy policy. Exploiting cheap coal and gas will allow for low energy prices without hefty government subsidy, making the US more attractive for energy-intensive industry.
The obvious cost will be climate change. Green energy schemes will succeed only to the extent that they can compete in a free market, inevitably delaying the uptake. But for those whose communities have been blighted by decades of decline, joblessness and all the social ills that result, climate change is a distant concern.
A bonfire of regulation combined with import tariffs will be the carrot and the stick to bring businesses back to the US. Trump's protectionism with regards to Mexico and other countries will have repercussions, but its appeal is not hard to understand. Many Americans have clearly lost out from competing in a globalised economy with workers in emerging markets, who are happy to take a fraction of the wage.
U.S Federal Reserve. Source: AgnosticPreachersKid
Unfettered free trade is disruptive; this can be good, but it can also lead to a concentration of jobs and wealth in certain parts of the world, and ravage other parts. Those jobs lost under Thatcher and Reagan amongst others, solid manufacturing jobs that always were the rigid bedrock of many communities, were never truly replaced.
Politicians, both democrat and republican, have been more than unwilling to acknowledge the damage that can be caused by huge unrestricted global flows of people and capital, which bulldoze over
the idiosyncrasies of place and community. Donald Trump won because he understands this. In his words: "You hear a lot of talk about our becoming a globalised world, but the relationships people value in this country are local: Family, city, state, country. They're local." He hits the nail on the head. This is why there is such a political chasm between the worldview of the university educated, mobile middle classes and those who have stayed in the same job, in the same town, for all of their life.
Neither view is wrong, they just represent different priorities. Neither the mainstream left, with its credo of multiculturalism, or the right, with its belief in global fee trade, have spoken to this group of people and so they became disengaged. Politics is now reshaping in line with these competing worldviews. The new political spectrum is not of left vs right but of engage vs protect. Global vs local.
If the Democrats are to win in 2020, they must realise this, and reach out to the left-behind who they once represented.