Posted on 03/17/2016 10:32:53 AM PDT by iowamark
Shall I tell you the most depressing thing? It’s not that the party of Lincoln and Reagan will be fronted by a self-absorbed, foul-mouthed, thin-skinned, bullying, mendacious, meretricious, mountainous berk. It’s not the reputational damage that our most important ally will suffer in consequence: if I were Mexico, I’d be glad to pay for a sodding wall to keep Trump out. It’s not the prospect of another sleekit Clinton using Supreme Court appointments to ensure a full generation of left-wing judicial activism.
No, sadder than any of these things is what the rise of the Donald says about democracy. With the exception of Switzerland, the United States is the most democratic country on Earth. Its founders, who had led a revolt against Lord North’s remote and self-serving regime, were determined to construct a system where decision-makers were representatives, not rulers. To this day, American democracy is characterised by a number of peculiar features designed to keep the government in check: term limits, states’ rights, balanced budget rules, ballot initiatives, open primaries, the direct election of public officials from the sheriff and the school board to the chap in charge of bin collections.
By and large, the system has worked. Power has been dispersed, devolved and democratised. For over two centuries, Americans have taken it for granted that they can turn their leaders out of office and change the direction of the state through the ballot box. This is more exceptional than we sometimes realise. For the past 10,000 years, the normal condition of humanity has been servitude: the gang in charge plunder the territory under their control, and try to ensure that their children enjoy similar rights of legalised looting. A mediaeval European monarchy was, in this regard, little different from a modern African kleptocracy.
In their great study, Why Nations Fail, James A. Robinson and Daron Acemoğlu call this model ‘the extractive state’, and note that it is humanity’s default setting. The alternative, which they call ‘the inclusive state’, is based on the rule of law and the accountability of those in charge to the rest of the population. Inclusive states have developed only recently, and largely in the language in which you are reading these words.
The founders envisaged citizen-legislators, servants of the people who would gladly renounce office and return to private life, as Cincinnatus to his plough. Donald Trump, to put it as neutrally as I can, is not such a man. In his private life, as in his business, he is preening and pugnacious, quick to take offence and unable to forgive. Everything is about him. His politics are simply an extension of his business branding: Trump, Trump, Trump.
He displays no trace of awareness that he is aspiring to an office bigger than he is. When he was asked on Twitter by Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska: “Will you commit to rolling back Exec power & undoing Obama unilateral habit? These r sincere questions & I sincerely hope u answer rather than insult,” he replied, “@BenSasse looks more like a gym rat than a U.S. Senator. How the hell did he ever get elected?”
What are Trump’s policies? Meh. A former Democrat and Clinton crony who saw that the other side offered a better opening, he has dispensed with details like policy advisers and manifestoes. Tax, abortion rights, foreign affairs: it’s all fluid. Even the one, absolute trademark policy, that wretched wall, is, he says, “all negotiable”.
Yet no one seems to care. Americans want someone who will articulate their anger, and Trump certainly does that: he has gone from lashing out verbally to urging his supporters to “beat the crap” out of anyone heckling his rallies.
Trump is not the first politician to play on anger, of course. The French populist, Pierre Poujade, once said that he spoke for “the lied-to, the ripped-off, the ignored, the furious”, and that’s pretty much Trump’s shtick.
But America isn’t France, for Heaven’s sake. It is designed precisely so that voters don’t have to be lied to, ripped off, ignored or furious. It is the ultimate inclusive state. To see that great republic descend into pessimism, irrationalism and sheer nastiness is heartbreaking.
It’s true that Trump may still somehow be stopped, though his critics are having to devise increasingly ingenious mathematical formulations to show how it could happen even in theory. It’s true, too, that, short of some grand jury indictment for Hillary, it’s hard to see how he can actually become president.
That, though, isn’t the point. The damage is already being done. The Republican Party is being tainted by association, America is being diminished in the eyes of her allies and, worst of all, the whole concept of participatory democracy, based on open primaries, is being tarnished.
Regular readers will be familiar with my pet theory that, in general, voters get it right. Every recent British election has been lost by the party that most deserved to lose. This is because the general population is generally wiser than the elites. When the experts fell, in turn, for appeasement, prices and incomes policies, non-selective education, the ERM, the euro and the bailouts, the country at large remained rightly sceptical. In Edmund Burke’s metaphor, the great oxen have a better track record than the noisy grasshoppers.
Until now. All of a sudden, people just want to use the electoral process as a way to register their disdain. As poor Marco Rubio said in announcing the suspension of his campaign, no one wants optimism at the moment.
Which is a pity because, looked at rationally, Americans have every reason to be optimistic. Their country is peaceful and prosperous, which is why so many people from around the world pay it the ultimate compliment of wanting to settle there. The protectionism that Trump espouses would, paradoxically, hurt the people who are cheering for him the most enthusiastically: low-paid workers, who would face a rise in prices and, as productivity slowed, a drop in wages. When Trump declares that he loves the poorly educated, he means that he is happy to have their votes, not that he has ever stood up for them in his life: he is the ultimate beltway networker. And yet, to repeat, no one seems to care.
Ah, America. You deserve better. And we expect better.
Well Danny ol boy. When you finish reforming your country you can get back to us on ours.
Daniel Hannan is a British faggot.
I’m sure Brits were disappointed in the Revolution as well.
Can someone explain (with a straight face), how a populist candidate who receives the most votes in the primary, and his selection to be the nominee, is somehow, a threat to “democracy”?
Don't be redundant.
Stopped reading 2/3rds through the first sentence.
The hate is strong with this author.
I like Daniel Hannan, but don’t know about his taste in US Presidential candidates.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/3676781/Why_Im_for_Barack_Obama/
America. A two party state (one party state) where it takes at least a hundred million dollars minimum to run a viable presidential campaign and pols spend half their time raising money from the rich and corporations.
Daniel, you just won’t get it through your head I want your kind and that thing you call “Republican” party that is really a cabal of elitist liars dead and gone in the sense of relevance to anything of importance to our political scene. GFY
Danny boy grew up in a socialist country, he wouldn’t know what freedom was if it hit him in the arse
The Republican Party did not need any help harming itself. It had more than completed the task all on its own.
In order to save democracy we must ignore the voters.
Trump is as close to Reagan as I’ve seen in my short life time!
Take care of your own back yard, Nancy. We have some cleanup to do here and don’t need any help from an impotent, inbred, jug eared, chinless fag with teeth that likely resemble baked beans. Go boil a loaf of bread and call it dinner.
Fun watching these twits melt.
To this day, American democracy is characterised by a number of peculiar features designed to keep the government in check: term limits, states’ rights, balanced budget rules, ballot initiatives, open primaries, the direct election of public officials from the sheriff and the school board to the chap in charge of bin collections.
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I have always enjoyed hearing Daniel Hannan’s views on things in Europe, but he seems a little out of touch when it comes to the United States. Term limits??? States’ rights???? Balanced budget rules???
It would be sad to think that Daniel was yet another shiny thing put out by the New World Order folks to distract true lovers of freedom from what is really going on.
“Regular readers will be familiar with my pet theory that, in general, voters get it right.”
Obama’s twice being elected kind of shoots his pet theory in the foot.
Should his credentials or his rhetoric impress me more??
I think Parlement would serve its public better by addressing the foul, stinking mess they have made of England, and helped make of the rest of Europe, before criticizing Trump, who at least still retains his testicles.
The American public, or at least a significant part of it, has had it with the establishment thieves who pander to one world globalist crony capitalists, and politicians who promise them one thing, and then serve the wishes of their campaign contributors after being elected.
You people still don’t get it, do you?
200 + years ago there would be barrels of bubbling tar and mountains of rails and feathers on their way to Washington. Be thankful we are living in a more genteel time.
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