Hate Farage? Vote Leave.

"Vote leave and you'll get Boris, Gove and Farage," we're told. Here's why that might not happen.

I received some small amount of flak for the suggestion, made in writing elsewhere, that Donald Trump might serve an important and positive function in the progression of American Democracy.

I stand by that assertion, based as it is on a truism that I consider to be uncontroversial: anti-establishment populism, which arises from disenfranchisement and alienation from the political process, is defeated by its own success.

The Tea Party, to draw again on the American example, which spoke to and emboldened a large sect disaffected with a centrist and neo-liberalised Republican Party, earned modest (but overstated) success in the congressional and senate elections of 2010. Trump is the logical next step for Tea Party voters who saw the small fruits of their labours as evidence that so-called anti-establishmentism could be an effective, successful position.

Trump is now the black hole at the centre of their galaxy of contempt whilst the Tea Party itself has become all but irrelevant, and the senators and congressmen it supported (like Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin) are having to live down, in their campaigns for re-election, that fact that they have been in office – and of the establishment – for the past six years.

What is being portrayed almost everywhere as a new phenomenon in democratic politics is, in fact, a return to a very old one. We have had more than two decades during which Left and Right politics and governance have been absent from the thrones of power. The last new phenomenon was the seemingly ultimate victory of centrism and neoliberalism – Clinton and Blair’s Third Way – in the early ‘90s, since when the old parties of the Left (Labour in the UK and the Democrats in the US) and the Right (the Conservatives and the Republicans) have remained more loyal to The Third Way than they have to voters who, in reality and to a large but by no means total extent (many people are genuine liberals, of course), are not reliable, devoted centrists but partisans of the old ideologies.

Anti-establishment paragons and pariahs are not, then, anti-establishment so much as they are anti this establishment. What they want, whether they are of the Left or the Right, is an establishment that looks, sounds and thinks like them; one that shares their world view, which is (for all it may often sound a- or anti-political) explicitly ideological. In particular, they want to feel as though it is they who make the establishment.

The Tea Party’s success, which was to embolden a movement that has led to Trump securing the Republican nomination, has come at its own expense. It was the means; the presidency, and breaking that office from a decades-long status quo, is the goal.

On this side of the Atlantic: much has been written about support for UKIP from working class regions and communities that were once of the Labour tribe. And it is certainly true to say that UKIP, like Trump, has been and will be the beneficiary of votes from the Old Left.

But I fail to see how this continues to perplex so-called analysts and talking heads. The reason for it is very simple to understand; the Old Left is not liberal. Indeed, there used to be a healthy disdain for liberals amongst groups that considered themselves true Leftists. (The late Christopher Hitchens once described liberals as “dangerous compromisers.” Some of us maintain that view.)

The Old Left, particularly the working class Left, has not benefited from liberalism as it pertains to the interrelated issues of economics and immigration, and has been betrayed by a Parliamentary Labour Party still packed with the ghostly disciples of Blair.

Moreover, Eurosceptic and Europhobic members of both sides of the hidden divide feel betrayed, with some justification, by party élites who have sought to enshrine Third Way policies beyond the reach of sovereignty; to remove the ‘British’ prefix from domestic politics in favour of the diktats of a continental commission. This, politics under the EU, is a trickle-down philosophy that removes the people from the decision-making process; members of the demos become the subjects to whom decisions are applied rather than willing supporters offering affirmative consent at the ballot box.

The response to this disenfranchisement has been, as in America, the rise of reactionaries and populists on both sides of the hidden divide, but (again, as in America) particularly on the political Right. UKIP may take votes from Labour, but its founders, funders and most of its key members have come from the Conservative Party. Its charismatic, almost totemic leader, Nigel Farage, who trades in anti-politics and on an ‘everyman’ image, was himself a member of the Conservative Party until ’92, when he resigned his membership in protest against Maastricht and, along with other members of the Bruges Group, became a founding member of UKIP.

But the referendum ‘debate’ (though it is barely worthy of the title), as is so often the case in big political ‘moments’, has imprinted, on our collective consciousness, an impression of UKIP itself that is now wholly inaccurate: that it is a united political force.

Regardless of the result of the referendum, but especially in the event of a vote to leave the European Union, this will be exposed as one of the great lies of the campaign. The existing divisions between the leading members of UKIP are, for a party of its size, remarkable. It is only for want of space in the media narrative that they have not become fatal. Once that space opens up, I suspect they very much will be.

Nigel Farage, still the face of the party, has been sidelined over much of this referendum period by the official Vote Leave campaign, which he does not support but which his party’s only MP, Douglas Carswell, does. Farage and Carswell are enemies not only in private but also, given the time and space, in public. Another high-profile Tory defector, the appropriately named Mark Reckless (who was an MP before his defection and is not an MP anymore), was publically opposed by Nigel Farage over comments the former had made about immigration. Reckless accused Farage of arbitrarily changing party policy without consultation and without consent.

Reckless is now a Member of the National Assembly for Wales, serving under UKIP’s  Assembly leader, the unscrupulous serial litigator and generally dodgy Neil Hamilton, who is yet another high-profile UKIP figure happy to publically denounce his nominal leader. The same is true of Susanne Evans. Once Farage’s dauphine, one of UKIP’s most successful spokespeople and the author of its well-liked manifesto, Evans was purged from the party after Farage’s decision to rescind his resignation. She, along with Reckless, Carswell, Patrick O’Flynn (former Farage spin doctor and UKIP’s most prominent MEP), Godfrey Bloom and UKIP founder Alan Sked, form at least one – and probably more – faction within UKIP which is opposed to the party’s leader and barely leashed to the idea of unity by a common purpose.

Now, I have written elsewhere (and will write again) on what I consider to be the right reasons to vote in favour of leaving the EU. This does not quite number amongst them, but the idea which underpins it is not so far removed as to be entirely unrelated.

Consider what I have written already: the Conservative Party has been wedded to a centralist, neoliberal philosophy since at least the days of John Major. During that time, and in service of the EU which protects that philosophy, the party’s Eurosceptic faction (and much of its base) has been very deliberately restrained, ignored as often as possible. Consider that disenfranchisement, as I have argued, creates dissent and leads to reactionary and populist resistance. Consider that UKIP, defined by its resistance to the EU and receiver of defectors resisting the Tory mainstream, is the embodied response to that disenfranchisement.

Now consider what may happen should we vote to leave the EU. The Conservative Party will be split; gone will be the days in which centrism was its guaranteed approach. The voice of the party’s right wing will have been freed; the leader of the party, in a bid to hold it together, will have to make concessions to that faction. That faction will believe it has a chance to shape the party’s future; its voice, its arguments will be important. Freed from the certainty of centrism, those pushed to UKIP, whether they be grassroots activists or party members and perhaps even elected officials with close and recent ties to the party (O’Flynn, Carswell), would at least be tempted to return. The deep division within the party remains, and its internal squabbles (coupled with the heightened influence of its more illiberal constituents) will harm its chances in local, regional and general elections.

Farage, meanwhile, is still popular amongst those UKIP voters who have remained loyal but is deeply unpopular amongst its high-profile members. Some have left, others see him attempting to reposition the party for a post-Brexit future and mount a leadership challenge on the grounds that its future should not be defined by a man from its past.

Most of its supporters, united only in their rejection of the EU’s anti-democratic, neoliberal attitude towards economics and immigration now find that their differences are far more potent than their similarities. Many begin to drift back toward their old allegiances, whether on the Right or the Left. A decline in party membership advances the cause of those looking to oust Farage, who, in his customary fashion, refuses to go quietly. Bitter and protracted disputes, played out largely in the media, give the impression of a party utterly divided. UKIP begins to slide in the polls.

Farage may emerge victorious, but one man does not a party make and any personal success is likely to be short-lived. George Galloway and the slightly more serious Robert Kilroy Silk provide unhappy evidence that popularity, like relevance, is fleeting and fickle.

Alternatively, he might lose. Embittered, largely friendless and demonstrably angry, he might mount an ill-fated challenge as an independent candidate but the result is likely to be little different to that of the scenario in which he wins. Still, he’s a media darling; we’ll see him again in one form or another.

But the point is this: there is, as I think I have shown, at least a plausible case to say that a vote to leave the EU, far from legitimising UKIP, may be its undoing. Without a party (or at least with one bitterly divided) and shorn of the support of previously disaffected Tory and Labour voters, Farage’s personal stock might rise but his political chances will not, and the aftermath will be a gruelling period of factional disputes, infighting, and declining support.

Leaving the EU pops the centrist bubble, the mainstream parties diversify, voters return to their old ideological factions having been emboldened by the new political possibilities, and UKIP – and eventually Farage – are confined to that unpleasant period of our history under Europe.

Think about it. It’s not impossible.

Friends Don't Threaten Each Other, Barack.

Friends Don’t Threaten Each Other, Barack.

Not in a healthy relationship, anyway.

Time and memory are precious commodities in politics, made so by the fact that they are in short supply. But I invite you back to 2013 and the occasion of the G20 summit in St Petersburg.

Britain had been branded “just a small island” by Vladmir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov. “No one pays any attention to them.”

David Cameron saw this as the perfect time to emulate the best, most foppish and lecherous Prime Minister Britain never had. This was his Hugh Grant moment. Britain, he said, was great. Sorry, is great. We beat fascism and slavery with Dick Francis and One Direction.

Absent from his sterling riposte (aside from any retort to the comments also reportedly made by Mr. Peskov about Russia owning Kensington and Chelsea) was a very important qualification.

The qualification is an inconsistency (I do not say paradox); one that never seems to be caught in the open but is detectable by its scent and the vague sense that something is happening just out of eye-line and ear-shot. It is a dog doggedly dogging in the dark; that unsettling thing that you seldom see as you stroll through the woods but that you are quite sure exists.  

And it is unique to the Better Together tribute act. The Brexit campaign has an alternative which is at least rhetorically cogent: Britain is great and therefore capable; it is great enough to, so-to-speak, stand alone. Moreover its greatness is served best by standing alone; it is only being held down by the burdens of a failing foreign power.

Cameron’s omission of this inconsistency is also one of Remain’s biggest flaws. It seems, at best superficially and at worst seriously, incongruous to speak of the boldness, patriotism, bravery and greatness of Britain if your argument tacitly acknowledges that we are reliant upon others for our status.

I make no secret of my own partisanship. Though I could hardly be accused of patriotism, I do not think that Britain is necessarily reliant upon Europe for its status.

But David Cameron undoubtedly is. George Osborne is, too. (Not for nothing does one cultivate a cosy relationship with Christine Lagarde.) The belated concession to those clamouring for a referendum forced them to gamble on that most important of currencies in politics: legacy.

So, whilst Mr. Peskov elicited such a quaint but firm response, Barack Obama was met not only with what we are obliged to call the red carpet treatment but also the personal and absolutely slavish devotion and indebtedness of the leader of a supposedly proud nation.

We should not kid ourselves on this: Barack Obama, speaking in the nauseatingly ‘candid’ tones of a dear ‘friend’, has left us with no room to doubt the depths of esteem in which he holds the junior partner in the special relationship; a real and valuable relationship disgraced by the monarchical attitude of the President and by a Prime Minister with an expression befitting only a sufferer from Stockholm Syndrome.

The conclusion we should draw from Obama’s speech is that Britain serves American interests by acting as its 51^st state lobbying within the borders of Europe; both a prostitute and a pimp. Out of Europe, Britain ceases to perform that useful function and is then, as Mr. Peskov stated, “just a small island.” No one will pay any attention to us, not least the United States, who will happily push us to “the back of the queue.”

A friendly reminder, apparently. Well, as the old saying goes: with friends like these, who needs enemies?

We are fortunate that the political scene in the United States suggests Mr. Obama was speaking not for any future administration and barely even for his own. Even Anne Applebaum, normally as astute as a tactical nuclear weapon, has noticed the almost perfectly bipartisan move away from exactly the type of trade deal (TPP and TTIP) that Obama has chosen to weaponize.

Whether Trump or Cruz, Clinton or Sanders, the next president is not likely to accelerate any free trade deal of the type for which he is an increasingly lonely advocate. And I know for a fact that I speak for many, on both sides of the Atlantic and of the supposed political divide, when I say that I would not be sorry to see daddy confiscate those particular toys. Let us continue to be the largest single foreign investor into the United States and still register a trade surplus without signing away the future of the NHS in a bid to appease any desire for ‘harmonization’.

But seldom is it that monarchs are concerned with reality, and Barack Obama is the most monarchical President of my living memory. He seems to have given no consideration whatever to the necessary trade-offs required by our continued membership of the European Union; democracy, accountability and sovereignty were not factored into his speech.

Then again, this is a President more at home in the company of our own queen than he would ever be in the House of Commons. His rhetoric is smooth and polished, his presentation superb, but this is a man whose tenure in high office only flourished after the Democrats lost both the House and the Senate. This is a man whose astonishing hubris (he claimed of his own election that it marked the moment the oceans ceased to rise) was only ever constrained by democracy and fit only to be enacted by decree. The leader of the free world has always preferred to act by executive order, often imposing policies less extreme than those he presented to his political opponents in the certain knowledge that they would be rejected. His lasting democratic achievement is the making of democracy redundant: rendering Republican speaker John Boehner’s position all but untenable and creating the very divide he has since used to justify his royal prerogative.

And this is a President whose promised “Change We Need” and “Change We Can Believe In” has been so remarkable by its absence that huge swathes of voters are now, apparently without self-critique, flocking to the candidate, Hillary Clinton, he once (and rightly) portrayed as the antithesis of that change. Millions more are so fed up with business as usual that they are helping to create the biggest protest movement since the Dixicrats walked out of the Democrats’ convention in ’48.

Barack Obama is popular. And, if popularity is a measure of success, then he is successful. His words and his warnings will probably resonate in the halls of the debate over Europe. But he will leave office with his legacy that of a commander by diktat; one whose actions demonstrate an absolute failure to work within the confines of democracy and to whom the notion of accountability and due process is seemingly alien. Little wonder, then, that he has many friends in the pro-EU establishment.

But, stripped (as he is soon to be) of the regalia of his esteemed office, his arguments for our continued membership are less convincing than those of even the least competent junior minister. That he used the privilege of his power to threaten the people of the United Kingdom is a repugnant abuse of his position, evidence of the vacuity of his cause, and an abuse of the friendship he affects to laud.           

Cry Me A River, Barbra.

Cry Me a River, Barbra.

A reply to Barbra Streisand's piece, published in The Huffington Post, entitled "The Sexism in American Politics.

I am not quite old enough to remember the career of Ms. Barbra Streisand. I’m told it was once rather impressive; she boasts a resume that glitters with the accumulated stardust of decades.

I’m sure she has achieved much that is worthy of respect. Gandhi probably did not say, of Western civilization, “I think it would be a good idea,” but one would be justified in saying the same of meritocracy. It is more concept than truth. Still, success is success and sustained success is a feat of its own.

But it is an unfortunate foible of our over-the-counter culture that a placement on the Billboard Top 100 grants, as an unofficial award, a platform from which celebrity may pronounce and pontificate and hold court in the real world; an arena from which celebrities are by definition removed.

So it is that I have long been aware of Ms Streisand not as a singer and an actress but in her role as a moonlighting political activist; a friend and supporter of the Clintons and a donor to their Foundation.

All three roles were merged in a paltry and patronizing piece in the Huffington Post, penned by Ms. Streisand, under the title The Sexism in American Politics.

The argument, for those who’ve hitherto avoided exposure to it, can be fairly summarised as follows: Hillary Clinton is disliked, sometimes viscerally so, because her critics are sexist and cannot stomach the thought of a woman having power.

To quote Ms. Streisand directly: “There is no one in this country who would deny the competence, intellect, stamina, warmth and courage of Hillary Rodham Clinton... But the criticism of Hillary Clinton has again demonstrated that the strong, competent woman is still a threatening figure in our culture.”

That is a challenge I intend to meet in due course. But first: I have never found this excuse to be anything other than facetious. If I were a woman, living in the United States, I think I would be fed up with the likes of Streisand, and the odious Madeleine Albright, speaking at me in this tone of voice.  (Hillary Clinton’s dire performance amongst millennial women in particular suggests that I would not be alone.) I think I would be fed up with being told that policy and record and character are to be considered irrelevant by presumption of merit earned and that Ms. Clinton deserves my vote because we happen share a gender.

As it is, I am a man living in the United Kingdom. But I am morally certain that my opposition to the likely Democratic nominee stems from something a little more substantive than my feelings toward, shall we say, the female form and visage.

I am quite willing to concede the broader, non-specific point about sexism in political discourse, but I was surprised at the relatively innocuous nature of the examples cited by Streisand.

“When MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough tweeted she should, “Smile. You just had a big night,” should we have been surprised? Hillary Clinton has a great smile and smiles often. So does Barack Obama. So does Bill Clinton. But no one would tell those two men to smile.”

This strikes me as ill-treatment of an important issue. There are tropes and visualizations and dog-whistle innuendos reserved exclusively for women in public life, to be sure. Donald Trump’s spat with Megyn Kelly is perhaps the most prominent case (though Ms. Streisand would have served her own purposes better had she cited his far more overt and reprehensible response to Clinton’s late return to the ABC debate stage in December). But to claim that something so innocuous as an injunction to smile ranks amongst the worst cases of sexism in American life is to invite the charge of over-sensitivity. Facile it may be, but it is no more severe or degrading than Rubio’s ‘small hands’ quip against Trump, or the talk of John McCain’s senility in ’08, or Hillary Clinton’s own suggestion (in the same campaign year) that Barack Obama was too black to be president.

But these remarks, when made about or against Clinton, are evidence of what Streisand believes to be “a pernicious double standard” to which Ms. Clinton alone is subject. That may or may not be true, but if Streisand believes that making women the subject of special standards is a bad thing then perhaps she will consider advising her friend to avoid playing to that same disparity in future. For it is not just Clinton’s allegedly sexist critics who define her candidacy in terms of gender but also Clinton herself: it was Clinton, not her critics, who deemed her womanhood to be more important than policy during ABC’s Las Vegas debate.

“How,” asked Anderson Cooper, “would you not be a third term of President Obama?”

“Well,” Clinton replied, grinning with arms outspread and a confident twinkle in the eye, “I think that’s pretty obvious.” Whoops and cheers all around the room for that remark. Clinton went on to say that “Being the first woman president would be quite a change from the presidents we’ve had up until this point, including President Obama.”

Clinton is no stranger to this sort of pandering to identity over policy and substance. Let no one claim she is not a quick and studious learner: prolonged proximity to loathsome manipulators like Dick Morris, friend of both Bill and Hillary and an infamous race-baiter who exploited the identity-related fears of the white working class during the first Clinton administration, has surely rubbed off. 

But either women are different, and thus subject to different standards, or they are not. Either Ms. Streisand believes gender disparity to be a bad thing (in which case she disagrees with the candidate she is supporting) or she does not. I should like to know which view she intends to adopt.

If identity is to be treated as the first of all issues then I should also like to ask Ms. Streisand how it is that she finds herself defending someone who both defended and enabled what we might charitably call the imposition – on Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Monica Lewinsky and others - of Bill Clinton’s services to women. If we are permitted indignation by association, I should like to know how she can support a candidate who supported DOMA and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and who claimed that the Reagans were good for LGBT citizens. If identity is important, I should like to know how Ms. Streisand can support a candidate who played the race card against Barrack Obama and whose husband, not to mention many of her associates and employees and advisors, is a Dixiecrat.

If, on the other hand, Ms. Clinton is to be judged by the same standards as her peers and on, as Streisand herself puts it, “the substance of what a candidate has to offer: his/her policies, his/her agenda, his/her experience, knowledge and demeanor in dealing with world leaders,” then surely she cannot complain about the sexism of Clinton’s critics when they point out her compromising connections to Wall Street, when they point to her botched healthcare reforms (and the fact that hundreds if not thousands of lives in Bosnia were spent on securing it coverage in the American media); when they question her links to Big Pharma and Big Oil; when they look into the murky world of her financiers and tremble with rage, and when they question her conduct and competency in the office of Secretary of State and conclude that her oft vaunted experience is a fortress built on sand. Surely Ms. Streisand would then understand our non-sexist aversion to any candidate on good terms with Henry Kissinger, would then appreciate our doubts about Ms. Clinton’s principles given that she behaves as though she has none, would then share our ire at a candidate who cynically exploits identity for personal gain.

Streisand says “We should stop being afraid of women, and meet them on a level playing field without resorting to name calling and sexist condescension.”  Rest assured: We are more than happy to oblige. But Ms. Streisand should be aware that a level playing field does not free her preferred candidate from criticism. Far from it.

Donald Trump Might Actually be Good for America

Donald Trump Might Actually be Good for America.

Consider this part gedankenexperiment, part the mutant child; the anti-consensus.

The mainstream narrative line, defined for so long by denial of his rise and prophecies of his failure, has seen Donald Trump progress from laughable irrelevance, through curious sideshow bloviating like some half-cut post-modern William Blake, into the Great Red Dragon himself.

“And behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars from heaven, and did cast them to the earth.”

Perhaps that should read The Great Red Donald, with the heads as states, the horns as endorsements, the crowns as delegates and the stars as his rivals for the Republican nomination.

He represents, we are told, the worst of humanity. He is a fascist or a proto-fascist or a crypto-fascist, the next Hitler; a racist, a tyrant, a fraud, a buffoon. He is an opportunist, a liar, a demagogue devoid of substance and decency. He is dangerous, he is divisive, he is a threat to our future and to the future of the world; he is bad.

And so on, and so on. Donald Trump has his own record of insults and assaults and it is impressive in its size and variety, though he does have a whole world with which to fight. But that arsenal is almost if not entirely matched by that of the forces arrayed against him and him alone.

At least, that is how we might frame the difference conventionally. But that lazy phraseology is a problem, and it is precisely the reason for his success and his immunity to attacks that would fell other men: It is not The Donald against the world, because The Donald is but the face and the voice and the toupee of a movement; one that he represents though he did not create it.

Much is made in election seasons of The Silent Majority. It is a phrase typically employed by those of whom the pollsterati have been painting unflattering portraits. “Yes, the polls put Party B comfortably in the lead, but I think, come the day of the election, you’ll find that the silent majority will come out to vote for us [Party A].”

It seldom happens, of course. The Silent Majority has become something like a myth, one born of the unhappy fact that voter turnout is invariably poor and of the complacency of those who don’t care to ask why; the comforting fairytale of electoral politics. We hear of it but never from it.

Well, The Silent Majority has found its voice in America, and it isn’t happy. It was never silent of its own volition, it was made to be so by a political system and a political and media establishment that became dead and deaf to it a long, long time ago.

Forgetting Blake and his dragons: The repetition of The Donald’s rhetoric is at least worthy of Eliot.

We will build a wall,
It’ll be a great wall,
It’ll be a great wall
And Mexico will pay for it.

It is nativist, if not completely racist, but his critics often try to have it both ways when they criticise him for being flexible and malleable and dishonest and then work on the assumption that his rhetoric is honest and criticise him for that, too.

A cursory look through his history in politics, as an activist and a lobbyist for causes as varied as universal healthcare and nuclear non-proliferation, betrays no innate racism and demonstrates a flexible commitment to fairly consistent principles. (His economic populism and calls for a return to isolationism have been constituents of his political gospel since his involvement in the Perot movement of ’92.)

His talk, then, is expedient; and that at least suggests that Trump is not as bad for America as someone, like Ted Cruz, who is a genuine zealot. He won’t really ban Muslims from entering the United States. He can’t. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prohibits it. Nor does he really hate women; his position on women’s’ issues, especially on Planned Parenthood, has been consistently liberal. Lip-service might be paid to the obligatory Republican crusade against abortion, but Trump has historically aligned himself with pro-choice movements whilst his opponents have not.

He might play to the worst sentiments of the Republican base but his comments on Mexicans, the Chinese and the Japanese are designed to get a reaction; to inflame the base and put their (sometimes legitimate) concerns at the head of the agenda.

The first was a crude amalgam of concerns regarding mass illegal immigration and the very real heroine crisis that is plaguing many Southern and early-voting states (and whether you agree with his tone or credit him with substance, both are serious issues). And that, I contend, is more honest than the dog-whistle approach employed by his Republican rivals and the neo-Dixiecrats in the Clinton campaign.

The others form part of an appeal for economic isolationism and a reflect the real concerns of those to whom the liberalisation of trade with Europe and China has been, to use a word The Donald is fond of, “a disaster.” Given that his opposition to such liberalisation almost certainly includes the TTIP, which theoretically opens NHS contracts to US health insurance tenders and might even allow companies to sue national governments if their policies harm profits, that position would benefit us a great deal.

Trump’s expediency is designed to play off the very system he rails against. Though he makes much of his personal wealth, his disposable income is too little to allow for a conventional campaign to rival the Super-PACs of his rivals. He might even be correct, then, when he claims to be beholden to no Big Money interests and that, too, is good for a political process which has otherwise been bought by the Koch brothers and by the likes of Right to Rise and Hillary Clinton’s innumerable Big Money backers.

It is a question raised both by Trump and by Sanders, and the question is a just and pertinent one: How can you honestly claim to be against the same interests that finance your campaign?

So it is that Trump energises his supporters with promises of an independent campaign, and his more colourful language has earned him air time that money quite literally cannot buy. There are limits to how much money can be spent to buy air time, even within the United States’ campaign finance system. Trump gets his for free, thus freeing him from the corruption endemic within that system and that, too, is a good thing.

 And Trump, like Sanders, is speaking for the forgotten; for The Silent Majority; for those left behind in the States’ transition from democracy to plutocracy; for Eliot’s Hollow Men.

“This is the dead land,
This is cactus land;
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.”

 More specifically, he represents the frustrations of those who believe that their representatives have sacrificed democracy for plutocratic cronyism, and that is inseparable from his image: a plutocratic crony who is sacrificing the other way.

It is something the Clinton team will do well to consider if (and it is still an if) she is able to schmooze and triangulate her way past Sanders for the Democratic nomination: Donald Trump’s campaign is gorging on the support of first-time voters in much the same way (though not quite to the same extent) as Sanders’ campaign. And, should the rigged nominations system confer upon Clinton the coronation she has long expected, and in so-doing opt for the candidate of both the conventional and the dark establishment, the Democrats may well face a support deficit and a de-energised support base in the general election.

But involving more people in the democratic process: That’s another good thing.

And who are those people? In the days when I found myself more enchanted by a snappy line than by the assumptions underlying it – and those days aren’t completely behind me – I lauded Lindsey Graham’s quip on the problem the GOP has with its electorate: “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”

I have always considered this to be true, but I now consider it to be a necessary and not a sufficient truism. Jeb Bush, for example, was absolutely right when he realised that it was and is not only “angry white guys” who are most naturally inclined to vote Republican. Many of the immigrants vilified for years by the GOP share many of the party’s convictions on social policy. For all we might disagree with those convictions, I was sorry to see Bush abandon his principles by reneging upon past positions in a pathetic attempt to meet Trump on annexed ground.

But why are Angry White Guys so angry? Surely they do not want to be. And I would bundle them into the same category as first-time Trump voters: These are people who have been energised by the consistent failure, on the party of the GOP, to account for their concerns.

Trump, for all his ills, is giving a voice to the disenfranchised. Should he win the nomination (which is likely but not a certainty given that a contested convention is possible; mass-suicides have happened before, after all) then, regardless of the outcome of the general election, the GOP will have nominated a candidate who represents The Silent Majority for the first time in recent history.

And, regardless of the outcome of the general election, The Silent Majority will finally have been re-engaged with a political process that has hitherto sought to exclude them from the debate. They will have representation. And, if you subscribe to the view, as I do, that political extremism is often a result of disenfranchisement (and, by extension, that the worst tendencies of the electorate are the fault not of the electorate but of the politicians who ignore them) then you will be open to the possibility that, just perhaps, Donald Trump will fundamentally realign the focus of the GOP elite away from the business interests of those who fund it and toward the concerns of those who made and make it.

No democracy can thrive or excel or even survive when only one party holds the power. I speak as someone with no ideological love for the GOP, and as someone who thinks that the Democrats are right wing, and as someone who thinks that the primary and caucus systems have many flaws that need to be addressed in order for the United States to be the democracy it claims to be, but I do firmly believe that (if we must settle for a two-party system) a strong GOP is absolutely vital if the United States is to achieve all that it is capable of achieving.

To that end, and for the sake of the voters, and for the sake of democracy, and for the sake of the United States; for the sake of accountability, and for the sake of reform, and for the sake of the separation of democracy and corporate interests (Jefferson had his wall, after all); for the sake of a challenge to Clintonian corruption, and for the sake of an end to one-party, one-ideology rule; and for the sake of theatre, and for the sake of entertainment, and for the sake of the American people:

Donald Trump might, just might, be good for America.