In the “war of ideas” against big government, corruption and socialism, right-wing populism and religious fundamentalism are not the answer.
Populism is a vaguely defined term that generally refers to a political orientation that pits the people against a putative elite.
It supposes that the wishes of common people, or the working class, or the proletariat (however you choose to name them), represent the moral good, and ought to be defended against the interests of the rich and the powerful, who are cast as corrupt and self-serving.
How these groups are defined can differ. They are often delineated along economic class lines, or ethnic lines, or nationalistic lines.
Critical theory delineates them in terms of power structures, usually racially determined but also distinguished by gender, gender identity and orientation, disability, or other cause of oppression. In this world view, the victims of oppression continually strive against the systemic oppression of a privileged elite and their governing institutions and media.
Ironically, while the right spits fury at the critical theory of the far left, which they denounce as “identity politics”, their own version of populism is cut from the same cloth.
It casts native-born, patriotic, Christian, working-class people as an exploited or threatened class, fighting for freedom against job competition from immigrants and the oppression of wealthy elites, left-wing media, socialist government bureaucrats, and supra-national treaty organisations – collectively known as the “New World Order”.
Their nationalism, in-group conformity and out-group intolerance can also be described as identity politics.
Populism
Populism can be left-wing or right-wing, or something else entirely. Socialists are typical populists, championing the interests of the common people against the capitalist class. Neo-fascism also often employs anti-elitist populist rhetoric.
Even classical liberalism can be described in populist terms, pitching individuals against governments who wield legislative and executive power.
The devil is in the details, and in the grounds on which power is contested.
I largely agree that governments around the world are too powerful, too large and too inefficient. They tend to tax too much, and spend even more. Many have troubling socialist instincts, despite the abundance of evidence that socialism is a recipe for poverty and civilisational decline.
Their scale directly leads to corruption: the more money and power governments have, the more there is to corrupt. This leads to crony-capitalism, or state-capitalism, which is a society far removed from the free markets and individual rights for which I have advocated all my life.
The consequences are higher costs of living, undue restraints on economic activity, infringements on individual freedoms, and constrained economic growth.
Of all the people in the world who ought to be concerned about these things, however, I would argue that Americans are pretty near the lowest on the list.
Richest people
Despite having spent 12 of the last 16 years under Democratic Party presidents, Americans per capita are the richest people in any nation with a population over 10 million in the world, and the 10th-richest overall. This ranking has not changed since 1990.
The US is fourth on the list of the most free economies in the world, behind New Zealand, Switzerland and Singapore. It is fifth if you count Hong Kong as a country. Despite its takeover by China, it still tops the latest Fraser Institute Economic Freedom Ranking, published two weeks ago.
The US ranks 17th in the world on the Cato Institute Human Freedom Index, which combines measures of economic and personal freedom (largely because during Trump’s first term, the US fell from 20th to 32nd in the ranking of personal freedom – its lowest score in 20 years).
America’s population, unlike that of many more sclerotic nations in Europe and the Far East, is still growing at a healthy clip, both organically and thanks to inward migration.
The country is producing record levels of energy. It became a net energy exporter in 2019 for the first time since 1952, under former president Donald Trump, and the gap between exports and imports has widened under incumbent president Joe Biden: it now exports 36% more energy than it imports.
The same is true for petroleum: exports exceeded imports for the first time in 2020, and the gap widened under Biden. Domestic energy production has also exceeded domestic consumption since 2019, and that gap has also widened since.
Best economy in the world
Inflation, which spiked worldwide as a consequence of pandemic lockdowns, has been brought back under control, to 2.4%. The forecast for 2025 is 1.9%, below the official target of 2%. This was achieved during Biden’s presidency without triggering a much-feared and widely predicted recession.
Energy price inflation, in particular, has been negative more often than not since the beginning of 2023.
The US unemployment rate reached 3.4%, the lowest level since 1969, in January of 2023, and remains well under control at 4.1% at last count.
Stock markets, too, are at record levels. The Dow Jones Index, the S&P 500 Index, and the Nasdaq Composite Index, all reached all-time record highs in the last month.
At 66% or so, the US home ownership rate is fairly stable, slap bang in the middle of long-term variability. House prices rose sharply after the pandemic, but stabilised and declined somewhat since mid-2022. Rising house prices are great for homeowners, who see their net worth rising, but not for home buyers, who need to shell out more to get into the property market.
Despite this, Generation Z, the oldest of whom are now in their late 20s, are richer than any of their predecessors, and with a 30% homeownership rate are ahead of Millennials and Generation X, who struggled with debt and recessions.
Overall, the US economy is, literally, the best in the world. It recovered faster from the pandemic than any other major economy, and will set the fastest GDP growth rate (2.8%) among the G7 nations this year, as it did in 2023. The IMF’s anticipated slowdown to 1.5% growth has not happened.
Myths and lies
The reason I say all this is to debunk the notion that Donald Trump created what he once called “the greatest economy in the history of the world”, but that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have ruined it.
The only economic challenge for Americans during Biden’s term in office that was worth whining about – real wage decline because of inflation – is a problem that (a) cannot reasonably be blamed on Biden administration policies, and (b) has been resolved, which can.
While inflation and real wage stagnation caused a widespread perception that the US economy was performing poorly – which the Trump campaign vigorously exploited – robust growth in consumer spending suggests that Americans have turned upbeat since the height of consumer price inflation two years ago.
The myth of America’s ruined economy, or the myth that Democratic Party presidents ruin economies, is just another lie we can add to the list of documented falsehoods Trump has been peddling all his life, starting with the fact that he is descended not from a Swedish immigrant, as he and his father both claimed, but from a Bavarian immigrant, Friedrich Trump.
The ghostwriter of Trump’s breakthrough 1987 book, The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz, told the New Yorker in 2016 that he feels remorse over writing it. What the book, in Trump’s voice, describes as “truthful hyperbole … an innocent form of exaggeration”, Schwartz described as “deceit”, which is never “innocent”.
Politicians lie
Trump has no rival – not even close – when it comes to lying, in or out of public office. The Pulitzer-Prize winning media organisation PolitiFact rates a staggering 76% of Trump’s statements as mostly false, false, or “pants on fire”. Only 3% merit an unqualified “true” verdict.
All politicians lie. Yet by contrast, Barack Obama’s claims were rated mostly false or worse only 23% of the time. For Joe Biden, it’s 41%, and for Kamala Harris, 42%.
(Another fun comparison is the number of broken promises per president. Biden broke 3% of his promises. Obama broke 23% of his promises. Trump again takes the honours, with a staggering 53% promises broken.)
Trump lies so routinely, so compulsively, so habitually, that political scientists have been pondering why it is that people accept his dishonesty, and even celebrate it.
The answer, they believe, lies in the fact that group dynamics, and hostility between in-groups and out-groups, turns those lies into weapons of competition, told for what that group perceives to be the greater good.
“If we see Trump’s lies,” wrote Jeremy Adam Smith in 2017, “not as failures of character but rather as weapons of war, then we can come to see why his supporters might view him as an effective leader. From this perspective, lying is a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s campaign and presidency.”
Sleazy grifter
Schwartz wrote in his journal: “Trump stands for many of the things I abhor: his willingness to run over people, the gaudy, tacky, gigantic obsessions, the absolute lack of interest in anything beyond power and money.”
Add to that his well-documented philandering, assignations with porn stars, crass talk about sexual assault, creepy talk about his daughters’ bodies….
Add to that 34 felony convictions, and charges of fraud, election subversion, and obstruction. The man clearly has little respect for the US Constitution that he peddles alongside his Trump-branded Bibles.
Add to that his meandering, often incoherent speech, drifting aimlessly from topic to topic, seasoned only with narcissistic self-aggrandizement, which he calls “the weave”, as if he’s a verbal pugilist, but which in any other geriatric would be viewed as warning signs of incipient dementia.
Add to that his sleazy grift, flogging over-priced baubles and trinkets – Trump Bibles and worthless crypto-tokens, and trading cards, and sneakers, and medallions with his face on them, and talking Trump dolls, and Trump jewellery, and gold playing cards – all designed not to promote his political ideas, or his governing policies, but to promote himself.
Add to that the brazen hypocrisy of standing in front of the cameras with religious leaders, praying.
Why level-headed, rational people believe, first, that the US is in some sort of crisis from which it needs to be rescued, and second, that a washed up reality TV celebrity and seedy real estate mogul is the right leader to do so, is a mystery to me.
Why evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics, in particular, view him as the second coming of Jesus, rather than as the antichrist – the “deceiver” and the “man of sin” – he far more closely resembles, is an enigma for the ages.
Identity politics
What concerns me deeply, as a classical liberal, is the rank intolerance, xenophobia and often outright racism of Trump and the people who support him. Trump might not be a Nazi, but the Nazis certainly support Trump.
Trump is not afraid to whip up racial hatred by falsely vilifying minority immigrants. He has promised to rope in the National Guard not only to “go after” “the enemy within”, like Congresscritters Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi, but also to deport all 11 million unauthorised immigrants, en masse.
Even if he gets this past Congress and the many legal stumbling blocks that might prevent this, imagine what an armed force capable of carrying out this order would look like.
Heavily armed jackbooted security police would be banging on doors of workplaces, housing projects and private residences, demanding “papers, please!” of anyone they encounter.
Given that the US does not issue its citizens with identity documents, and no other document serves as conclusive proof of identity and citizenship status, imagine how many innocent people will get caught up in the dragnet, simply because their English is poor or their skin colour resembles Trump’s spray tan.
This is a recipe for a racist police state.
Fascism
Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief military adviser to the president and the secretary of defense, retired general Mark A. Milley, described Trump as “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country”. This is according to a forthcoming book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bob Woodward.
In a retirement speech, he said: “We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, to a tyrant or dictator or wannabe dictator.”
Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, told the New York Times that he believed that Donald Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.
“In many cases, I would agree with some of his policies,” he told the paper, “But again, it’s a very dangerous thing to have the wrong person elected to high office.”
More than a dozen former White House officials signed a letter in support of Kelly’s warning.
His former vice president, Mike Pence, on 6 January 2021 refused Trump’s demand that he block the certification of the election result declaring Joe Biden the winner.
According to CNN, he said: “The American people deserve to know that President Trump asked me to put him over my oath to the Constitution. … Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States.”
His second attorney general, Bill Barr said: “Someone who engaged in that kind of bullying about a process that is fundamental to our system and to our self-government shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office.”
Other former Trump staffers listed by CNN as having turned against him, calling him unfit for office, a grave threat, and (in one case) “an idiot”, include his first secretary of defense, James Mattis; his second secretary of defense, Mark Esper; his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson; his first ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley; his presidential transition vice-chairman, Chris Christie; his second national security adviser, HR McMaster; his third national security adviser, John Bolton; his former acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney; one of his many former communications directors, Anthony Scaramucci; another former communications director, Stephanie Grisham; his secretary of education, Betsy DeVos; his secretary of transportation, Elaine Chao; his first secretary of the Navy, Richard Spencer; his first homeland security adviser, Tom Bossert; his former personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen; his White House lawyer, Ty Cobb; a former director of strategic communications, Alyssa Farah Griffin; a top aide in charge of his outreach to African Americans, Omarosa Manigault Newman; a former deputy press secretary, Sarah Matthews; his final chief of staff’s aide, Cassidy Hutchinson.
There is an extraordinarily long list of Republicans who publicly oppose Trump’s campaign, including former president George W. Bush, former vice president Dick Cheney, and many cabinet-level officials and current or former senators and members of Congress. Several of them have actively endorsed his opponent, Kamala Harris.
“Vastly superior”
The Wall Street Journal, which is a pretty hard-line conservative newspaper, runs a quarterly survey of economists. In the latest update, from early October, it reports, “Most economists think inflation, interest rates and deficits would be higher under the policies former President Donald Trump would pursue in a second administration than under those proposed by Vice President Kamala Harris.”
Twenty-three winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics – more than half the living American recipients of the prize – signed a letter that described the economic agenda of the Kamala Harris campaign “vastly superior” to the plans laid out by former President Donald Trump.
I’m going to quote the whole thing, because I think it’s important:
We, the undersigned, believe that Kamala Harris would be a far better steward of our economy than Donald Trump and we support her candidacy.
The details of the presidential candidates’ economic programs are not fully laid out yet, but what they’ve said, combined with what they’ve done in the past, gives us a clear picture of alternative economic visions, policies, and practices.
While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies, we believe that, overall, Harris’s economic agenda will improve our nation’s health, investment, sustainability, resilience, employment opportunities, and fairness and be vastly superior to the counterproductive economic agenda of Donald Trump.
His policies, including high tariffs even on goods from our friends and allies and regressive tax cuts for corporations and individuals, will lead to higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality. Among the most important determinants of economic success are the rule of law and economic and political certainty, and Trump threatens all of these.
By contrast, Harris has emphasized policies that strengthen the middle class, enhance competition, and promote entrepreneurship. On issue after issue, Harris’s economic agenda will do far more than Donald Trump’s to increase the economic strength and well-being of our nation and its people.
Simply put, Harris’s policies will result in a stronger economic performance, with economic growth that is more robust, more sustainable, and more equitable.
Elon Musk, the tech billionaire (and alleged one-time illegal immigrant) who has been campaigning for Trump and looks set to be given the position of budget-cutting government efficiency czar, not only agrees with these economists. He predicts economic hardship, and agreed with a commentator who foresees a storm with tumbling markets and a severe overreaction in the economy, before a “rapid recovery to a healthier, sustainable economy”.
And all this pain is needed to fix the best-performing economy in the world? I think not.
RFK Jr.
“I’m going to let him go wild on health. I’m going to let him go wild on food. I’m going to let him go wild on medicines.”
That’s what Trump had to say about his one-time rival for the presidency, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.)
“Donald Trump has promised me control of the health agencies,” Kennedy said, “which is [the Department of Health and Human Services] and its sub-agencies: CDC [Centres for Disease Control], FDA [Food and Drug Administration], NIH [National Institutes of Health] and a few others, and also the USDA [US Department of Agriculture], which is, you know, key to making America healthy again.”
RFK Jr. must have been distraught to earn only the second place (behind Joseph Mercola, about whom more here) in The Disinformation Dozen, a report on vaccine misinformation published by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate.
Kennedy is one of those charlatans who without any relevant qualifications (he’s an environmental lawyer) pounced on the debunked idea that the MMR vaccine causes autism back in 2005, and ran with it.
He claims not to be against vaccines, but merely to want safer vaccines, but none of his work recommends vaccination, and he has described vaccination-related autism as a “holocaust”.
He is a prolific conspiracy theorist. He also believes Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci conspired to prolong the pandemic and exaggerate its effects to promote expensive vaccinations for the benefit of what he called “a powerful vaccine cartel” (why would either of them do that?). In addition, he has said that wi-fi causes “leaky brain”, anti-depressants cause school shootings, chemicals in drinking water are turning children transgender, HIV does not cause AIDS, and that everyone except him is lying about it and suppressing the truth.
PolitiFact gave him the Lie of the Year award, denouncing his campaign as a “campaign of conspiracy theories”.
The idea of having a nutcase like this in charge of food, medicine and healthcare in the US is, quite frankly, terrifying. People will die.
Project 2025
It’s getting late, and I have a deadline, so I’d better wrap up. I’ve written at some length about the beliefs of Trump’s running mate, JD Vance (he styles his name without punctuation marks), and about Project 2025, which is the conservative Heritage Foundation’s 900-page opus of policy proposals and personnel recommendations for a Trump presidency.
Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025. As this fact check makes clear, in July, he posted to his own social network: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
However, a different fact check points out that Trump was there in 2022, when Project 2025 was conceived, and spoke favourably of it.
Speaking of Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, he is on video saying: “Already we have shown the power of our winning formula, working closely with many of the great people at Heritage over the four incredible years that we’ve worked with you a lot and we were just discussing it with Kevin (inaudible), they’re going to work on some other things that are going to be very exciting, I think, Kevin, I think maybe the most exciting of all.”
He also called the plan a “colossal mandate”, and added it would “lay the groundwork for exactly what our movement will do” in order to “save America”.
I don’t for a moment believe that a project that involved so many of the leading lights of the conservative intelligentsia, including many former Trump staffers, which Trump praised at the outset, and about which Trump had to lie when it became a political liability for him, will not form the basis of many policies, executive orders and laws should Trump win the White House again.
Combined with JD Vance’s strange conservative Catholic obsession with traditional nuclear families, the illegitimacy of any deviation from God-ordained binary gender roles, the fact that Trump took credit for the overturning of Roe v Wade, and Trump’s pharisaical pandering to the religious right, the spectre of a theonomy looms.
A theonomy is a form of government in which people are governed by divine law (as opposed to a theocracy, which is government by religious leaders).
The radical religious right in the US – to which many Christians are opposed – is champing at the bit to tear down the wall between church and state. Trump has promised to reintroduce prayer into schools, act to curtail transgender rights, and enact the binary religious view of sexuality into law. Next on the chopping block will be gay marriage, and protecting the right of Christians to discriminate against gay people.
Gilead
Since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, and many states began enacting partial or complete abortion bans, Amari Marsh was charged with murder by child abuse after suffering a miscarriage. Patience Frazier was arrested on suspicion of culpable homicide after suffering a miscarriage. (“Why did you say you’re sorry,” one of the police officers asked about a Facebook post in which she expressed her grief at the loss.) Brittany Watts was charged with felony abuse of a corpse after she miscarried into her toilet. Josseli Barnica is one of two women in Texas known to have died after doctors refused to treat a miscarriage in progress, citing the state’s law against abortion.
Women’s rights to safe and appropriate medical care during pregnancy, and their right to bodily autonomy, are being dismantled, and elsewhere are under grave threat from religious fundamentalists who insist that the government impose their anti-scientific and Biblically dubious moral laws upon others.
The same is true for transgender care, which should be none of the government’s business.
Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, a novel (and later a film and a highly acclaimed television series) in which a fertility crisis leads to the United States government being overthrown by a strictly patriarchal religious tyranny, establishing an oppressive state known as the Republic of Gilead, in which women had few, if any, rights or control over their bodies and procreative abilities.
Two years ago, Atwood wrote: “I invented Gilead. The Supreme Court is making it real. I thought I was writing fiction in The Handmaid’s Tale.”
If Trump is elected, an intolerant, oppressive and discriminatory religious fundamentalism very similar to Gilead will be allowed to grow and metastasise, in which women and LGBTQ+ people will lose their hard-won rights, protections and freedoms.
Liberal democracy
Classical liberalism calls for a liberal democracy, in which individual rights and freedoms are protected, markets are free, and everyone is treated equally and without unjust discrimination.
A Trump presidency will be the opposite of that. It will be oppressive, nationalistic, protectionist, ultra-conservative, and tolerant of intolerance. It will be a disaster for individual freedom, and for economic prosperity.
It will set the US back decades. Don’t do it, Americans.
[Image: Donald Trump caricature by DonkeyHotey on Flickr. Used under CC BY-SA 2.0 licence.]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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