03 November 2016
It’s my party…
by J.R.Thomas
Whether Mr Trump wins or loses next week, one thing is for certain; the Republican Party is a smouldering wreck. The Donald has driven his bulldozer of personal ambition through the Grand Old Party and debris will continue to cascade into the basement for months, years, yet. And if indeed it turns out to be President Trump, the party’s problems will only just be beginning. Trump supporters en masse will, no doubt, climb over the battlements of the GOP to raise the Trump flag. What the party leadership will do in such circumstances is not clear; the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, the second most powerful man in Washington and increasingly seen as the de facto leader of the GOP generally, has hinted that he is hoping that it will be Mrs Clinton in the White House next January. That way Mr Trump will move on, possibly ungraciously and controversially, to new ventures, and the party establishment he has so much derided can hose down the smoking ruins of its once proud mansion and began thinking about how to rebuild. But if Mrs Clinton is beaten, what then for the Republican Party?
If Mr Ryan and his friends find themselves in that nightmare of a Trump presidency, a long break in the British Isles might help them overcome their shattered nerves. What is more, between traditional English breakfasts and energetic walks in the frozen countryside, they might find it interesting to study a political basket case with similarities to their own – the Labour Party.
This is not to draw comparisons between Mr Corbyn and Mr Trump. That would indeed be a supreme feat for even the most subtle political commentator. What Jeremy and Donald have both done is to engineer in a very short space of time a complete reordering of the politics of their respective parties. Gone is the usual ceaseless striving towards the centre ground – the strategy to capture the wavering mild and moderate floating voters who really decide elections (so it is argued), but without losing the party loyalists whose natural bent is always towards the outer fringe of their parties philosophical spread. Thus, the deeply embedded Tory tends towards hanging and lower taxes, is against immigration, is delighted to be Brexiting, and keeps a photograph of Mrs Thatcher in a prominent spot. On the Labour side, the true loyalist began life as a Trotskyist, adores beards and Mr Corbyn, wants to renationalise things and introduce wealth tax at penal rates, and campaigns in the streets for the National Health Service at every possible opportunity.
This is, of course, a gross over simplification, but it has an element of truth. Normally political parties are engaged in tugs of war between those who hold wild fringe views, and those who are only vaguely to one side or other of the political divide. But sometimes there is a political earthquake, normally because of a resounding defeat or a series thereof, and the fringe gets control. In the case of the recent turmoil in the Labour Party the roots of the leftish seizure of the party go back a bit further and a bit deeper. The long grumbling leftish unhappiness at the direction in which Tony Blair took the party – well into the centre ground – led to a long, hard, and initially almost underground, pushing of the party back leftwards. Mr Milliband emerged as a result of that and as the instrument of the next phase, providing the entryist mechanism for a left takeover by way of cheap membership fees. That enabled the capture of many constituency parties by the left and the ideological cleansing of the party we see now.
Across the pond, Mr Trump is not known to have any ideological roots, one way or another; and to the extent that he was thought to have opinions, he was previously believed to lean to the donkey side of the spectrum (Democrat), not elephant (Republican). Why he wants to be President, intellectually, we do not know, but what Mr Trump, a skilled businessman used to working out what the public wants and selling it to them, has done, is to work out what a lot of Republican voters want, and quite a lot of Democrats too, and to provide a bag of policies that appeals to them. His buyer group is middle America, becoming poorer and more neglected and feeling forgotten by the metropolitan elite, a group that sees their income going down, their jobs under threat from the export of industry and the import of cheap labour, the USA embroiled in foreign fights and not winning them. His policies, in so far as they can be discerned, are surprisingly close to Mrs Clinton’s – interventionist economic policies and more government direction, more tax on the rich, maybe less on the poor, a cutting back on foreign adventures. It is a simplistic populist argument and it is selling well.
And oddly, for a party that worshipped Ronald Reagan, still a great hero to most Republicans, this goes down very well with Republican activists away from the metropolitan centres. They like the Trump message; they are reinvigorated in their views and turn out in large and enthusiastic crowds at Trump rallies. Those activists are now running things at the local level in many places and it is the Republican grandees in Washington who feel disenfranchised and marginalised; they have lost control of their party and do not recognise those who describe themselves as Republicans now.
This is not just a phenomenon of the English speaking political world. European democracies are seeing the same tendencies; not so much in the control of the political parties – the two party system is relatively uncommon in Europe – but in the rise of new parties to left and right and the collapse, maybe temporarily, of the traditional ones. Ms le Pen in France has finally demolished the carefully crafted coalition of the right built by General de Gaulle to furnish his shiny new Fifth Republic. It had been crumbling for a while, but French politics on the right are now multi party and the populist vote is going for Marine. The left is in danger of disintegrating under the disaster of M. Holland’s presidency. And even in Germany, so stable and loyal to the symbols of the postwar new republic, Mrs Merkel seems to have blown that structure away with her generous but ill thought through offers of refuge to the dispossessed of the Middle East. And so it goes in the Netherlands, and Sweden, and Poland, and in Spain, and Italy.
The extremes are now on the march; politics is polarising, and what is driving that process is that the political parties which were supposed to be the moderating filters, the averagers out of views, the broad churches with pews for all types, have been seized by the party loyalists. That has almost certainly happened because the public are not really interested in politics any more. Life has been good for so long, there are endless gizmos and devices to amuse us; we all work too hard and play too long; maybe we have just lost our sense of civic responsibility. Whatever it is, mass membership of political parties has been dropping for years. So now the true believers can take over – their views and single minded determination repulsing the ordinary sort of supporter – so the activists become ever more entrenched.
This is almost certainly not the end of western democracy, if that is bothering any readers. We have been here before – the USA and UK at the end of the nineteenth century, France many times, Italy almost all the time. Politicians promise all sorts, but delivering on the promises is much more difficult. Activists get bored with the lack of achievement, disillusionment at the failure to implement dreams puts the moderates back in control, and things settle down. Systems contain their own checks and balances – Ms le Pen is unlikely to prevail in the second round of the Presidential election; and Mr Trump will find it is difficult to get anything done, even with control of Congress (which is why nobody should let the thought of Donald prowling the Oval Office keep them awake at night).
But socially responsible and politically aware citizens might do their duty now by joining the major political party of their choice. The rhetoric will annoy you, the procedures stupefy you, the repetitious nature of basic tasks bore you to insanity. But you may just help propel representative politics back to dullness and safety.
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