Violence, hypocrisy and assassinations. Oh, what a mess we are in

Yet again I find myself watching history unfold on my phone screen on a Saturday night whilst in one of East London’s craft beer bars. This time I am looking at blood pouring from Donald Trump’s head as the Secret Service desperately try to bundle him off stage. He has his fist raised in defiance at the person who took a pot shot at him and the American flag flies above him. It is quite the image. 

My first, slightly drunken, thought is that this is going to lead to an even more severe clamp down on the people who don’t hold the increasingly narrow spectrum of beliefs that the establishment allows. There will be far more scrutiny from police and mainstream media of the views of protesters, Muslims or anyone to the left of Kamala Harris.

Let me be clear: I do not condone someone trying to murder Donald Trump. He’s towards the top of the list of worst people in the world and his toxic effect on politics could be the beginning of humanity’s final tailspin down into fascism or oblivion. We would be better off if he shuffled off the political stage and never appeared in public again. Preferably to count his money and have sex with porn stars, not because he has been shot in the head. I don’t think anyone should be murdered. Not even Trump. 

Violence is everywhere in politics

I could say something obvious, such as “violence has no place in politics” but this would be hypocritical because there is a lot of violence in politics. From the brutal policing of ethnic minorities, in both Britain and the US, to the steep rise in evictions, to war. Violence is everywhere in politics.

That violence is closely entwined with politics is naked in war. The recent war in Gaza and the sensible moderates in the West’s complete inability to restrain the Israeli state in any way, shows that war is unrestrained violence, free of the moderating influences the UN and Geneva convention were supposed to place on it. The idea of a humane and controlled war was a liberal fantasy. War is unrestrained violence of the strong against the week.

This is not to condone any acts of violence. I don’t think we should do politics by shooting each other. I want to get the violence out of politics, by reducing the amount of war, evictions and aggressive policing. Ideally to zero. I’m not condoning violence directed at the people I don’t like. That would be hypocritical. But do you know what’s worse than being a hypocrite? (According to Judith N. Shklar amongst others.) It’s being cruel towards other people, which is what violence is.

Threatening students

Here’s an example of the establishment legitimating violence against people they don’t like. In 1986 it was considered acceptable to threaten students with violence for their planned political action. Warden and Fellows of Wadham College wrote a letter to students planning political action. It stated:

“Dear Gentlemen: We note your threat to take what you call ‘direct action’ unless your demands are immediately met. We feel it is only sporting to remind you that our governing body includes three experts in chemical warfare, two ex-commandos skilled with dynamite and torturing prisoners, four qualified marksmen in both small arms and rifles, two ex-artillerymen, one holder of the Victoria Cross, four karate experts and a chaplain. The governing body has authorised me to tell you that we look forward with confidence to what you call a ‘confrontation’, and I may say, with anticipation.”

If this isn’t a threat of violence, then what is? This is just one example of when it was fine for the establishment to openly threaten people it didn’t like with naked violence of an extreme kind. The type you would find in a war. 

Contemporary relevance

This letter was reproduced in The Knowledge recently (for the uninitiated, The Knowledge is a news email from The Week, which claims to be politically neutral but spends more time praising Trump than Keir Starmer). Presumably reprinting it means the letter has some relation to current events.

How do we interpret this? It’s either a joke or a real suggestion as to how rebellious students should be treated. It’s probably intended to be funny by implying that lefty students (of both today and 1986) aren’t tough enough to fight actual soldiers, so they should just shut up and go back to their books and racking up huge debts that they will never be able to pay back. At this point it’s worth remembering most of The Knowledge’s readers went to uni for free, but enjoy sniggering at students. This is probably why the letter was reprinted.

If we are taking this seriously on any level, it’s worth noting that chemical warfare and torturing prisoners are war crimes in an actual war, which protesting is not. Did they really plan to release sarin gas in the middle of Oxford? Or use artillery for that matter? It seems like a dumb, empty threat to me. Not worthy of reprinting. Also, I don’t think “we have people who can and will commit war crimes on our staff” is the boast Wadham College think it is.

Trumps’ violence

The point is that it was considered acceptable to at least joke about using “qualified marksmen” against student protesters in 1986 (or today, judging by the reprinting of this in a supposedly politically neutral newsletter) but it’s not acceptable to use marksmen against Trump. I don’t think it’s acceptable to shoot Trump, but neither is it acceptable to threaten students with chemical weapons, artillery and torture. Or to imply that all young people are softies because they wouldn’t face down such a threat.

Trump is also an extraordinarily violent politician. He has joked about shooting someone on 5th Avenue. He has used dehumanising language, describing undocumented migrants as “animals,” which is likely to lead to violence. He talks about a “bloodbath” if he doesn’t get elected. He fermented a riot that tried to violently overthrow the government; although we all pretend that didn’t happen and that Trump is just a normal right-wing politician.

One of his white supremacist supporters also killed a woman protesting against white supremacy with his car, another thing we pretend didn’t happen. Trump is not a stranger to political violence, just to receiving it. I’m sure that Trump and his supporters feel that it is acceptable to mete out violence to people they don’t like (from protesters to migrants) and that it’s not acceptable to be violent towards them. Any centrists, or anyone of any political persuasion, condemning the Trump assassination attempt must acknowledge his violence. As this article does.

The people it’s acceptable to be violent towards

Owen Jones is the only British journalist I can think of who has been beaten up. Boris Johnson also once conspired to have a different journalist beaten up and it didn’t stop him getting elected Prime Minister. This shows who is allowed to mete out violence and who should receive violence. As always, the politicians advocating for violence, from Trump to the uncritical supporters of Israel, don’t think they should receive violence but that other people should.

There has always been people it’s acceptable to do violence to and people it’s not acceptable to do violence to. Oil companies do huge damage to the natural world, but when there’s a march the police line up to protect their buildings. I know this from experience. Social media is full of threats to Just Stop Oil activists for daring to inconvenience people and for pointing out that we’re killing the whole world.

Good to know that it is acceptable for Trump to encourage violence but not receive violence. It’s nice to make all this official. For the historians. Assuming humanity continues long enough for people to write history about 2024.

What comes next

If anything, his attempted murder will help Trump win the election. He’s just been officially nominated by the Republicans and chosen JD Vance as his running mate (a man who once described Trump as “America’s Hitler” and will now parrot anything Trump says, no matter how deranged).

At least Joe Biden has done the right thing and decided not to run again. He was too old and would only have thrown the election to Trump. If there is any hope in stopping Trump (and all methods short of assassination need to be deployed to stop him) then it lies in the Democrats, and all Americans who don’t want a dictator, rallying around someone (anyone) capable of stopping Trump winning in November.

Oh, what a mess we are in. American democracy is on the line. Most likely this is just the beginning of more violence to come. Most likely that violence will come from Trump and his supporters. Then it will be politely explained away by centrists as normal politics, while anyone who tries to oppose Trump, and his rising tide of violence, is chastised as the real extremist.

Donald Trump picture taken by Gage Skidmore and used under creative commons.

Will Trumpism continue without Trump?

Four years ago I was confident that Hillary Clinton would easily beat Donald Trump, so it’s with some trepidation that I start this blog post by saying that the polls are looking good for Joe Biden in the election this November. 

Election website 538 forecasts a Biden win in 87 of the 100 scenarios they projected (at time of writing). The predictions of a Democratic victory could be wrong and Trump has come from behind to beat the odds in the past, but the smart money is certainly on Biden and he could possibly win a huge landslide.

There is the very real possibility of Trump refusing to acknowledge his defeat and sitting in the White House like the blockage in the drain of democracy that he is. If that happens it will be the most unprecedented thing that has happened in this whole unprecedented Presidency. 

I think Trump will leave office if he loses. Probably not without a fair amount of grumbling on Twitter. He will most likely go when, after losing them the White House, Senate and House of Representatives, the Republican Party finally grows a spine and cuts him loose. The more important question is: what happens to Trumpism after Trump? Will it die with his political career? Will someone else emerge to be the standard bearer for bloviating hate in American politics?

Trumpism beyond Trump

Trumpism won’t end with Trump. Trump satisfied a need that a group of American voters want. This may be a minority of voters, and if Biden really wallops Trump then we’ll find out exactly what the floor in Trump’s support is, however, the itch in American politics that Trump scratches won’t go away if Trump loses.

What some voters want, and what Trump stands for, is America’s naked self-interest, free from constraint by any other principle. Trump is purely transactional; he sees the world through the prism of what benefits him (which is why he doesn’t understand military service despite claiming to be a patriot) and he appeals to voters who see politics the same way. The “ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do for you” voters.

America First

This is summed up by Trump’s adoption of the (antisemitic in origin) slogan: America First. Trump supporters want America First. They don’t care about America’s allies or the values that America is supposed to represent around the world. They don’t have vainglorious ideas about America being the world’s policeman or the exporter of free-market capitalism, which makes them different from how many establishment Republican politicians see America. They want what benefits America (and themselves) within the country.

They don’t want to apologise for America or to compromise for America. They see the world as everyone vs America and make no distinction between fellow democracies, America’s close allies or authoritarian dictatorships. They see all countries as equal before the question of: what have you done for America recently? Many voters see politicians in these terms and Trump is the perfect candidate for them.

Bellicose politics

Trump is also rude about his enemies. He isn’t restrained about what he says or holds back in any way, especially when laying into someone he (and his supporters) doesn’t like. This is another itch that Trump scratches. During the Cold War American conservatives had the perfect enemy they could loudly denounce: communism. Communism was the ultimate anti-America and conservatives could be as loud as they want in demonising it.

Since the end of the Cold War, conservatives have wanted an enemy they can be loud about hating. The politics of globalisation and international cooperation of the 1990s didn’t provide this. Islamic terrorism in the 2000s was a partial substitute for communism, but it didn’t provide the need for an enemy inside America working to bring down the country that communism provided. Islamic terrorism is mainly something that happens far away from America (barring one notable and high-profile exception) and therefore doesn’t exist to many Americans.

Trump’s endless bellicose crusade against liberals, mainstream conservatives (mainstream by American standards, or terrifyingly right wing by everyone else’s standards) BLM, antifa, the media and anyone else who has been mildly critical of Trump’s massive corruption and defaming of the highest office in America, meets the need for conservative voters who want an enemy they can hate and indulge in violent fantasies about defending their local grocery store from.

Blue collar social conservatives

Trump also provides a rallying point for blue collar social conservatives. This is odd as Trump is in many ways the opposite of a socially conservative blue collar voter. Sure, he hates immigrants, liberals and people who went to college, and he isn’t afraid to say so in un-PC ways, but in many other ways he is the opposite of blue collar socially conservative values.

Trump has no time for faith (he claims to be religious, but clearly doesn’t believe there is a power higher than himself), he has no self-denial (Trump has never held back on indulging himself), he is an affront to the traditional family (Trump is a serial cheater and serial divorcee) and he doesn’t believe in service to the community (Trump has never done anything that doesn’t benefit him personally immediately).

These blue collar socially conservative values are at odds with liberal metropolitan America’s values of self-expression and self-actualisation. Trump certainly believes in pursuing his own self-actualisation and pretty much insults every blue collar socially conservative value, but he still provides a rallying point for people with those values. By saying you support Trump, you are able to make a bold statement about your politics, which is another need in American politics that he satisfies: being the visible symbol for a group of people with certain values.

The culture war isn’t going away

This stark divide in values between many Americans has led to a culture war between liberal and conservative Americans, which shows no sign of ending even if Trump loses big time. Not all conservatives are Trump supporters, but Trump does provide some things that many conservatives want: America First, being aggressive towards conservative America’s enemies and being the symbol of blue collar America - at least until Google invents a self-driving, Confederate flag flying, country music blasting pickup truck that is legally allowed to stand for office.

Yelling “America First” and being rude about his enemies is key to Trump’s success. He may have gotten into the White House because people disliked Hilary Clinton more than they disliked him and he may get kicked out of the White House because more people dislike Trump more than they dislike Biden, however, Trump got the Republican nomination because he gave conservatives what they wanted.

Another politician will emerge to provide these things, whatever happens to Trump in November. This may be a politician who is less of an unhinged, impulsive, stupid, megalomanic than Trump and thus might be a lot more effective at rallying their support against the restrictions that the American constitution places on the power of the presidency, which is something we should all be worried about. If Trump is Barry Goldwater to someone else’s Ronald Regan, then we should all fear that someone else.

All this means that the era of Trump’s politics isn’t over, even if Biden wins in a landslide.

Donald Trump picture taken by Gage Skidmore and used under creative commons.

The Mueller Report is the end of the beginning of the Trump Presidency

Liberals, leftists and anyone who doesn't want the world to end in the next few years have been waiting with baited breath for the release of the Mueller Report. For those lucky people who have been living under a rock, the Mueller Report is the final report from the investigation into Donald Trump’s presidential campaign’s possible connections to Russia conducted by Robert Swan Mueller (yes that is his real middle name). The idea was to answer the question of whether the current President of the United States colluded with a hostile power to cheat his way into the White House. Writing that sort of unbelievable sentence is the new normal. 

Anyone who hasn't gone that peculiar type of mad that the American Right has gone have been hoping that the Mueller Report would be the end of the Trump Presidency. Or, hopefully, the end of Trump as a public entity, after he had been thrown in prison for a long time for conspiring with the enemies of the country he professes to love so much.

Sadly, the Mueller Report doesn't look like it will be the end of Trump. It didn't lead to the Republican Party finally turning on him and holding him accountable for all the ways he has threatened the democracy they claim to love so much. (There is more than enough hypocrisy to go around when it comes to Trump.)

The Mueller Report doesn't appear to be the beginning of the process to get rid of Trump. Even if the Democrats in the House of Representatives start impeachment proceedings, there is not enough in the report to have him convicted in the Senate or forced from office. The Mueller Report seems more like the end of the story of Trump impeachment than the beginning.

When thinking about the sorry state of US politics (summed up by the fact that their President is a reality TV star who lost money opening a casino) I am reminded of a Winston Churchill quote: "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

This is the end of the beginning of the Trump Presidency as it ends the questions raised by the campaign. The Mueller Report settles the issue of whether the way that Trump became the President means that he is not legally allowed to be President. It reminds me of when the Supreme Court ruled on the election of President Bush in 2000; it means that a legal process won't end the nightmare the world has found itself him.

I think that Trump is completely unfit to be president because of his character, the fact that he is a bully, he mocked the disabled, he stirred up racial tension, attacked the institutions of democracy, lied a lot, refused to condemn Nazis, was endorsed by the KKK, is a failed businessman, is an idiot and for many more reasons than I can think of right now. He doesn't need to break election law to be bad for the whole world. However, the Mueller Report shows he hasn't invalided his Presidency by his own actions.

The Mueller Report is not a complete exoneration of Trump, whatever he claims. There are many wrongdoings highlighted by the investigation and many senior people from the campaign, including the man who ran it, are in prison. The problem is that the Mueller Report isn't going to be the impeachment ejector seat that many people, myself included, hoped it would be.

The struggle against Trump and the ethnonationalism he exploits continues. It will be a long struggle and there will be many painful defeats along the way. However, we must continue to fight Trump and his ilk with everything we have. The far-right won't be beaten by a legal technicality.

We need to defeat the far-right at the ballot box, in culture, online and in the streets. This fight is bigger than one report or even the Trump Presidency. It is a struggle against authoritarian and ethnonationalist ideas that we can see in Brazil, in Poland, in Austria, Germany, France, Italy, Russia and elsewhere. We can see it in the UK with the rise of Tommy Robinson and UKIP's change into being an openly xenophobic party. The tolerant people of the world need to repudiate intolerant.

The hope that the Mueller Report would neatly remove Trump without the need for a messy election is similar to those in the UK who think that if we can just revoke Article 50, and stop Brexit, then everything will go back to pre-2016 automatically. Even if Remain can win a second referendum, Tommy Robinson will still be a blight on our politics. We need to organise against everything that is wrong with Britain, not just Brexit.

Everyone needs to get involved. You can contribute in big and small ways. You can vote, volunteer, march or join a group. What you do doesn't have to be party political. You can volunteer at a woman's Shelter or with a group who support migrants or stand up to Uncle when he says “that Gerard Batten chap makes some points.”

The lesson here is the way to defeat Trump and the far-right is not to claim that there has been an administrative mistake, like someone who has been served the wrong thing in a restaurant, but take to the streets.

2020 is when we end Trump. George Bush won a second term, we can’t let Trump win again. The Mueller Report shows that the origins of Trump won’t be his undoing; only a movement of resistance will be.

This is the end of the beginning of the Trump Presidency and now the real the fight begins.

Donald Trump picture taken by Gage Skidmore and used under creative commons.

American cannot ignore the problems of its history

American history is full of chapters many Americans would rather forget. The theft of land from the Native Americans, followed by introducing them to smallpox and whiskey for example. Writing slavery into the constitution and then suppressing African Americans via Jim Crow laws is another. There’s also the wars, started ostensibly to spread democracy, but actually to spread America’s power. There is also, the propping up of oppressive regimes sympathetic to America, or encouraging anti-democratic rebellions against democratically elected left wing governments.

How any country engages with the darker aspects of its own history is a fraught topic for its citizens. For America, which prides itself on being not just another country but a land of justice and liberty, it’s an even more emotionally explosive process. Americans can be quite sensitive about the times their country has failed to live up to the shining city on the hill it was supposed to be.

This is why I have a lot of respect for President Barack Obama who tried, to some degree, to atone for the terrible episodes of American history. As well as being the first black President and trying to heal America's racial wounds, he visited Laos and acknowledging that they are the most bombed country in history, thanks mainly to America, still dealing with problems today involving unexploded but still very dangerous ordnance. He was the first sitting US President to visit Hiroshima during the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan and embraced Shigeaki Mori, a survivor of the bombing.

These were the right things to do. Obama was able to show remorse for the terrible parts of American history with a dignity that meant that the country was not brought low by this acknowledgement. He showed that America could engage with its past while trying to live up to what it promised. It was right for Obama to attempt address these historical injustices, not the least because the more America acknowledges its past tragedies, the more likely it is to avoid future tragedies.

It has become clear that many Americans don’t want to acknowledge the troubling episodes in their country’s history. They don’t want to engage with the systemic racial violence that is most of American history, and they certainly don’t want to atone for it. Many Americans are not happy about the spread of liberal ideas, such as: “it’s good that America show some humility towards countries like Laos and Japan that it has treated terribly”. They are also not happy about liberals asking why so many statues were put up to honour Confederate leaders during the Jim Crow era. There has been a cultural backlash against the idea that America has anything to be ashamed of.

America is currently embroiled in a liberal vs. conservative culture war that has dragged in everything from football to Rosie O'Donnell. Even supposedly independent institutions like the US military have been appropriated for this conflict. Part of this culture war is a fight over what America should say about itself. Should it be unashamedly proud of its own history or should it attempt to address historical injustices and atone for its past?

One side of this great divide had their man in the White House, so America briefly showed some shame about all the people it had killed and how it failed to be a shining city on the hill. Now the other side has its man in the White House and America will not admit that it has any flaws. Salute the flag or take a hike. Those are your only choices.

Donald Trump’s unselfconscious patriotism is so uncritical of American history that it goes out of its way to encourage the worst aspects of America: white nationalism. No matter how many Nazis or Ku Klux Klan members claim that they feel emboldened by Trump’s election, Trump still cannot bring himself to criticise anyone who assembles under the Stars and Stripes. He cannot conceive of any flaw with patriotism even when it is emboldening Nazis and thus he cannot believably condemn them.

For Trump, the flag and American history is something to be proud of and not apologise for in any way. He represents an America that is not ashamed of anything it has done, no matter how cruel, bloody, or a betrayal of the values America is supposed to stand for. Trump’s America does not need to show remorse.

This may sound very academic, but if America cannot acknowledge the problems of its past, or what people have done under the name of protecting or loving America, then it cannot avoid problems in the present. If American has done nothing wrong then it can do no wrong, especially when it is looking after its national interests. Trump has also gone out of his way to encourage the worst aspect of other countries. He has praised strongmen like Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Trump is creating the associations that future liberal Presidents will have to apologise for and future Conservative Presidents will ignore as they continue the cycle of violence and oppression.

Ignoring the worst aspects of American history won’t make them go away. In fact it will lead to America doing terrible (and avoidable) things in the present. There are many tragedies in America’s history and they need to engage with. Otherwise they will only fester.

Trump can undo a lot of Obama’s work. He is trying his best to do exactly that, but he can’t get rid of America’s past and cannot extinguish the hope that Obama gave us. The hope that America can engage with its past and atone for the terrible things it has done.

Donald Trump picture taken by Gage Skidmore and used under creative commons.

Why are we surprised when Trump does what he said he would do?

The world has been shocked by President Donald Trump’s executive order that suspends America’s refugee program for 120 days, indefinitely halts the Syrian refugee program and bans entry to the US from seven Muslim majority nations (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen). Although suspended, for now, it caused chaos throughout the world’s airports and closed America off to people fleeing the worst conditions in the world. More significantly by creating a law that specifically targets the followers of one religion, Trump is putting into law the naked prejudice of his campaign.

The world has been shocked by President Donald Trump’s executive order that suspends America’s refugee program for 120 days, indefinitely halts the Syrian refugee program and bans entry to the US from seven Muslim majority nations (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen). Although suspended, for now, it caused chaos throughout the world’s airports and closed America off to people fleeing the worst conditions in the world. More significantly by creating a law that specifically targets the followers of one religion, Trump is putting into law the naked prejudice of his campaign.

Trump has disregarded the moral obligation that the West has to people feeling violence, tyranny and economic collapse. These are the least fortunate people in the world, who are leaving conditions the West has indirectly created or failed to address. To strongmen like Trump, compassion is a weakness to be expunged. It is essential that we stop Trump from crushing our compassion for people who have been caught in horrific civil wars and sectarian violence.

I am surprised that Trump actually enacted this executive order, despite making it a key part of his campaign for President. I thought it was such an extreme idea that surely he did not intend to go through with it. Trump is clearly a bully with little regard for the lives of other human beings, but I assumed that even he would want to protect America’s (and his own, as President’s) standing as the moral leader of the world. I am not alone in this. So why are we surprised when Trump does what he said he would do?

One reason may be our reassurance that the checks and balances of the American government would hold him in place. Trump may be President, but he is at odds with much of the Republican Party who control of the Senate and House of Representatives. So-called “mainstream Republicans” should act as a check against the extreme actions of Trump.

Congressmen and senators are not standing up to him out of fear of his base and the power they hold during the next primary season. Trump has already nominated a suitably conservative Supreme Court justice. As long as he also delivers the tax cut Congress has been itching to pass, repeals Obamacare and cuts Medicaid, then the Republicans are more than willing to let any number of heartless executive orders pass that motivated by prejudice.

His own government may not hold Trump back, but the pressure from other world leaders has constrained rogues before. Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande were quick to condemn Trump’s action. However, our own Theresa May has so far refused to do so. May is desperate to court Trump as an ally to deliver the trade deal that will make Brexit more viable. If sacrificing our status as a moral leader by refusing to condemn overt prejudice is the cost of Brexit, then it is too high to pay.

How can we criticise the actions of the Russian or Turkish government if we allow similar affronts to decency from our closest ally? One that we have a “special relationship” with? Jeremy Corbyn was right to call for Trump to be banned from the UK while his Muslim ban stands. Only by refusing to respect Trump and the office he holds can we communicate to him that his actions are morally unacceptable.

One reason why I surprised that Trump would actually enact this order might be because I am out of step with what people want? A recent poll showed that 49% of the British public think that Trump’s state visit should go ahead. It is possible that many other people have the same prejudices towards Muslim and refugees that Trump has, but a popular prejudice is still a prejudice and a popular moral outrage is still a moral outrage. We have a duty to these, because we won the lottery of life by being born into stable Western democracies. We owe to those less fortunate to help them however they can. Trump’s action must be opposed even if they are met with widespread support.

Another reason why we did not believe that Trump would enact the Muslim ban is that he lies a lot and contradicts himself a lot. It is difficult to tell what he really means. It is easy to dismiss anything that he says if we want to. This is connected to another reason for our disbelief: it is hard to

We are reluctant to accept that Trump will behave in an openly prejudiced way, enact illiberal executive orders (orders that violate the constitutional requirement not to pass laws that discriminate against someone because of religion) and cannot be held back by anyone, because this denial is a natural defence to prevent our fragile psyches being crushed by total and all-consuming panic about how much danger we are in. However, we must take Trump seriously when he says he wants to do something. We must accept that he will try and build the wall, start a trade war with China and begin a nuclear arms race. In the future he may threaten more extreme actions. We must take these seriously as well.

What Trump is doing is wrong. He may use the justification of national security, but America already has one of most stringent vetting processes for refugees and immigration controls. These measures go beyond those passed by George W. Bush during the height of the war on terror. This is a populist gesture informed by a perception of Muslims as dangerous. It fans the flames of hatred, prejudice and is inherently discretionary. The Republican Party will not stop him. Other world leaders will not stop him. It is up to us, concerned citizens, to stop him.

It is especially important that we take Trump seriously when he behaves like or shows affection for authoritarian strongmen. Trump has praised Vladimir Putin and people in his inner circle have links to Putin. Putin also aided Trump in getting elected through the targeted hacks of his Democratic opponent. Trump also frequently attacks the independence of the press and its right to criticise him. He has given senior government jobs to Republicans responsible for repressing the voting rights of African Americans. We must take seriously the fact that he is a threat to liberty and democracy. We need to take this seriously and to stop denying the truth of Donald Trump.

Donald Trump picture taken by Gage Skidmore and used under creative commons.

The rise of illiberal democracy

In my last post I talked about the threat to liberal democracy that comes from liberal undemocracy. Liberal democracy has been the basis of Western society since the end of World War 2, but now it is under threat from both liberal undemocracy and illiberal democracy, which is also spreading through the Western world.

To understand illiberal democracy, we need to start by looking at the basic elements of a liberal society. (This is liberal with a small “L” or liberal as in John Locke, not liberal like Hillary Clinton.) The main elements of a liberal society are a free press, an independent judiciary, a degree of economic freedom, a degree of social freedom and representative democracy coupled with universal suffrage. We are seeing the rise of a political movement that threatens all of these things and thus strikes at the heart of the liberal Western order.

Donald Trump is leading an attacking on the free press. He misses no opportunity to call the media biased against him and to question the legitimacy of any criticism of him. In Trump’s world there is no such thing as pro-Trump bias, there is only legitimate news that supports him and illegitimate news that criticises him. This is an attack on the liberal idea of a free press that holders the powerful to account.

Recently the independence of our judiciary has also been questioned. Following a High Court ruling that parliament (not the government) must decide to trigger Article 50, and begin the process of Britain leaving the EU, several British newspapers questioned the rights of judges to interpret the law and some even went so far as to label them “enemies of the people”. Another key principle of a liberal society is that parliament makes the law and judges are free to interrupt them. By suggesting that some political decisions are so important that judges must not be allowed to interrupt how the law applies to them is to question the independence of our judiciary. It is fine to claim that the judges made the wrong legal decision (or interpretation of the law), but to question their position as arbiters of the law is against liberalism.

Both of the above attacks were backed up by the fact that the political movements attacking liberalism (Trump and Brexit) won democratic elections. These political movements represent a huge change to Western society because they call into question our liberal democratic foundation. As political movements they attack liberalism in other ways: both want to restrict economic freedom and are a profound shift in the economic policy. This could be the end of neoliberalism and the beginning of a new age of economic nationalism. Although Brexit and Trump are profoundly different (Brexit is much more pro-free trade than Trump) they both question the current liberal economic consensus.

These two political movements also want to restrict social freedoms. At their core is nativist populism, which is frequently expressed as hostility to immigrants and non-whites. Winning elections based on illiberal practices such as curtailing immigration from certain countries, deporting large numbers Mexicans, banning Muslims from the country or exploiting latent xenophobia is an expression of hostility to the social freedoms that underpin liberalism. There is no valid liberal democracy without social liberalism and winning a democratic mandate on a platform of taking away people’s rights away is profoundly illiberal.

Trump and the Republican Party have even gone so far as to attack universal suffrage. Voting reforms put in place by Republicans and supported by Trump are designed specifically to stop poor people and ethnic minorities from voting. This is because they are more likely to vote for Democrats. We can expect to see more of this under President Trump and by making it difficult for citizens to vote, Trump is threatening the liberal principle of representative democracy through universal suffrage.

Finally, Trump attacks the foundations of liberal democracy by calling the election itself into question. Trump claims that millions voted illegally, which there is no evidence of. Questioning the legitimacy of elections themselves show the scale of Trump’s hostility to liberal democracy as does his fondness for dictators like Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Trump represents a clear and present danger to the very basis of western civilization through his attacks on liberal democracy.

These two occurrences, the rise of illiberal democracy and liberal undemocracy, are threatening liberal democracy because Western society is so divided. Trump, Brexit and other populist, nativist movements show the divisions of our society, which are mirrored by illiberal democracy and liberal undemocracy. Some people hail Trump and Brexit as the overturning of a corrupt political order and some see it as a threat to western society. Some are willing attack liberalism to destroy this corrupt political order and some want to subvert democracy in order to prevent them. This new divide between illiberal democracy and liberal undemocracy cuts across the old left and right political spectrum and is the key debate in contemporary politics. Restoring the old axis and liberal democracy is not possible until we unite our divided societies and return political debate to the old divisions.

This is not possible, partly because we cannot turn back time, but partly because the idea behind the old political debates do not explain the world we live in anymore. Neoliberalism does not make sense after the 2008 financial crash. Technocratic institutions are not protecting our society from existential threats. We need to engage with the ideas thrown up by illiberal democracy and liberal undemocracy so that we can combat the worst aspects of contemporary politics: ie racist populism and the desire of certain people to take away the rights of others.

The established liberal democratic ideas that underpinned Western society for decades are now being questioned. We cannot turn back the clock and stop this. Instead we need to ask ourselves: what do we want from our future and what must be stopped at all costs?

Donald Trump picture taken by Gage Skidmore and used under creative commons.

2016: the year everything stopped making sense

In 2015 there were lots of surprises, but at the end of the year everything made sense. David Cameron had won an unexpected majority for the Tories, but the reasons for his victory were typical of past elections: the voters preferred Cameron as a lead and thought that Labour were weak on the economy. No one predicted that Jeremy Corbyn could be leader of the Labour Party when he declared his intention to run for the position, but his victory makes sense when you remember that the other candidate’s statements on welfare, spending and immigration were far to the right of what the average Labour Party member is comfortable with. 2015 made sense when viewed through our traditional lens for examining politics.

All that changed in 2016. It is as if our ability to understand the titanic shifts occurring in politics is itself breaking down.

This year saw surprise victories for Brexit and Donald Trump, as well as growing support for right wing nationalist populism all over the Western world. Despite the conventional left and right opposing these movements, and the combined weight of our civil institutes and media thrown against them, they succeeded by engaging in a different political debate that is completely parallel to the one being had by established politics. Cameron wanted to talk about the economy, but Nigel Farage was talking about borders. Hillary Clinton wanted to talk about experienced leadership, but Trump wanted to talk about crooked politicians.

Brexit was not a left wing or a right wing issue. The leaders of government and opposition were united in opposing it and are now united in supporting it. The supporters of Brexit and Remain are drawn from both safe Tory and Labour seats. People now politically identify more strongly with their referendum vote than any particular political party. This is an earthquake that has shaken up the way we have been doing politics since 1989 (perhaps since 1945).

British Politics is profoundly different after the referendum result. There is now a new political spectrum divided between nativists and globalists with both sides drawing support from both the main right and left wing parties. This is nothing short of a profound reordering of politics.

The same process is happening in America. The victory of Trump has shown that the most electorally successful position in the old way of doing politics (being socially and economically liberal) does not work when confronted with populism. The way of doing politics that has gone unchallenged in Britain and America since the days of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton is now dead. Seeing the world through their political prism no longer allows us to make sense of it.

The unusual victories of Brexit and Trump were driven by many factors, but a key one is the way that we consume our news today. Two points emerged this year: firstly, that many of us get most of our news from a social media bubble that feeds back opinions that we are likely to agree with and excludes ones that we are likely to disagree with. This has distorted our perception of politics and how widely accepted our opinions are. It has allowed ideas and positions to go completely unchallenged and preventing voters from interrogating their own opinions.

The second issue is that many people are consuming some degree of fake news. Stories that are completely untrue and would not see the light of day in a media landscape that was dominated by a few well established brands that respected the ethics of journalism. The complacency and narrow mindedness of some established media companies is partly to blame for this. However, responsibility also lies with ourselves as media consumers.

We are too willing to only read articles that we agree with and ignore articles that we disagree with. This is what has allowed us to be lied to at an industrial scale. We need to break out of our filter bubble and find some way of telling what is a lie from what is truth in a media landscape where both appear equally valid and where we are driven to the one that most suits our own bias.

Much like climate change, the solution to this problem does not require a technological fix, but for people to behave better and to be more open minded. How do we encourage people to avoid confirmation bias, to be open to new ideas and to challenge their own assumptions? Most people, it turns out, would prefer to be lied to than to challenge their own world view. In our current way of doing politics we accept news from the sources that we like or that broadly share our political opinions. In the world of fake news this leaves us open to being lied to and exploited.

The undisputed king of the fake news and media relativism is Vladimir Putin, a man who has extended his reach across the world this year, maybe as far as the White House. Politicians of the left and the right are united in the belief that something needs to be done about this tyrant and threat to democracy. However no-one knows what to do beyond the use of strong words.

In the old politics sunlight was the best disinfectant. It was sunlight that showed the BNP to be the incompetent thugs that they were, but how do we do use facts to bring down a man who shifts perceptions of reality itself? How do we argue with someone who exists in a murky world where every piece of information is equal regardless of how extreme or spurious it is? How do we present a better alternative to someone who insists that all government is equally flawed? Putin challenges even the fundamental idea of what a fact is. We cannot defeat him with conventional politics.

Putin’s biggest accomplishment this year has been saving Bashar Al Assad’s oppressive Syrian regime and successfully crushing the uprising against him. In the process hundreds, perhaps thousands of civilians have been killed. The suffering the people of Aleppo, meted out indiscriminately by these cruel despots, must move every human being. However, the West cannot do anything about it. The world is too complex, too unstable and too frightening - so we are paralysed by inaction. This is not the world of the 2000s; America and Britain cannot throw their weight around and hope this effects a smooth transition to a better, freer world. We do not understand the complexities of the geopolitics in the 2010s enough to stop something as awful mass slaughter.

Our entire way of understanding the world has stopped working. The current toolbox we use to understand politics is not sufficient to explain the new political system that we live under. This has led to those with painfully simple messages to cut through the confusion to great effect: “take back control”, “make America great again”. The answer is not to become simpler, but to find a way to navigate these new complexities.

In 2016 the soft left ran out of things to say that explain the world to voters. Between Hillary Clinton and Owen Smith, people simply do not believe in the old way of doing social democracy anymore. Corbyn offers something different, which is welcome, but I do not feel that his analysis of the political challenges of the early 21st century are complex enough or radical enough to be up to the task of inspiring large numbers of people to support a left wing political movement.

Let 2017 be a year of new ideas. Not 80s throwbacks, or 90s throwbacks, or insultingly simple answers to complex questions. Let 2017 be a year of brand new exciting ideas, deep thought about the world we now find ourselves in and an openness to re-examine the assumptions of the past. The left needs a vision of the future because the future is frightening. It needs to be new and it needs be radical, perhaps more radical than we have ever been before. I know we can do it if we find a way to remixing our thinking so that we can make sense of 2017.

Donald Trump picture taken by Gage Skidmore and used under creative commons.

In defence of identity politics

Alec MacGillis, at Pro Publica, wrote a piece that was typical of how we thought before the election. There was fear that Donald Trump would win over blue collar Democrats and non-voters and ride into office on the backs of the economically marginalised, those left behind by globalisation. It did not happen. According to Shane Bauer, Senior Reporter for Mother Jones, Trump supporters earned on average $11 thousand a year more than Hillary Clinton’s supporters.

This shows how divided America is politically. Millions of Republicans would not support Clinton despite the racism and sexism of the Trump campaign. However, rather than a divide between the haves and the have-nots, the divide is between those who like the way American culture and society is changing and those who are hostile to it.

This is an important fact about the state of contemporary politics in the West. Brexit has been described in similar terms, however, 59% of leave voters were middle class. As David Wearing, at the Centre for Labour and Social Studies, has argued: "The Leave vote correlates much more strongly with social attitudes than with social class."

Wearing goes on to show 81% of leave voters think multiculturalism is a hostile force and that 74% dislike feminism. 26% of the U.K. population (slightly less than the percentage who voted to leave the EU) agree with the statement that “the government should encourage immigrants and their families to leave Britain (including family members who were born in Britain)”. Taken together this paints a picture of people who are motivated primarily by hostility to multiculturalism and not economic anxiety.

70% of Brexit voters say they would make an economic sacrifice to leave the EU, which indicates that Leave supporters are not living on the breadline. As Wearing says: “If the white van man has become the iconic Brexiteer, it appears that what's more pertinent is the whiteness of the man rather than the van (and the fact that the van is more likely to be an Audi).” The key point is that the election of Trump and the Brexit vote were not caused by economic hardship, but a rejection of multiculturalism.

Why are so many people opposed to multiculturalism? For many on the left support for multiculturalism is self-evident. If many people are alienated by it then it must be because we are going about seeking equality the wrong way. The goal is fine, but the methods are wrong. People who hate identity politics, political correctness, safe spaces and privilege checking are responding with an anti-liberal backlash.

Recently Stephen Kinnock argued that Labour must stop “obsessing” over diversity or face the same defeat as Clinton. Kinnock argues for a one size fits all approach to social justice, saying that: “Every group is actually struggling with the same problems of social mobility, the same problems of disempowerment, the same problems of feeling that they are being left behind. It doesn’t matter what the colour of your skin is or what your background is. What matters is that you’re poor and you’re disadvantaged and we’ve got to be there to help and engage with every single one of you - not just those who seem to have been taking priority over others.”

Tackling poverty and disempowerment should be a priority of the Labour Party, but Kinnock is misrepresenting the growing political division as economic and not social. In Britain 48% of adults hold authoritarian, populist attitudes and 26% support a statement that is a clear definition of prejudice. This division cuts across economic groups and is a rejection of multiculturalism itself, not how we package it.

Prejudice and right wing populism is spreading. The victims will be immigrants and ethnic minorities. Already one in four people believe that you are not properly British if your parents were immigrants. Hostility to Muslims is spreading. A significant number of people believe that acceptance and tolerance of other cultures is a force for social ill. On the left we need to stand up to this. You can call this standing up for identity politics or political correctness or whatever you like, but it is what we need to do. It is not enough to have a one size fits all policy on equality, because we are not all the same. Some people suffer more discrimination than others. On the left we need to specifically stand with the people suffering from the backlash against equality. That is doing identity politics.

People who feel alienated by identity politics, political correctness, safe spaces and privilege checking are people who do not like the way that ethnic minorities or women ask for equality. Identify politics is the mechanism through which emancipation from prejudice is achieved. If someone feel uncomfortable with this, it is because they benefit from the systems of privilege that run through society and realising this is a painful experience.

We need to stop spreading the view that the disaffection of the poor created Trump, Brexit and the backlash against multiculturalism, because they wanted jobs and healthcare. This is simply not true. The root of this backlash is dislike of how our society is changing. It is a dislike of equality.

The growing backlash against equality needs to be directly confronted and not pandered to. People need to know that it is unacceptable to hold racist and xenophobic beliefs to stop holding them. To legitimise them in any way is encouraging racism and xenophobia. Identity politics, political correctness, safe spaces and privilege checking are all parts of this.

Donald Trump picture taken by Gage Skidmore and used under creative commons.

Trump’s election shows how divided we are politically

Already a lot of column inches have been filled by analysis of Donald Trump’s unprecedented victory. A lot focus on how racially divided the results were: 58% of white voters opted for Trump, whereas only 21% of non-white voters did. Despite the fact that Trump won the support of the majority of white voters, there was no white surge, i.e. he did not turn out millions of white non-voters. The support he did get was from traditional Republican voters. Trump turned out 90% of the Republican coalition that Mitt Romney did in 2012, and got around 1 million less votes than Romney did.

Trump won the election because Hillary Clinton did not turn out Democratic voters; she got 5 million votes less than Barack Obama in 2012. The effect of Trump and his extraordinarily racist campaign was to turn voters off, hence the lower turnout, rather than encouraging support for Clinton. It turns out that Americans would not vote for the candidate of another party, even if one party’s candidate is a sexist, xenophobic demigod without experience of government and temperamentally unsuited to the Presidency. Trump’s awfulness failing to translate into support for Clinton is because of the huge political divide that has opened up between the two different Americas that inhabit one country.

This divide ensured that Republicans would not vote for Clinton to keep Trump out. Republicans were willing to overlook racism to vote for their party's candidate; they knew how awful Trump was, but they did not care enough to vote for another candidate. Endorsing, with your vote, an openly racist candidate is racism, however, I do not believe voters were consciously voting for a candidate of white supremacy. They were voting for a party they supported against a party and a candidate they loathed.

How did we get to the point where millions of people are willing to support racism instead of changing their political allegiance? Certainly the false equivalence we saw during the campaign played a huge part. Anyone, whether professional pundit or casual social media commentator, claiming that both candidates were equally flawed was supporting the view that Republicans should stick with their disgusting monster of a candidate, because Clinton was just as bad. This is not true. One candidate was objectively worse than the other. Anyone engaging in false equivalence directly contributed to a Trump victory.

The filter bubble created by social media is crucial, it means that we do not see news that challenges our worldview. In order to curate the information environment that you will agree with, Facebook or Twitter also engage in a false equivalence of news sources. A blog putting out unsubstantiated, heavily biased “news” that you agree with is presented as equally credible to a news source putting out news you disagree with. A Republican may see an article about Trump being accused of sexual harassment from the New York Times, but below it is a Breitbart article or a post from a smaller blog claiming that Hillary Clinton had people killed. One of these is legitimate news from legitimate news source. The other is not, but our own confirmation bias and social media’s false equivalence mean that they are given equal weight.

Hatred of mainstream media feeds into this. We are quick to dismiss anything from a mainstream news source that might challenge our worldview and quick to accept anything, regardless of how flimsy or dubious it might be, that chimes with how we see the world.

There are lots of problems with how mainstream publications cover many stories, but the solution is not turn instead to news sites that have no reputation to uphold, no sense of journalistic standards, print outright lies or conspiracy theories. The Internet has provided a whole Universe of different news sources so that we can turn our backs on the mainstream media and never hear anything that challenges our deeply held beliefs. This has grown the political divide and leads us to a situation where people believe that Hillary Clinton is a worse candidate for President than Donald Trump.

Some have chosen to blame “safe spaces”, “political correctness”, or any aspect of social liberalism or pluralism that they do not like, as a cause of this divide. This is not the case. Political correctness is the desire for minority groups to be treated as equals to others, not a plan to marginalise white heterosexual males. Safe spaces are places where people can be sure they will not experience racism, sexism or other forms of prejudice. If you accept that they caused the divide then the solution is to abandon attempts to treat other people fairly, get rid of spaces where people can shelter from prejudice and accept more of the discourse of Trump and his followers into our politics.

Western society is very close to a breakthrough in the difficult struggle for racial equality. Movements such as Black Lives Matter and thousands of other grass roots campaigners, writers and journalists have detailed the struggle of ethnic minorities. The emphasis is now on politicians and members of privileged groups to act, however we are now confronted with a backlash from white people who believe that giving rights to others takes away their own rights. We have seen this in GamerGate, the Sad Puppies, accusations of ‘feminazis’ - and now in Brexit and Trump.

Calls to end political correctness and abolish safe spaces are calls to slow down the journey towards racial equality in favour of a slide backwards to a world where white privilege stands unchallenged. Some have claimed that social liberalism and pluralism is too confrontational and is exacerbating the political divide. They would prefer that women, people of colour and other oppressed groups made their objections as quietly as possible so that they can be easily ignored.

Social liberalism or pluralism is not the problem. The problem is that many of us have gone on a journey and not taken others with us. This is the cause of the divide. We have not made the case for political correctness in a convincing way, and that is where we have faltered. The problem is not being too confrontational - rights were never won by not being confrontational. The problem is not standing up for social liberalism and making the case.

We are deeply divided but not entirely irreconcilable. People on both sides of the divide hold common values of a sense of justice, fairness and community. It is through these values that we can appeal to other people, make our case and heal this division.

Donald Trump picture taken by Gage Skidmore and used under creative commons.

Welcome to life inside the nightmare

I am writing this on Wednesday evening while looking at the front page of the BBC news website. I cannot believe that the events of the last 24 hours are real. There was a moment, at about 4am on Wednesday morning, when I was confronted with the full ghastliness of what was happening and my sleep deprived brain decided that it was not true. This is just a dream, I thought and spent a good few seconds trying to wake myself up. It did not work. Reality remains stubbornly real. We now have to accept that we are living inside our worst nightmare.

Oscar Wild once said that “when the Gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.” This sums up the perverse way that I feel responsible for what has happened in America. For years I have wished that all the people oppressed by the neoliberal status quo would get together and throw their weight behind an alternative. Then we could rock our economic system to the foundations. This is what has happened, but it was not supposed to be like this.

The first question that came to mind is, how did an uprising against global hyper-capitalism come from the far right and not the left? How did we get to a point where millions of Americans are willing to vote for a candidate who is openly racist, has ties to Vladimir Putin, lies through his teeth, brags about sexually assaulting women, flirts with the alt-right, is supported by neo-Nazis and the KKK and shows contempt for democracy itself? Who is to blame for this?

It is a complex question. False equivalence is certainly a factor; the media and individuals on social media have created a myth that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are equally flawed candidates and this is simply not true. I am not the biggest fan of Clinton but she is a million times the better option than Trump. How partisan politics has become is also to blame. Despite Trump being obviously awful, millions of people could not bring themselves to vote for the candidate of the other party. There are the left behind, the people whose wages and living standards have declined over the last thirty years, who desperately want change. There is the overt racism spreading amongst the white population. There are other factors. It is not an easy question to answer.

There are obvious parallels to be made with Britain’s vote to leave the European Union in June of this year. Two distinct interpretations of Brexit have emerged. The first is that this was a rebellion against the unequal distribution of the economic growth caused by neoliberal globalisation. Jobs, wages and living standard have declined in post-industrial areas of Western economies. Many of these areas have been thrown under a bus in the dash for the market liberalisation, free movement of capital and financialisation of the economy - the tenets of the neoliberal capitalism embraced by both major parties. People from Flint, Michigan to Boston in Lincolnshire are angry about how bleak their future is. We need to listen to them and take steps to improve the quality of life in such places to stop radical, right wing populism spreading.

The second interpretation is that white Western people are becoming increasingly hostile to multiculturalism and the mingling of different races. They are angry at the loss of privilege that being white once brought. And men, who over-index in support for the populist right, are angry about the loss of male privilege. Racism and xenophobia are spreading in a backlash to social liberalism that has been adopted by all mainstream politicians. This needs to be directly confronted to create a more harmonious society. What is overlooked in many of these discussions is that this populist, right wing rebellion against the status quo can be both of these things at the same time. The two are intrinsically linked.

The radical populism of the right is a response to the changes in society that we have seen over the last thirty years. It is a response to the changes in social structures that have given more status to women and ethnic minorities, which some people believe is at the expense of white men. It is a response to globalisation, which has given increased freedom to business, created economic growth but also created huge inequalities. It is a response to changing economic landscape, the location of jobs, the types of jobs and sectors of employment. It is a response to the increased number of people living cities and the increased numbers of people holding degrees. It is a response to the way the whole world is changing by the people who want to tell “STOP” at the top of their voice.

This has led to the emergence of a new political spectrum. It is not left wing versus right wing, but those in favour of these changes versus those opposed to them. For now, we call these two groups globalists and nativists, but clearer definitions will emerge in time. This new spectrum cuts across existing political divides. That is one reason for the success of Trump, he reaches across the Republican/Democrat split and appeals to non-voters because he is the alternative people wanted to the way the world is going. The same can be said for the leave vote in Britain or a vote for Marine Le Pen in the upcoming French presidential elections or a vote for the AfD in Germany or a host of other new nativist movements.

What does all this mean for the left? It does show that there are many people who are opposed to the globalist status quo, but Trump and the Tories under Theresa May are already shifting to occupy this territory. Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders’s traditional left wing politics do not fit into the new political spectrum. They are anti-globalist, but not nativist. By not fitting into this spectrum they risk alienating people at both ends of it.

New politics needs new politicians and new policies. People schooled in the changing political discourse. The left needs something new. The technocratic neoliberalism of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton has been rejected by voters, but the old left politics of Corbyn and Sanders is not gaining much traction. I do not know what this something new will be, but it should contain a healthy amount of social liberalism and skepticism of globalisation with a thirst for the future and a politics that looks forwards to a more hopeful tomorrow and not back to a lost golden age.

The problem is that the left does not have much time to decide what this something new is before we cease to be relevant altogether. We need to get active and resist the populist right now, because I do not want to spend the rest of my life trapped inside a nightmare that I cannot wake up from.

Donald Trump picture taken by Gage Skidmore and used under creative commons.

Hillary Clinton cannot save America

Hot take: Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders are reinvigorating politics and shaking up the left wing establishment. It's a cliche of political blogging, drawing out the obvious comparisons between old white men, both veteran socialist campaigners who are enjoying an unlikely period of success despite many people writing off their ideology in the early 90s.

It shows how complacent the centre left in Britain and America have become. Before the UK general election, and when the American Presidential election had only been going on for 6 months (why does it last 2 years?), no one would have imagined that Jeremy Corbyn would win a landslide victory to lead the Labour Party and that Bernie Sanders would give Hillary Clinton a run for her money. Then again, a year ago we were told that Donald Trump could never be the Republican Nominee.

The centre left (the Clintons, Coopers and Burnhams of this world) have been startled by a surge in support for the far left, mainly amongst younger and more disenfranchised party members. Their only response has been scare tactics. The conversation has been remarkably similar on both sides of the Atlantic: "he'll alienate moderates, he's unelectable, look at that awful right wing guy with freaky hair who will get power if we choose him".

If Sanders and Corbyn are so completely unelectable, then how come professional centre left politicians with years of experience, huge amounts of money, massive popular recognition and opinions that (apparently) everyone agrees with cannot beat them? Could it be because the centre left has completely lost its way and has nothing to offer anymore? Does anyone seriously think that electing Hillary Clinton as President will change much?

When Barack Obama was elected President back in 2008 I was hopefully for change. Eight long, painful years of George Bush Jr's presidency was coming to an end. A young, energetic, exciting politician was sweeping his way to victory. Surely after the disastrous wars and economic collapse of previous Republican government, things were going to be different this time.

For a while that hope lasted, Obama said he would close the prison in Guantanamo Bay, end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and deliver healthcare for millions of uninsured poor Americans. Then the Republicans took back the House of Representatives and the rest of the Obama presidency became a slow war of attrition between the Democratic White House and the Republican Congress. The pettiness reached its height in Autumn 2013 when the Republican shutdown the entire US government simply because they could.

I do not think Clinton will tackle the deep rooted problems of America: the huge economic inequality, the systematic unemployment, the criminalisation and intense poverty of African Americans, the openly xenophobic politics, the systematic assault on women's rights, the hollowing out of worker's rights, the sense of hopelessness and powerlessness that gives rise to extremism. I had more confidence that Obama would tackle these problems when he was re-elected in 2012 (despite four years of painfully slow struggle) than I do in a future Clinton presidency. What does Clinton have to offer to tackle America’s problems? Not much that is particularly inspiring.

The issue in Britain and America is that the centre left has nothing to offer to fix the problems of society (a lot of which were caused by their past periods of power, i.e. Blair and Clinton I). The centre left has run out of things to offer other than being opposed to the centre right, which they look quite similar to. The only reason why the centre left is in less of a crisis in America than in Britain is because the right is in thrall to the far right, which is scaring moderate voters. Trump is a gift to Clinton; I do not think she could have beaten Jed Bush or Marco Rubio.

Obama has achieved a lot in his 8 years, he did provide the healthcare he promised and stopped the Republican Congress from defunding it. He did pull America out of Afghanistan and Iraq (after a while). He brought Iran in from the cold and avoided the worst effects of the stagnating global economy. He did not close Guantanamo and he has taken America into wars in Libya and Syria. Clinton does not fill me with the confidence that she can even achieve this much. Her centre left politics do not seem capable of responding to the more complex and frightening world of the 21st century. They seem more appropriate to the mid 1990s when we thought the good times will never stop rolling. A slightly more compassionate neoliberalism is not what the world needs now. The world's needs change, now more than ever.

Bernie Sanders offers the change that America needs. Unfortunately his campaign was doomed from the start. His poll ratings among ethnic minorities are very low and he cannot win the democratic nomination without the support of black and Hispanic democrats. The current delegates spit is 2,228 to Clinton and 1,454 to Sanders, with 2,383 being the magic number to win the race. It looks like it will be Hillary Clinton.

Clinton will most likely defeat Trump to become the next President. I am sure she will be a good liberal President. She is unlikely to ban Muslims from entering the country or pass a national ban on abortions. However, I do not think she will tackle the deep rooted structural problems in American society. Oppression, hopelessness and feelings of powerlessness are rising and this breeds extremism of all flavours. America needs the type of change that Sanders promises and it needs it soon.

The rise of Trump shows the failings of American politics

I will refer you to all the moderate conservatives who said that Donald Trump will never be the Republican candidate for president. At the time of writing Trump is the frontrunner in the Republican race; it is still mathematically possible for Ted Cruz to win the nomination but it would require an unusual reversal of fortune.

Trump's campaign has been characterised by the rhetoric of the extreme right and has horrified both liberals and moderate conservatives. We were told that he would never get this far. We were told wrong. The success of Trump requires everyone to rethink how they see American politics. The reasons for Trump's success are complicated, but I believe that the rise of Trump shows a failure of American politics to tackle two critical issues: the decline in living standards of white working class Americans and the Islamophobia of American politics.

Trump’s rise as a political force is a result of his ability to exploit the rhetoric of Islamophobia. He is not the first politician to be Islamophobic, but his popularity is a result of the collective failure to stand up to Islamophobia. What was once a dog-whistle of Islamophobic political rhetoric has become just a whistle. We have had 14 years of blaming every Muslim for the actions of the few that have committed acts of terrorism and this has brought us to a point where a politician can be openly hostile to all Muslims. Trump is not new in being an openly Islamophobic, he is just better at it than everyone else.

It was inevitable that we would reach a point where a politician can call for a complete ban on Muslim immigration and imply that all Muslims should be made to identify wear badges that public identify them. It was inevitable when liberals and moderate conservatives failed to stand up to Islamophobia. We all act surprised when Trump says these awful things but he is only following an established narrative.

Liberals are to blame for the rise of Trump as much as moderate conservatives. Liberals in America have failed to stand up to Islamophobia and have been paying lip service to it whenever we talk about "criticising Islam". This is the dog whistle for being hostile to people who follow a minority religion and (usually) belong to a minority ethnic group. By not standing up to the dog whistle, or using it themselves, liberal Americans have aided Trump in turning it into an actual whistle.

Lack of moderate conservative opposition to Islamophobia, as well as exploiting this view, has allowed the conversation to be dictated by the far right. In many ways the the different candidates in the primary stage of the American presidential race are the different parties that would exist in any other country. Like in France, America has rounds of elections to narrow the field to two candidates who represent two political ideologies. Usually this ends up as being the moderate left and the moderate right, but occasionally (as in 2002 in France) a candidate from the far right makes it to the final round.

Trump represented the far right in this race and currently he is winning. Anyone who is a moderate conservative needs to think about how they have allowed this climate of Islamophobia to grow and how they have exploited it for their own ends until it was used by Trump to make moderate conservative voices irrelevant in this election. Moderates have no decent response to Trump's Islamophobia so they have been swept away by it.

A climate of Islamophobia has helped Trump get as far as he has, but this is not the only thing contributing to his success. Trump's followers are mainly white and working class, a demographic with problems that American politics has failed to tackle.

Liberal middle class Americans do not care about the loss of living standards of poor white people. Liberal Americans have other political objectives, such as defending Obama's healthcare program and tackling the massive racism in America. These are noble aims, but there is a real lack of interest in dealing with the problems of the white working class.

This failure to engage with the white working class is because the left does not want to ignore problems of race at this critical time for race relations and there are concerns about undercurrents of racism in poor white people’s politics. If liberal middle class America were willing to engage with the problems of white working class America then they might find that their political complaints are not rooted in racism but in the way they have been marginalised.

The moderate conservatives are also to blame for ignoring the problems faced by white class Americans. The moderate right has not tackled the problem of poor white people because it involves criticising capitalism, which they are not prepared to do. Conservative support for neo-liberalism on both sides of the Atlantic has created a ticking time bomb of ground down white working class people whose lives have been destroyed by prevailing economic thought. Poor white people were hit hard by the financial crash, de-industrialisation and globalisation. They have lost jobs and income. In Britain, poor white people are the lowest performing ethnic group in educational attainment. Now the white working class want answers that the moderate right do not have for them.

Bernie Sanders does appeal to some of the white working class in America, but the Hillary Clinton campaign does not fully appreciate how bad the fall in living standards of poor whites is. In many ways Clinton's politics is as bad as the moderate conservatives, she is not willing to criticise neo-liberalism and prefers platitudes about making America whole again. The left is generally focused on Clinton and their hopes that she will be the figure that unites America. She maybe that person that can span the growing left/right divide to win the presidential election, but she will not help poor white people. A vote for Clinton is a vote to kick this can down the road and hope that the problem will be dealt with in the future. It is a vote for the vague hope that the far right cannot mobilise this anger for electoral success.

Let me be clear here: I do not think that Trump cares about or will help white working class Americans. However he is willing to engage with these victims, which liberals and moderate conservatives are ignoring. Trump is a used car salesman, he will tell you everything you want to hear until he has his hand in your wallet and you drive off his lot with an overpriced, terrible car that you cannot claim a refund on. To help white working class America we must first stop Trump and to stop Trump we must understand his success, even if it involves asking painful question about how the American left has conducted itself.

It is very hard to say that would happen if Trump were actually elected president, partly because Trump has not mentioned many actual policies he intends to intact. I can imagine that it will be worse than George W. Bush's time in office, which is frightening enough. Liberals and moderate conservatives need to act together to defeat Trump, but as I said, this can only be done by understanding what has brought us to this juncture.

Trump will probably lose to Clinton because he frightens people too much, which is the only hope to cling to right now. Although we were told that he would never win the nomination and that looks likely. America needs to tackle the problems of Islamophobia and the loss of living standards by the white working class before someone comes along who is even more awful than Trump. If you think this will never happen then, I will refer you to all the moderate conservatives who said that Donald Trump will never be the Republican candidate for president.