Emulating Trump would be suicide for the Right. He’s a liability to the West

This new era does not need more Trumps – it needs more Reagans and Mrs Thatchers, clear in mind and morally disciplined

Who would have thought that after a generation of consensus over the role of government – a pax populi in which there appeared to be tacit agreement about the function of the state – we would see a return to genuine dispute about basic principles? Yet here we are, arguing in often aggressive terms about questions that were thought to be all but settled apart from matters of detail. There is a fight to the death now between those who insist that this heated debate is necessary and those who believe it is risible. Much of the deeply discontented electorate is in the first camp, while a great many professional politicians are in the second, thus putting themselves out of touch with their own supporters.
Suddenly, the terms Right and Left have come roaring back into Western politics again, having appeared to fade away in the post Cold War complacency of a new world order. This is the great illusion that sustains the stalwarts of the Centre Ground: the compact drawn up after the explosive 1980s which everybody who wished to be taken seriously had to accept was that capitalism had won the ideological battle but that it had to be tempered with democratic socialist interventions to make it palatable. All that remained for elected governments and plausible opposition parties to do was to tweak the mechanisms which could achieve the optimal balance between free markets and social “fairness”. This was all there was – and would ever be – to democratic politics, which is why it became so managerial and technocratic.
That era has come to an end. Maybe because the idea of democratic government as nothing more than an exercise in marginal manipulations and risk avoidance, in which the interests of one social group or economic lobby are weighed against another and mass dissatisfaction avoided, was too uninspiring to attract first rate people. Democracy is the embodiment of a great idea: if you are genuinely excited by it, why would you want to be nothing more than chief accountant and clerical operative to the nation?
Anyway, a new dawn is upon us. Political parties and their leading voices are now talking in the fundamentalist terms of Right-wing and Left-wing which had once been consigned to the outer fringes of political life, often to hinterlands which were outside the bounds of the electoral process. Today in Europe, parties of the Right have disrupted what had appeared to be a smugly satisfactory arrangement. Their alarming historical significance is unmistakable and quite alien to our own experience.
But it is the American phenomenon that risks causing serious confusion for British political observers because American discourse is generally assumed to be translatable into ours. So, if in the US, Donald Trump represents a resurgent Right which is consumed by the issue of migration then British politicians who express concern about immigration must be soulmates of Trump. But Trump’s campaign is making a nonsense of the vocabulary: his statements – or perhaps “utterances” would be the better word – are not actually political at all. They are so arbitrary and blatantly narcissistic that they are not even truly populist. At their worst, they are ramblings which are literally meaningless.
Sometimes they are outright lies, like his repeated claims that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had diverted hurricane relief funds from Florida residents to migrants in what he described as “the worst response to a storm or hurricane disaster in US history”. (Everything in Trump’s childlike language is “the worst” or “the greatest” or “the biggest” in history.) His latest outburst was inspired by the broadcast of an interview with Kamala Harris broadcast by the CBS current affairs programme, 60 Minutes in which one of her replies was edited to make it shorter. This is a familiar procedure with televised political interviews but Trump regarded it as deliberate falsification because it made her appear more concise.
His account of this on his own social media site (capital letters included): “A Giant Fake News Scam by CBS & 60 Minutes. Her REAL ANSWER WAS CRAZY, OR DUMB, so they actually REPLACED it with another answer…to make her look better. A FAKE NEWS SCAM which is totally illegal. TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE.” He later called this the “GREATEST FRAUD IN BROADCAST HISTORY” and went on to demand that all the national broadcasters should have their licences sold off because they are “just as bad – and maybe even WORSE.”
As I said, this is not politics – at least not as it is done in democracies. It is absurd to the point of technical insanity but it must be taken seriously because this is the man who may yet run the country which leads the West. But it must be made clear by everybody involved in the new British game of Right vs Left that this sort of thinking – if “thinking” is the right word – can never be any sort of model for our own quaintly sane electoral process. The new Reform warriors on the British scene might claim that Trump and his team are saying what has been made unsayable by conventional politicians and the mainstream media, and that this is a stance which it is legitimate to emulate. But British people (unlike Americans) have a particular – and well-founded – dislike of narcissism and grandiosity in politicians which they see as ludicrous.
However noisy and vicious Trump’s band of UK fans may become when it is said, this cannot be repeated often enough. It would be extremely dangerous for the respectable Right in this country (whether Tory or Reform) to think that there could be any possible rendition of this foaming egotism that would suit a British electorate. President Biden described Trump’s latest effusions as “un-American” which may or may not be true, but anyone who tried selling them here would discover that they were decidedly un-British.
The ideal Anglo-American political alliance of the Right was, of course, between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher who presided together over the end of the Soviet empire and the emerging settlement which saw freedom and capitalism as inextricably entwined. Are there any leaders out there who can recreate that moment of clarity?