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2016 election, amnesty, attrition, Contract for the American Voter, Democrats, deportation, Donald Trump, entitlements, establishment, healthcare, Im-Politic, Immigration, immigration magnet, independents, Jobs, NAFTA, Obamacare, Peggy Noonan, politics, Populism, Republicans, TPP, Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Wall Street Journal
Throughout this circus of a presidential campaign, I’ve emphasized the importance of distinguishing between Donald Trump’s myriad personal failings and the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign positions – which I remain convinced can form the basis of an urgently needed, sensible, and therefore, enduring new American populism. This week, substantial support for this proposition has come from Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan and, more surprisingly, from Trump himself.
In an October 20 essay, Noonan – long one of the most effective critics of the corporate-funded Republican establishment that Trump thoroughly trounced during the primaries – described the pillars of “Trump-ism without Trump” with her usual wit and grace. Among the highlights:
>He “would have spoken at great and compelling length of how the huge, complicated trade agreements created the past quarter-century can be improved upon with an eye to helping the American worker”:
>He “would have argued that controlling entitlement spending is a necessary thing but not, in fact, this moment’s priority. People have been battered since the crash, in many ways, and nothing feels stable now”:
>And he “would have known of America’s hidden fractures, and would have insisted that a healthy moderate-populist movement cannot begin as or devolve into a nationalist, identity-politics movement.”
The only matter on which I believe Noonan is seriously off-base is immigration. I certainly agree with her that Trump should have “explained his immigration proposals with a kind of loving logic—we must secure our borders for a host of serious reasons, and here they are. But we are grateful for our legal immigrants….” The problem is with her apparent belief that “In time, after we’ve fully secured our borders and the air of emergency is gone, we will turn to regularizing the situation of everyone here….”
As I’ve written, this popular (with both wings of the establishment) version of amnesty inevitably will supercharge America’s “immigration magnet.” The perceived likelihood of eventual legalization can only bring millions more impoverished third world-ers to the nation’s various doorsteps. It’s inconceivable that even a President Trump would take the measures needed – which would surely involve some use of force – to keep these masses, and especially the women and children, at bay.
The far better, indeed only realistic, approach is one that Trump himself has unfortunately barely mentioned: a stout refusal to legalize in any form accompanied by a strategy of attrition – i.e., encouraging illegals to leave both by boosting efforts to keep them out of the workplace, and by denying them (and their anchor children) public benefits.
But it’s almost like Trump was listening. Two days later, he came out with a “Contract for the American Voter” that echoed much of Noonan’s column. He promised that in his first hundred days in office, he would announce his “intention to renegotiate NAFTA or withdraw from the deal,” along with withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal. Both measures should draw strong support from Democrats and independents. In addition, Trump would designate China a currency manipulator, and order an inventory of predatory foreign trade practices.
On immigration, he omitted any reference to blanket deportation of all illegals and instead focused on starting to remove “the more than 2 million criminal illegal immigrants from the country and cancel visas to foreign countries that won’t take them back”; to de-fund Sanctuary Cities; and to “suspend immigration from terror-prone regions where vetting cannot safely occur. All vetting of people coming into our country will be considered extreme vetting.” Especially in the political climate that would result from a Trump victory, would most Democrats on Capitol Hill fall on their swords to prevent any of this?
And what did Trump vow re entitlement reforms? The phrase doesn’t appear at all in the Contract, although the list of legislative proposals does include the repeal of Obamacare and replacement with a system (described only generally, to be sure) that could well appeal to most Republicans and many independents, and that in combination with other measures mentioned could bend the national healthcare cost curve down further.
Couple these ideas with Trump’s support for a big infrastructure build-out and repair program; his broadly non-interventionist foreign policy stance combined with a big (job-creating) defense buildup; new government ethics reforms that seek to halt the corrupting revolving door between government and private sector; and any kind of serious middle class tax relief, and it looks to me like a (mandate-sized) winning formula – for a politician who can pass the interlocking personality, character, and temperament tests.
Can such leaders emerge from the current political system, as I recently asked? Are American politicians who rise up through this system simply too beholden to special interests, or too thoroughly imbued with the “If you want to get along go along” ethos to favor rocking any big boats? I still can’t say I know the answer. But I’m as confident as ever that unless and until this kind of candidate emerges, American politics is going to remain one very angry space.
The reason Trump can get away with so much more than any other candidate has in recent history and still maintain significant support is because he has expressed, albeit in a very crude way, the conviction of many people, including me (although I do not support him because of the person he is) that globalization as pursued by successive American governments and both parties since 1990 has been an unmitigated failure for them and thus must be repudiated. In this sense, he is a vehicle of this dawning realization among the masses. I wonder if Trump even consciously understands this, but he is at the vanguard of the future of politics in developed countries. The dream of globalization has been a Utopian project of an elite consensus that does not accord with reality. And as Lenin said, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Elites have failed to realize that for most people, the nation-state, borders, immigration and national as opposed to universal interests still matter, a lot. The Utopian dream of seamless trade flows and the free and unimpeded exchanges of people, ideas and goods in a global village has proven extremely naïve. All it has led to is some more realist countries like China gaming the naivety of the West to its own advantage through beggar thy neighbor, mercantilist policies and multinational corporations racing to the bottom to outsource, all of which has made the vast majority of our people poorer and a tiny few disgustingly wealthy and deindustrialized our country making us less productive and harming future generations. It has also led to a steady flow of unskilled immigrants into developed nations that has held down wages for the vast majority of our workers and made it impossible for them to get ahead. It has upset the foundation of Democracy, by creating vast economic inequality allowing the elite few to monopolize economic resources and buy political and legislative outcomes. Finally, it has led to hugely imbalanced trade and capital flows that created massive financial bubbles and led to the Great Recession, and growth built on chimeric government spending and borrowed money. This has still not changed. If Hillary is distrusted by almost as many people as those who distrust Trump in spite of the fact that her personal failings pale in comparison to his, it is because people still see her as one of those elites who undertook the globalist project in the first place and suspect she will simply continue the same failed policies. Trump, for all his faults, represents the only option for people to break with this failed past and bring our government more into line with the will of the people and, in fact, the reality of human nature and how the world actually works. Unfortunately, Trump who is espousing some much needed reform ideas, is an unethical, psychologically unbalanced and vindictive bully and egomaniac who sanctions demagogic, undemocratic and racist tactics. It is a shame that a jerk like this is the one bringing these ideas into public discourse, and my fear is his personal issues will discredit them in the eyes of the public. Nevertheless, I don’t think this movement will end with Trump, and in the Hegelian-like progress of History, the thesis of globalization will be repudiated by the old antithesis of the nation-state, but not wholly replaced. Hopefully, there will be a synthesis of the two where a more realistic global system can emerge with trade, immigration and capital exchanges between strong nation-states looking out for the interests of their citizens, recognizing costs and benefits and respecting reality, no longer rushing headlong into Utopian visions of elitist grandeur.