The Directors’ View on the US election result
We are pleased at the defeat of Clinton, even as we are concerned over the victory of Trump.
The DN is not politically partisan, let alone with regard to a country where it does not vote, and many of whose nuances we do not claim to understand. But it is intellectually biased, towards honesty. Too often, that honesty was lacking in the election, on both sides. It was the side favouring the status quo which we found most irritating, precisely because we are, in fact, natural adherents of conservatism and incrementalism.
On the other hand, we do expect prompt action to be taken when ‘the house is on fire’.
In our view the house has been on fire ever since the Great Financial Crisis 2009, with a zombie version of neo-liberalism staggering towards the precipice. Yet nobody seems to be taking the failure of the existing intellectual edifice too seriously – apart from Trump and Brexit voters.
This is why we also recognized the valid concerns of the Brexiteers even as many pundits scorned their opponents as backward-looking and sub-literate.
If Clinton was the best that the establishment could come up with after the Great Financial Crisis, then one should not blame Trump voters.
Additionally, as the spouse of a former president, she should not have been allowed in government at all, let alone run for the top job. We view dynastic politics with unapologetic aversion.
Clinton personified the establishment which has generated a slew of pointless wars and a well documented increase in inequality. It was her husband himself who presided over the large-scale financialization of the US economy, while she made herself known as a hawk during her time a Secretary of Defense.
To many people who did not like Trump but recognized the resentment that bred the Trump phenomenon, it became tiresome to be branded on social media as a sexist or bigot if they criticized Clinton on event the most objective political grounds. Many of these probably voted Trump.
Even people suspicious of Trump often have a favourite Trump moment, when they applauded his bludgeoning wit. The DN’s moment was the humiliation of Jeb Bush over the Iraq war. It was intensely refreshing to have someone so powerful humiliated in the most public manner possible.
Much political discourse is couched in theory and euphemisms, especially the status quo media. But for many people who have lost opportunities, life is all too real. Trump made politics real to this class, by personalizing the issues and singling out individuals for blame.
We are pleased at the defeat of Clinton, even as we are concerned over the victory of Trump.
Trump is not someone who has the sympathies of the poor and downtrodden at heart. His version of America may have fewer immigrants and be more cut off from the world (as his supporters seem to wish), but it does not look like a place where happiness and prosperity are more evenly divided or even greatly increased.
However, we do not worry excessively. Trump is not a revolutionary. He is a business insider and himself a card-carrying member of the business establishment. We suspect that he will accommodate himself with Washington and have a great time pushing the politicians around, for a while. We do not see much evidence that he will enact radical change. Rather, we see a re-calibration in the intellectual atmosphere away from global issues, global warming, international trade treaties and above all, identity politics. But rather like Duterte, an insider masquerading as a radical, much of this will be for show. If anything, US politics will become even more an ‘Augean stable’, while America’s foreign policy will demonstrate its usual well-attested continuity.
Above all, we are saddened. As former financial journalists, we had a close-up look of the arrogance and incompetence engendered by the finance sector before its implosion. If ever the world was ripe for change, it was after 2009. Instead, the establishment tried to ‘paper over the cracks’ and pretend it was ‘business as usual’. Trump and Farrage did not come out of nowhere. To anybody with intellectual honesty and no vested interest, their appearance was both justified – and tragic.
