I heard a joke this week from the era when communists expected workers to rise up any minute to cast off the chains of paid labour. Though, told in another context, it seemed to me to contain a truth about the phenomenon of Trump.
It goes like this: after a long struggle, communism has emerged triumphant, and the countries of the world are conferencing on the policies of their new society, in which everyone contributes according to their ability and everyone receives according to their need.
Trump’s actions could lead to a useful cost/benefit analysis. Credit: AFR
“But we’ll have to keep one country capitalist,” one comrade declares. “Why, comrade?” a second asks. “Because,” says the first, “otherwise we won’t know what things cost!”
After several decades of Green New Deals, Conference of the Parties meetings, globalised markets, reduced trade barriers, world banking, increased migration, United Nations treaties, and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) schemes in the developed world, Trump 2.0 – who is busy undoing all these things – is about to show us what they cost. This might leave some pundits with egg on their faces. What if it turns out they’ve not been a net benefit, or, worse, a drag? It’s only possible to pretend that the policies countries have been pursuing are unquestionably good when there is no “control group” for comparison.
Within the USA, the panic has taken on a decidedly two-speed quality. Urbane man-about-the-globe and Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh (a personal favourite of mine) is concerned about the “great liberal shrug”. He frets that “liberals have allowed a healthy acceptance of electoral reality to cross into a hope that Trump’s second term won’t be so bad”. But it’ll be worse, says Ganesh, because in the first two years of his second term, Trump will be unconstrained by the need to be popular. He can’t win again, so he’ll do what he damn well pleases.
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Here is where the columnist confounds the interests and people and pundocracy. Polls and anecdata give Trump a net positive approval rating. Mutterings from across one of America’s increasing number of oceans suggest that many liberals (a reminder that this is the US term for left-leaning) are not just shrugging but somewhat relieved – even secretly thrilled – that Trump is finally running the big experiment. They, too, have begun to wonder what things actually cost.
Not so the pundits, however, for whom the stakes are much higher. There is a business model to defend. And an indelible internet trail of bylined opinion that could prove embarrassingly wrong.
Which is why we are now seeing the liberal media and the liberal reader at odds. Far from shrugging, much of the media is, as with Trump the first time around, registering somewhere on a scale from consternated to hysterical.
