Reply to post: Re: I am Mad

Re: I am Mad

@Big John

"You have this exactly backwards. It's the libs in charge that are changing things, and it's the conservative people voting against them that want it stopped."

No - you have misunderstood.

I am not talking about liberal vs conservative at all. In the UK, Cameron staked his leadership on staying in the EU and the head of the official 'Remain' group - Stuart Rose - is a conservative peer in the House of Lords. And there were, of course, Labour members who supported the 'Leave' campaign.

In the US, it's not so simple as saying that the Presidential race was a choice between a Republican and a Democrat. Donald Trump's first major victory was in securing the party's nomination - something he did with a platform of not being 'one of them'. His big push against the other Republican candidates was that they weren't to be trusted because they were part of the system. Similar too was his dismissal of the views and assertions of experts or academics - they, too, were part of the system and not to be trusted. Trust him, instead, and trust your own instincts.

Donald Trump did not run, primarily, as a 'conservative' against a 'liberal'; ran ran as an anti-establishment outsider against the establishment. That he ran, also, on traditional 'right' issues does not make him 'conservative'. His message was not just to limit immigration but to actively round-up and kick people out and build an impossible wall to keep them out. His message was not just to resist pressure from the UN and NATO but threaten the US's involvement in them.

And, I never suggested that the 'libs' weren't 'changing' anything. Of course they are, but so are conservatives. Every party and president makes changes and they nature of government most usually means they are slow (which is not necessarily a bad thing). I said that one side wanted to 'stay the course' - not 'stand still'.

That the two sides, in the US, were labelled as 'Republican' and 'Democrat' is not insignificant by any stretch but far more important was the core difference in their position in relation to & attitude towards the institution of government. That, after all, is why Trump was there in the first place.

You say it is 'the libs in charge that are changing things'. Why then didn't the 'conservative people' make an established 'conservative', with a proven history of conservative voting, the Republican nominee? If people were really wanting their conservative representative to resist changes then why didn't they choose Ted Cruz, who has a career-long history of arguing conservative cases as a lawyer and proposing and voting for conservative bills in the Senate? Most particularly, he openly criticised other republicans for insufficiently resisting changes by Obama. If anyone of the Republican candidates could be said to be dedicated to resist liberal changes, surely it would have been Ted Cruz, rather than Donald Trump who has a provable record of agreeing with 'liberal' policies.

Neither the US election nor the Brexit vote was about conservative vs liberal ideology; it was about one side/candidate pointing to the established order and telling everyone that that is the problem - all those politicians and economists and academics and journalists and scientists who sit in their towers and tell you how the world is and how it should be - they are the ones who are wrong and you are the ones who are right.

For the Brexit Leave campaign it was sometimes absolutely out in the open, with people like Gove outright saying that people had had enough of trusting experts, like the economists clearly pointing out the cost/benefit numbers of EU membership.

I want to be clear, at this point, that I don't actually reject that line of argument.

There is a large part of me that really feels some affinity for some of the underlying concern and push-back. Ignoring the undeniable xenophobia that both the Trump and Leave campaigns harnessed, there is a purer, more defensible argument that must be grasped by the 'establishment' if there is to be any hope working towards a society that is cohesive and happy.

That argument is that the well-being of the population is just not being properly considered. The establishment - which consists of the majority of politicians, economists, bankers and business 'leaders' - are just not using the right metrics or working from the right assumptions. The prevailing logic has been, and continues to be, that globalisation is the way to go and that the measurement of sucess is whether the 'economy' benefits.

There is no room in this model for the real, everyday concerns of the average citizen and people are, quite frankly, getting rather sick of it. It is entirely possible for an educated individual to understand that a particular law or deal or tax will improve the economy but be against it.

The 'establishment' has constructed their 'system' as this precarious, complex, inter-connected, gigantic house-of-cards whose only protection is that they have made it so that it is too complex, too inter-connected and too gigantic to fail. Or, more accurately, to fail without taking down rather a lot else.

The 'system' is, essentially, trickle-down economics writ large but it has become like a sword of Damocles over us all, ready to fall if we make too sudden a move.

Many people have accurately observed that our economies result in a small number of people controlling the vast majority of wealth but it's actually more problematic than that because it's not simply a result of the system; it's the inherent design of it.

So yeah, with that tangent, I understand one part of the frustration that has led to both Trump and Brexit and my hope for the future is that our politicians, collectively, hear the wake-up call and understand - really understand - the deep feelings of disappointment, distrust and even betrayal. People really believe that their governments have not just let them down and ignored them but sold them out.

It is not about 'conservative' vs 'liberal'.