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Donald Trump’s a warning to us all

Donald Trump looks set to contend the US presidential election for the Republicans.
Donald Trump looks set to contend the US presidential election for the Republicans.

We must be doing something wrong – where are the clowns? There’s Nicola and Kez and Ruth, Willie and Patrick but no Boris, or Donald or Nigel.

Sure, there’s David Coburn of UKIP, an MEP and a candidate for Holyrood – our only buffoon.

Others seem to have bigger, sillier characters on the political stage.

Perhaps when you have limited powers, you only get regular candidates – people bound by the conventions of the everyday. It’s only when tax and spend can do a candidate’s bidding that you get the men with red noses.

Popular theory had it the other way round. Back in the 1990s, people said Holyrood would just be a big council, playtime in comparison to proper parliaments.

Now, the entertainment all comes from the big capitals.

Donald Trump has all but got the Republican nomination for the US Presidential race, after his challenger, Ted Cruz, dropped out.

The rest of the world looks on because the American president is, in crucial ways, our president.

Is the world amused? Not so much, more alarmed.

Culture of cynicism

Trump is the threat of chaos, borne of a culture of cynicism.

American voters have spent so long being told that Washington is corrupt and the system broken, they have responded by choosing a maverick. In that sense it is logical – if the message is that the system doesn’t work, then get someone from outside.

However, this is also the land of the illogical – because the system isn’t broken and the last thing America or the world needs is someone who could break it.

American political culture, at least on the right, has developed the idea that big government is a threat and the democratic consensus is part of that threat. There have long been outside candidates for the presidency peddling a line like this.

In 1992 Ross Perot ran on the ticket of a runaway debt which needed to be controlled. In 2000, Pat Buchanan challenged for the Reform party – the former White House press man credited with inventing the phrase “family values” as a signal of a fundamental conservatism.

The Tea Party emerged in 2009, horrified that President Obama wanted to help bankrupt homeowners.

There’s nothing wrong in being conservative but the effect of decades of right wingers saying the common ground of democracy is poisoned results in extremists becoming acceptable.

That seems to explain Trump. A bid for office which has shredded every preconception of what is acceptable has taken him to the finals of America’s political competition. He has become acceptable because the establishment is so despised.

Yet American politics is not in crisis. There is a huge debt (which country doesn’t have that?) and things move slowly but broadly, the country does fine.

It is still the world’s largest economy, growing at a rate faster than anywhere in Europe and remains the place the world’s poor want to end up.

It has shocking levels of poverty, appalling education and health standards on average and a terrible record on killing its own citizens, either by rage or accident. Yet none of this is what upsets Republicans.

They have created a straw doll of Washington as some cash-happy place where the hard labour of “ordinary Americans” – by which read white – is frittered away.

As a critique of US democracy, it stinks. Western democracies share a set of problems but corruption and carelessness are not the issues.

Dearth of ideas

Far more relevant are a dearth of ideas, disengagement, a lack of challenge and a debt burden which will be passed on with unknown consequences.

Trump is a warning to us all. If you pursue a form of anti-politics and buy into the idea that “they are all at it”, you create the environment for dangerous candidates.

That’s what feeds the clowning of Boris and Nigel here – a convenient “enemy” in the EU gives an excuse to undermine the entire system.

Suddenly, President Obama is just a stooge, every economic agency and independent authority dealers in lies, ideas of tolerance and sharing appear feeble.

We are guilty of it too – indulging the idea that the Tories are bad because over a quarter of a century ago they had a leader we didn’t like, or just accepting that all ideas from London are bad.

We stop challenging ourselves, testing our ideals, because it’s easier to go for the invented or historic enemy, the catch-all baddie – no matter how fictional that enemy may have become over time.

Trump becomes possible when we stop thinking for ourselves and buy into lazy stereotypes about our politicians, our problems and our enemies.

Today we have a Nicola, a Kez, Ruth, Willie and Patrick too but tomorrow we may have clowns if we stop engaging and base our politics on prejudice.

That’s why you should vote – vote even if you hate them all and haven’t read a manifesto.

Engage for 10 minutes, read a summary of policies that every media outlet has and pick a party, because that day we stop engaging and the day we decide the system doesn’t work, is the day the system begins to fail.

Let’s not get Trumped.