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(I've been avoiding much of the writing around the electoral circus,
but thought this one worth reading. -SL)<br>
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<article id="post-83101" class="post-83101 post type-post
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<p>Yves here. Even though readers may disagree with Pettis’
dismissiveness about Trump’s prospects for suceess in
November, trust me, this is a terrific post. </p>
<p><em><strong> By Michael Pettis, a Senior Associate at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a
finance professor at Peking University’s Guanghua
School of Management. Cross posted from <a
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href="http://blog.mpettis.com/2016/03/the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians/"
onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event',
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'http://blog.mpettis.com/2016/03/the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians/',
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<p>We’ve pelted Donald Trump with all the withering humor we
can muster, and even though it is hard to imagine an
easier target for elitist humor, with his blustering
narcissism, his intellectual inconsistency, his
questionable business record, and his truly stupid
television show, above all of which rages his ferocious
hair, it’s been so frustrating. Although we have shown
again and again that he is dishonest, unfit for the
presidency, and incapable of office, not only has he been
able to survive, but he actually seems to thrive on the
relentless series of what for any other candidate would
have been knockout blows. Donald Trump’s supporters are
indifferent to our wit and to our arguments, and we’ve
convinced ourselves that this only proves what probably
didn’t need much proving, that his supporters are racist
nitwits and that they support Donald Trump for reasons
that are too trivial to matter. This frightens us because
collectively they seem to be bringing something new to
American politics.</p>
<p>But we are wrong on all counts. Most of Trump’s
supporters are not racist nitwits, and not only do they
have legitimate reasons behind their support of Donald
Trump, in fact they are very important ones. We are
finally starting to see this. We are wrong, however, to
see recent events as some kind of turning point in
American history. The outrage which the American political
establishment is being rejected certainly brings dangers
and risks, but much fewer than we think because in fact
we’ve been here many times before, and by remembering our
history we can make some pretty good guesses as to how
this all of will evolve.</p>
<p>Trump’s supporters belong to what we sometimes call the
Jacksonian tradition in American history, and their
history, which of course pre-dates the presidency of the
man who gave them their name, combines the impressive with
the shameful. Like Andrew Jackson himself they have been
the strongest defenders of some of our most fundamental
American values while undermining others. While their
social peers in Europe have largely accepted their limited
role in politics, except from time to time when they rise
up in sans-culottes rage, the Jacksonians always demand to
be heard when they feel their rights are threatened.</p>
<p>But while he may count on the support of the Jacksonians,
Donald Trump is no Andrew Jackson and soon enough, like
most of his predecessors, he will abandon his followers or
be abandoned by them. Because Jacksonians lack
sophistication, and tend to be largely uneducated, at
times when the small victories they have worked for are
threatened to the point of creating deep-seated anxiety it
has always been easy for scoundrels to exploit them, but
as one of the greatest of their heroes reminded us, you
can’t fool all the people all of the time. The Jacksonians
have been the defenders of American democracy even when
their history has been marred by misjudgment, and although
Donald Trump’s time will be limited, the effect of Trump’s
supporters will be far-reaching, and probably positive for
the US in the longer term even if it risks foolishness in
the short.</p>
<p>I won’t pretend I’ve ever been a Jacksonian. In the early
1980s, when I was getting my Ivy League education, my
brother and I lived in Manhattan’s notorious Alphabet City
and ran a music space on Avenue C and 3rd Street. One of
the friends we made in that heavily Dominican neighborhood
was Dani, a bright, uncontrollable but ferociously
charming 15-year-old, who at some point within a few
months of our meeting him suddenly seemed to have
constructed us into his family. As we got to know Dani, we
quickly learned about a life very alien to ours but which
he took for granted. Dani’s daily life combined what to us
was the romance of New York street hustling and the sheer
awfulness of life for a kid living in one of the worst
neighborhoods of the city. It consisted mostly of petty
crime and street hustle, avoiding trouble with local gangs
and only picking fights you knew you could win.</p>
<p>He didn’t stay often with his Dominican mother but, until
my brother and I managed to get him a tiny apartment in
the basement of our building, Dani usually slept in Lower
East Side squats, friend’s apartments, and even sometimes
in a wooden box tucked away on a side street. He went to
school occasionally, and until we put him on an allowance
he depended mostly on hustling, shoplifting and small
burglaries to earn spending money (in fact we met him when
he tried to charm my brother and me into not noticing as a
friend of his made off with a crate of beer from our bar).
When he was 16 he got caught up in the crack epidemic
sweeping New York and it took us more than a year, and a
tough year at that, to get him to stop.</p>
<p>Dani never knew his father but had been told that his
father was half African-American and half Dominican,
although if Dani wanted to seem white he easily could.
Over time we met his two younger sisters, who both
eventually became prostitutes and junkies, and both
eventually died of AIDS before Dani turned 25. His older
brother, with the very inappropriate nickname of Hippie,
was a fairly scary guy, heavily scarred and stocky, who
had been in and out of jail several times. He too died
early, in his mid 30s, halfway through a 12-year sentence.
Hippie had been convicted of a series of armed robberies
at local ATMs, and because he had forced Dani to join him
as lookout – and Dani, like most of us, was far too
frightened of Hippie not to do whatever he demanded – Dani
was himself sentenced to four years in jail.</p>
<p>I was glad to see Hippie in jail because of the way he
had dragged Dani into dangerous crime, but my brother,
both tougher and less judgmental than I was, would send
him care packages six or seven times a year. After Hippie
died my brother’s girlfriend showed me some of the letters
Hippie had sent my brother from jail: badly written,
misspelled, with the most hackneyed expressions of
emotion, which conveyed nonetheless an almost heartrending
gratitude for packages that were the only evidence Hippie
had during his final years that anyone on the outside
cared or ever thought about him.</p>
<p>With that kind of background it was easy to assume away
any useful future for Dani, but he had always been bright
and ambitious. I think I may have been the first person
ever to tell him how smart he was, some time when he was
still 15, because when I did, and then had to insist that
I wasn’t just making fun of him, his mouth fell open with
surprise and he began beaming cockily when he realized
that I was probably right. He certainly was bright, and
while in jail, Dani decided he would complete his high
school education. We spoke by telephone nearly every week
so that he could brag about his progress, and about the
facility for computers he discovered he had.</p>
<p><strong>How to Succeed</strong></p>
<p>Over the next few difficult years after his release Dani
made an amazing recovery. He got a job working in some
computer capacity, and then another job driving a truck.
After a lot of oats were sowed, mostly with the arty white
girls who had begun moving into the neighborhood in the
mid-1980s, he suddenly fell in love with a working class
girl of Irish descent, and decided he had to marry her. He
did, and they are still married nearly three decades
later.</p>
<p>A few weeks after the events of 9/11, an event that
shocked him terribly, I happened to meet Dani for beers
when he told me, very casually and without the least sense
of having done anything praiseworthy, that beginning two
or three days after the Trade Center disaster, every
morning he had joined the hundreds of volunteers working
downtown to dig up bodies and clean up the rubble of the
devastated Twin Towers. I didn’t know what to say when I
heard that except that I felt very proud of him, which
surprised him. After a moment of confusion, he suddenly
figured out why his volunteer work was indeed sort of an
impressive thing, and he beamed, realizing that he had
just hustled some big points with me.</p>
<p>Around that time I left New York to live in Beijing, but
from there I learned that Dani’s knack for computers paid
off. A few years after 9/11 he wrote to me to say that he
had started a small computer consulting business and had
moved to the Midwest. He had three daughters, of whom he
was inordinately proud, and joked about the dictatorship
his wife exercised within the family. He was now a member
of the middle class, and although he was much closer to
the bottom of the middle class than to the top, he had
achieved a social standing almost unimaginable for anyone
in his family. He was very clear that his adored daughters
were never going to be given the chance to return to the
place from which he came.</p>
<p>Over the years during trips back to the US I saw him from
time to time, although rarely, but I got emails and later
was able regularly to check his Facebook page. His page
consisted of the expected combination of family pictures,
silly animal videos, and the corny jokes he had always
been famous for, along with dutiful messages about the
various volunteer work he and his wife (and the kids) were
doing as community members and as a family. He had
determined to become “normal”, as he saw it, but of course
far from being normal what he had become was the result of
extraordinary effort and determination.</p>
<p>Late last year I noticed for the first time on his
Facebook page that he had taken an interest in politics,
and this year I could see that the candidate of whom he
seemed most to approve was Donald Trump. I sent him a
joking Facebook message about his new-found interest in
politics and asked him if he really was a Trump supporter.
He wrote back, a little sheepishly, knowing that I was
unlikely to be impressed, saying that yes, he was going to
vote for Trump if he got around to voting.</p>
<p>After a few more kidding messages back and forth, as I
expected, I could see that Dani didn’t know much about
Trump’s policies and his background, even though many of
his friends also supported Trump, and he didn’t mind that
he knew so little. To the extent that he and his friends
even noticed it they dismissed the controversy around
Trump as noise, and probably to be expected by anyone who
had decided to take on the establishment, which he
believed Trump to be doing. He had never paid attention to
politics before because he had never thought any of it
mattered, but he had some idea that Trump was a successful
businessman determined to toss out a political
establishment for whom Dani had always seemed irrelevant.</p>
<p>Few people who follow the Trump saga will be surprised to
learn that Dani never really was able to explain to me
very clearly why he supported Trump, except to the extent
that he felt a vote for Trump was a vote against everyone
else, and that rather than be swayed by the howls of
liberal or conservative anti-Trump rage, which he barely
followed, he thought that every time some over-educated
pundit attacked Trump it only reinforced his sense that
Trump was probably taking on the Washington establishment.
Democrat or Republican, Dani wasn’t able to distinguish
among the Trump critics, and we shouldn’t be too quick to
take that as evidence of how hopelessly naive Dani is when
it comes to politics. As far as he and his family were
concerned there really was little to distinguish the two.</p>
<p>Dani’s success in life was tenuous enough that he was
unwilling to admit that his middle-class life was
threatened in any way by financial difficulties, but from
the way he talked about how the government had mismanaged
the economy, and his concern about illegal immigrants
taking jobs, I suspect that things weren’t always easy
financially, and the educational needs of his daughters
would certainly be creating pressure for him. The things
that worried him seemed to be the things that were
weakening his grasp on the edges of the middle class.</p>
<p><strong>Trump and the Dummies</strong></p>
<p>Dani clear doesn’t seem to most of us to be an obvious
Trump supporter. Given his background he is clearly a
tough guy who can handle himself in a fight, but I know
him well enough to know that if he ever actually attended
a Trump rally, which I doubt, there is no way he would be
one of the trouble-makers that joined the mobs looking to
beat up protesters. He probably wouldn’t have any sympathy
for the protesters, but in Dani’s world you mind your own
business.</p>
<p>So how does Dani fit in? Clearly he isn’t a racist, and
just as clearly he isn’t one of those losers who flock to
Trump campaign events to get reassurance that their
failures are caused by someone else. He is a successful,
middle-aged, middle-class family man, not terribly
educated but smart, of black and Latino descent, who
participates and volunteers in community events (grumbling
just enough to be good-natured about it), and who cannot
hide the sense of joy and even surprise whenever he looks
at his daughters.</p>
<p>And yet he supports Donald Trump, a man who probably
isn’t especially racist himself but is distressingly
reluctant to reject racism, and who is so intensely
narcissistic that the idea of his volunteering to help
some abstract community, and for no reward, wouldn’t even
register with most of us. It is almost impossible, for
example, to imagine Donald Trump working shoulder to
shoulder with Dani, digging through the fetid ruins of the
World Trade Center to pull out bodies, simply because, as
Dani tried to tell me that night over beers, he felt there
was an obligation to show respect to the bodies of the
people who had died there, especially the cops and
firemen.</p>
<p>It is also hard to imagine that Dani could have much
sympathy for someone who inherited a fortune. He came from
a wholly dysfunctional family, and shortly after he turned
18 he was in jail for violent crime, had almost no
education, and a history of crack addiction, and yet he
was able to turn himself around through hard work and a
total lack of self-pity. Even Donald Trump might agree –
or perhaps he is narcissistic enough not to – that Dani’s
pitiful success is heroic in a way that Trump’s
magnificent success isn’t.</p>
<p>But in fact Dani’s support for Donald Trump isn’t any
more surprising then the fact that Dani is almost
completely ignorant of anything Trump has done or said.
His support for Trump simply reflects a recurring and
predictable feature of American history. There are so many
historical precedents for anyone willing to read American
history in light of the Trump campaign that it should have
been obvious from the surge in recent years in immigration
and, even more so, the surge in income inequality, that
sooner or later someone like Trump was going to emerge and
someone like Dani was going to support him.</p>
<p>In fact what is important about Dani’s support of Donald
Trump is what it says about the bulk of Trump’s supporters
and what it says about the ignorance of the opposition to
Trump. The political establishment in the US, the press,
and much of the huge anti-Trump constituency loves the
excitement of the Trump campaign because Trump has given
America and much of the world a wonderful gift whose value
we are too embarrassed to acknowledge. He allows us to
feel the thing that we most eagerly want to feel: unified
and justified outrage.</p>
<p>Nothing seems to make us happier than when we are able to
join hands to recoil together in outrage at some thing
that is unambiguously detestable. We count with delight
the racists who flock to Trump’s campaign speeches as
fodder for our outrage, we quiver with an almost delicious
anger as we note the redneck shit-kickers who show up
hoping that some raghead will allow them to unleash their
hatred of Muslims, we recoil when Trump measures his
penis, we are enraged when Trump has the effrontery to
contradict today what he said only yesterday, and then we
damn the sheer stupidity of anyone who is unable to see
the contradiction. We are certain that Trump’s supporters
consist of the worst people in America, and there are
enough of them to make him president.</p>
<p>But Trump’s supporters are not the worst people in
America, and they will never make him president. Of course
it is true that many of the worst people in America do
support Trump. Why wouldn’t they? There is no doubt that
if you think black people have slyly and unfairly, and no
doubt at the connivance of the Jews, gained the upper hand
in America and deserve to be knocked down a notch or two,
or that the only important decision that must be made by
the mob of which you are a part is whether to beat up the
Mexican first or the Arab, or if you loathe foreigners but
aren’t really sure where you stand on people from Oregon
because you can’t remember whether or not Oregon is a
foreign country, then of course you are going to attend a
Trump rally – which gives you the comfort that a
homogenous crowd grants itself – and roar with approval
every time Trump says something outrageous.</p>
<p>But who cares about whether or not these people attend
Trump rallies, except for those who are eager for the
excitement and danger of showing up to protest? We must
remember two things. First, these people, the dumb ones,
are not the ones who are going to win Trump the
presidency, or even the Republican nomination, because
these people don’t vote. They aren’t smart enough to vote.
They find voting to be too complicated and confusing.</p>
<p>Second, the dumb ones and the thrill seekers who attend
the rallies only because they are cheap entertainment have
locked Donald Trump into an unwinnable position. If he
wants to keep them roaring their approval at ever-larger
rallies, and his narcissism makes him want it desperately,
Donald Trump must be outrageous every day. But our
standards of the outrageous adapt so quickly that this
only means that every day Trump must do or say something
more outrageous than he did yesterday, or he risks losing
his momentum. The whole penis incident only makes sense
when you recognize the pressure under which Trump has
placed himself to remain outrageous.</p>
<p><strong>Stratospheric Outrage</strong></p>
<p>But if you have to be more outrageous every day than you
were yesterday, and the election is months away, it is
certain that at some point you will become
stratospherically outrageous, and you will have gone way
too far. This is when Trump’s real supporters will begin
to get over their intoxication, as they eventually almost
always do, and this is why it is probably only a matter of
weeks before the whole Trump phenomenon begins to
collapse. You cannot easily maintain a geometric
progression when it comes to outrageousness.</p>
<p>Because while the dummies of America may indeed flock to
Trump’s campaign speeches in order to enjoy the spectacle,
it is unfair to dismiss Trump’s supporters as if they are
all the same. Many people who support Donald Trump, and
Dani is an obvious case, are good people, honest,
hard-working, perhaps not especially well-educated, but
they are often the backbones of their communities and
their country.</p>
<p>And they are not as stupid as we want to believe. Does
immigration hurt them? Yes it does, and while I believe
that immigration has always been one of the greatest and
most powerful sources of American success, and will
continue to be for decades, if not centuries, I also fully
understand that only someone who treats trade as a matter
purely of ideology can deny that there are short-term
costs. But Dani and millions of Americans do risk paying
these costs, and it is unnecessary and even stupid to
point out the irony of Dani’s own immigrant background as
if this conclusively proved anything because it is wholly
besides the point. When Dani worries about immigration it
is because he is worried about his daughters’ education,
and not because he has forgotten that his mother is
Dominican. Trump’s supporters know that some of them may
end up paying the short-term cost for what many of them
even know is America’s long-term benefit, and they know
that they do not have enough slack in their incomes and
savings to afford it.</p>
<p>And what about their fury at what they believe to be
unfair international trade? While there may well be global
benefits to free trade, and almost certainly are, it isn’t
so incredibly hard to recognize that the global trading
environment is systematically gamed by many countries –
and yes, sometimes by the US too – and that they do so
because there are gains to be had at the expense of other
countries. The global trade regime has undoubtedly
benefitted certain constituencies in the US, but it has
also created significant costs for the US and, more
importantly, has resulted in a redistribution of income,
and while the hard-working if uneducated millions who
support Trump may not be able to explain the costs to them
as glibly and as self-confidently as they are denied by
bankers and other winners from free trade, they are right
to complain. Trade is undoubtedly a complex issue, but
there is a real case against the current system of free
trade that must be addressed in a way that makes sense to
Trump’s supporters.</p>
<p>And finally Trump’s supporters are enraged by the
inexorable rise of income inequality. The only response
they have been offered is that this rise in income
inequality is natural, probably the result of technology,
and cannot in any way be reversed, so we might as well get
used to it. This response is so profoundly untrue that it
can only be seriously proposed by someone for whom
American history is a total mystery. We have had periods
of rising income inequality before, and they have always
been reversed once there was a political determination to
do so. Dani, and the millions like him, have every right
to be enraged by the past three decades of rising income
inequality, and if they dismiss every anti-Trump witticism
as completely irrelevant until it addresses income
inequality, they are right to do so.</p>
<p>Trump’s followers may not articulate it very well, and
they may too easily allow their anxiety about immigration
and trade to spill over into nativism and hatred of
foreigners, but they do have a strong case that makes them
in fact part of a venerable history. Trump is almost
certainly not going to resolve any of these issues for
them – the historical precedents are pretty clear on that
point – but it isn’t stupidity that drives them anyway to
Trump. It is the recognition that because anyone that
belongs within the political establishment has clearly
proven himself unwilling or unable to resolve any of these
issues, then gambling on someone “outrageous”, who they
identify as outside the political establishment, is
perfectly reasonable because it has no possible downside.
Their logic is the logic of successful hedge funds: when
there is no cost to being wrong, then you must gamble, no
matter how small the chance of being right.</p>
<p><strong>The Jacksonians Ride Again</strong></p>
<p>The Jacksonian tendency in American politics has existed
throughout American history. Their first flag bore the
motto “Don’t tread on me”, and all of their subsequent
flags have retained that message in one form or another
ever since. Their often-admirable self-reliance, however,
comes with other qualities.</p>
<p>They are often ferociously nativist, i.e. anti-immigrant,
and while we think they are always foolishly unaware of
the irony of their provenance, in fact they understand
that irony to be irrelevant. They know that the filthy
immigrants that thirty years ago threatened to corrupt the
American ideal are today the nativists that are determined
to protect American purity, but the fact remains that they
often have too little slack in their daily lives, and
those of their families, to afford any financial
interruption. Perhaps that is why they seem so unimpressed
with irony and it is probably only arrogance on our part
that assures us that they are too stupid to see it. Dani
and I have spoken about his family background many times,
and he knows full well that his American genealogy is
shallow, but he grew up in the streets of New York and he
is convinced that he is as full-blooded an American as any
one else, and of course he is.</p>
<p>Jacksonians can shift their views haphazardly. In modern
times, for example, they usually support states’ rights,
although during the 19th century, during Andrew Jackson’s
campaign, they demanded a much stronger presidency. But
there are also rock-hard consistencies. Jacksonians
romanticize the common man, whether he happens to be at
the time the frontier settler, the homesteading farmer, or
an employee of the Ford Motor Company in the 1920s, in the
same way that Dani spoke feelingly about the police and
the firemen whose bodies he felt obliged to dig up after
the tragedy of 9/11. They have always fulminated against
anything resembling a hereditary aristocracy, and instead
admired or even worshiped, sometimes with astonishing
foolishness, the nouveau riche that displaced them because
these men made their own way. Trump has convinced them, in
spite of the truth, that he is one of these self-made men,
and as long as they believe him they will forgive his
clownishness and his self-importance.</p>
<p>This is because Trump has positioned himself well, if
dishonestly, among people who have a long history of
loathing monopolists and big city bankers. Jacksonians
have always despised New York and Washington (and now Los
Angeles too) as the homes and headquarters of all that is
wrong with the Republic. They value fair play and a level
playing field as the highest aims of government, and
oppose on principle government actions that attempt to
redress social wrongs by favoring any group – and while
this hatred of government redress can very easily slide
into racism, it is unfair to dismiss it as only racism,
especially when many conservative and religious but often
silenced African-American and Latino families scattered
around in cities, small-towns and farms across the country
share the same feeling. In fact if someone were ever able
credibly to overcome their fear that nativism leads
automatically to racism, many of these blacks and Latinos
would quickly join the Jacksonians.</p>
<p>Jacksonians include the original tea-partiers and the
Sons of Liberty, who despite their subsequent
glorification included hooligans and sometimes-vicious
mobs who were often revolutionaries less for love of
liberty than for hatred of the rich. They included the
Know-Nothings of the 1850s, nativists who rose up in anger
to purify an America that was likely to be overrun by
filthy Irish Catholics, along with the Locofocos of the
1830s, who rose up in anger to protect workers from the
depredations of rich monopolists. William Jennings Bryan
counted on them in his crusade against gold, and even more
against the New York City bankers who backed the gold
standard. His followers were known as the progressives,
and their racism and nativism was largely romanticized out
of history, but they were no less Jacksonian than those
who say they support Trump today, something Harvard
historian Niall Ferguson has already pointed out.</p>
<p>The Jacksonian fury with the changes brought about by
rapid industrialization and the monstrous Second Bank of
the United States, around which the new country suddenly
saw individuals of once-unimaginable wealth emerge, put
Andrew Jackson in the presidency, and it is unfortunate
that the real concerns many Americans had in the 1830s
have been subsumed by the racism of Andrew Jackson and his
followers – both against black slaves and against native
Americans – but we do no favor to our understanding of
American history if we allow racism to be the whole story
of Jackson’s presidency, any more than if we forget that
people like Dani, who is not a racist, comprise a larger
share of Trump’s supporters than the racist fools we love
to mock.</p>
<p><strong>Dirty Rotten Scoundrels</strong></p>
<p>The strength of the Jacksonian tendency has waxed and
waned depending on American conditions. It is during
periods of especially heavy immigration, and during
periods in which income inequality is especially deep,
that they have come out in force, so much so sometimes
that they rock the political establishment to its very
bones, and usually none too soon. But with very few
exceptions the Jacksonians have almost always chosen as
their leaders the worst and most hypocritical of
scoundrels, scoundrels who nearly always betray them once
they’ve pocketed the millions they’ve obtained from
thrashing the old elite.</p>
<p>When we tremble at the idea of Trump as president, we
should remember their weak track record in putting
presidents into office (even William Jennings Bryan for
all his oratorical brilliance got trounced). Perhaps their
only triumph was Andrew Jackson himself, but his success
in no way suggests that Trump can do the same. Andrew
Jackson, for all his barbaric treachery towards native
Americans, was no hypocrite and no opportunist, and his
accomplishments, especially as a soldier, put in him in a
category that is wholly out of Trump’s reach, so much so
that to compare the two is meaningless.</p>
<p>But while they have nearly always been unlucky or foolish
in who they end up choosing as their leaders, the
Jacksonians have still managed to disrupt the political
establishment in ways that proved pretty permanent, and
they are doing so again. As absurd as Trump may be, he
channels their sans-culottes hatred of the elite in ways
that might actually strengthen democratic institutions.
Trump’s supporters might be why the US has never developed
a European-style permanent aristocracy or its
institutionalization of power. And perhaps it is not just
coincidence that any period in which there has been a
significant downward redistribution of wealth seems to
have been preceded by a period in which the Jacksonians
have done well. For better or for worse, Trump is not
exceptional in American history and the good news is that
even though he will never win the presidency, he has made
it clear that future presidential candidates have no
choice but to address income inequality and the anxieties
of the Jacksonians if they want to keep the likes of Trump
out of office.</p>
<p>Even if Trump does get the Republican nomination, the
only effect might be to destroy Abraham Lincoln’s party
forever, and the Democratic candidate, almost whoever it
is, will win by an historic landslide. And for those who
need the bogeyman of a possible Trump presidency in order
to maintain that delicious feeling of justified outrage,
so what if Trump becomes president? That is not the end of
the world, or even close to it. The first thing every
American president learns is how little he is able to do,
and President Trump will be in office for four years, with
a Congress in which both parties despise him, and he will
accomplish nothing, after which he will exit office with
among the lowest popularity ratings ever recorded.</p>
<p>And about that wall, how many times have we heard our
liberal friends threaten that if Trump becomes president
they will give up their US citizenship and move to Canada?
What idiots. In the incredibly unlikely circumstance that
Trump becomes president, the very first decision he will
make, because he has no choice but to make it, and
probably the last he will ever implement, is to build the
wall between Mexico and the United States that he has
promised. But anyone whose has followed Trump’s business
career knows damn well what will happen. He will indeed
build the wall, but inevitably he’ll build it on the wrong
side of the country – perhaps out of incompetency or
perhaps because there is a lot more money to be made with
a longer wall. Those liberal idiots can talk all they want
about going to Canada, but they won’t be able to get
there. There’ll be Trump’s wall in the way.</p>
<p>P.S. I don’t really write about political events on my
blog, but after a discussion about Trump with an English
friend during one of my business trips, I wrote this on
the flight home with some vague idea of perhaps submitting
it to some publication. However I didn’t want to spend too
much time on this as I am swamped with other commitments
and so have decided to publish it here. By the way I wrote
this just before the horrible events Tuesday in Belgium,
which reminded me that while I dismiss the chances of
Trump ever making president, or even of lasting much
longer as a candidate, there is a fly in the ointment that
will give him a few more weeks purchase. Terrorist
organizations seem to know that we are in a period of
elections in the US and Europe, and that to the extent
that they can affect the election process in the West –
and clearly they can – they must do what they can to
ensure that the extreme parties of the right perform well.
The two are in a self-reinforcing loop. The awful events
in Brussels will not only strengthen Donald Trump, Marine
Le Pen, Vladimir Putin and a host of others, but their
increased strength will raise the number of domestic
recruits for terrorist organizations. It is a maddening
process.</p>
<br>
<br>
105 comments </div>
</div>
</article>
<div id="comments" class="comments-area">
<ol class="commentlist">
<li class="comment even thread-even depth-1"
id="li-comment-2569419">
<article id="comment-2569419" class="comment">
<header class="comment-meta comment-author vcard"> <cite><b
class="fn">Disturbed Voter</b> </cite><a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569419"><time
datetime="2016-03-24T07:03:43+00:00">March 24, 2016
at 7:03 am</time></a> </header>
<section class="comment-content comment">
<p>Why has it been automatically assumed, since the
League of Nations, that nationalism is obsolete? Who
would such a policy serve? Nationalism has obvious
drawbacks, but most of us aren’t ready to live in a
global village, ruled by iron fisted bureaucrats … for
our own good. Smells of snake oil.</p>
</section>
<div class="reply"> <a moz-do-not-send="true"
rel="nofollow" class="comment-reply-link"
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569419"
onclick='return addComment.moveForm(
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aria-label="Reply to Disturbed Voter">Reply</a> <span>↓</span>
</div>
</article>
<ol class="children">
<li class="comment odd alt depth-2"
id="li-comment-2569444">
<article id="comment-2569444" class="comment">
<header class="comment-meta comment-author vcard"> <cite><b
class="fn">Moneta</b> </cite><a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569444"><time
datetime="2016-03-24T08:25:53+00:00">March 24,
2016 at 8:25 am</time></a> </header>
<section class="comment-content comment">
<p>The right wants globalization and the left world
peace with one big happy global family.</p>
<p>Maybe one day we’ll be able to properly mesh the
micro with the macro… and understand that healthy
sustainable communities needs some level of
self-sufficiency and industry diversification.</p>
</section>
<div class="reply"> <a moz-do-not-send="true"
rel="nofollow" class="comment-reply-link"
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569444"
onclick='return addComment.moveForm(
"comment-2569444", "2569444", "respond", "83101"
)' aria-label="Reply to Moneta">Reply</a> <span>↓</span>
</div>
</article>
</li>
<li class="comment even depth-2" id="li-comment-2569456">
<article id="comment-2569456" class="comment">
<header class="comment-meta comment-author vcard"> <cite><b
class="fn">Minnie Mouse</b> </cite><a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569456"><time
datetime="2016-03-24T08:55:22+00:00">March 24,
2016 at 8:55 am</time></a> </header>
<section class="comment-content comment">
<p>What can be said for the nation state is that it
functions as a defacto safety firewall against
screwing up everything all at once. That alone
justifies nationalism. Any mono culture can get
wiped out by a single infection.</p>
</section>
<div class="reply"> <a moz-do-not-send="true"
rel="nofollow" class="comment-reply-link"
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569456"
onclick='return addComment.moveForm(
"comment-2569456", "2569456", "respond", "83101"
)' aria-label="Reply to Minnie Mouse">Reply</a> <span>↓</span>
</div>
</article>
<ol class="children">
<li class="comment odd alt depth-3"
id="li-comment-2569664">
<article id="comment-2569664" class="comment">
<header class="comment-meta comment-author vcard">
<cite><b class="fn">scraping_by</b> </cite><a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569664"><time
datetime="2016-03-24T14:03:48+00:00">March
24, 2016 at 2:03 pm</time></a> </header>
<section class="comment-content comment">
<p>There’s a small but growing line of thought
that nationalism has worth because it values
people on a basis other than economic utility.
It may be sentimental, subjective, and
conventional, but it is a recognition that a
human being is more than a cost input in a
profit machine. With the last humane impulses
being beaten out of religion and professional
psychology mired in identity politics, history
weaponized and literature divided into silos,
it may be one of the few paths to human
recognition we’ve got left.</p>
</section>
<div class="reply"> <a moz-do-not-send="true"
rel="nofollow" class="comment-reply-link"
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569664"
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</article>
<ol class="children">
<li class="comment even depth-4"
id="li-comment-2569756">
<article id="comment-2569756" class="comment">
<header class="comment-meta comment-author
vcard"> <cite><b class="fn">Minnie Mouse</b>
</cite><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569756"><time
datetime="2016-03-24T16:11:28+00:00">March
24, 2016 at 4:11 pm</time></a> </header>
<section class="comment-content comment">
<p>National self sufficiency tends to
diversify the overall global supply chain
simply because everybody must produce at
least some of everything to be self
sufficient, hence “biodiversity” is a
hedge against global catastrophic failure.
Concentration of anything is a single
point failure vulnerability. Nationalism
is more than sentimental, subjective, and
conventional but mitigates global systemic
risk.</p>
</section>
<div class="reply"> <a moz-do-not-send="true"
rel="nofollow" class="comment-reply-link"
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569756"
onclick='return addComment.moveForm(
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Mouse">Reply</a> <span>↓</span> </div>
</article>
</li>
</ol>
</li>
</ol>
</li>
</ol>
</li>
<li class="comment odd alt thread-odd thread-alt depth-1"
id="li-comment-2569420">
<article id="comment-2569420" class="comment">
<header class="comment-meta comment-author vcard"> <cite><b
class="fn">Andrew Anderson</b> </cite><a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569420"><time
datetime="2016-03-24T07:05:16+00:00">March 24, 2016
at 7:05 am</time></a> </header>
<section class="comment-content comment">
<p>Andrew Jackson took on the banks, not very
intelligently because it caused a depression (of 1837
iirc).</p>
<p>Today we know better and can deprivilege the banks
safely but we’d best start planning carefully how to
do so.</p>
</section>
<div class="reply"> <a moz-do-not-send="true"
rel="nofollow" class="comment-reply-link"
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569420"
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</article>
<ol class="children">
<li class="comment even depth-2" id="li-comment-2569449">
<article id="comment-2569449" class="comment">
<header class="comment-meta comment-author vcard"> <cite><b
class="fn">SufferinSuccotash</b> </cite><a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569449"><time
datetime="2016-03-24T08:39:30+00:00">March 24,
2016 at 8:39 am</time></a> </header>
<section class="comment-content comment">
<p>He actually took on only one bank, the Second
Bank of the United States. But the results were
pretty definitive.</p>
</section>
<div class="reply"> <a moz-do-not-send="true"
rel="nofollow" class="comment-reply-link"
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569449"
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<ol class="children">
<li class="comment odd alt depth-3"
id="li-comment-2569649">
<article id="comment-2569649" class="comment">
<header class="comment-meta comment-author vcard">
<cite><b class="fn">barefoot charley</b> </cite><a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/michael-pettis-trump-and-the-re-emergence-of-the-jacksonians.html#comment-2569649"><time
datetime="2016-03-24T13:32:31+00:00">March
24, 2016 at 1:32 pm</time></a> </header>
<section class="comment-content comment">
<p>Driving a stake through the heart of the
ever-never-dead central bank was a great
left-wing issue throughout the 19th century,
second only to slavery. Leftists cannot and
will not be serious until they get off the
banksters’ bus. Good essay. Jackson embodied
the strengths and contradictions that Trump
lampoons like a reality tv show: he’s the
authoritarian father-figure who knows what’s
good for you; the daddy who loves and hates
for you; the rabble-rousing honest broker
who’s not above an occasional shooting or
clubbing, usually well deserved; above all
he’s a man, not a worm like the bankster
buddies and biddies Trump’s running against.
(Forgive me for not mentioning Bernie, perhaps
the last ghost of Lower East Sides past. In a
better America after WWII, his views got
trampled like Jackson trampled Indians.) If we
could fuse the nativist/populist and elite
Progressive strains of our country, we could
recognize the deep overlaps of Trump and
Sanders. It’s culture, not policy that most
divides them. Note that Marine le Pen and
Nigel Farange also have vastly more
progressive social policies on banksters and
centralization than leftists, who are as
captive as government regulators.
Trump/Sanders 2016!</p>
</section>
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