In case you missed it, a significant political event took place last week in Jackson, Miss., where Donald Trump joined forces with Nigel Farage, the anti-immigrant leader of the successful campaign to take Britain out of the European Union.
Mr. Make-America-Great-Again stood shoulder to shoulder with Mr. Brexit to make the point that, on both sides of the Atlantic, the same disruptive movements aim to break the free-trade, pro-globalization neoliberal consensus that has held sway in the West for at least a quarter-century.
“Folks, the message is clear,” Farage told the people of Mississippi in his plummy accent. “The parallels are there. There are millions of ordinary Americans who have been let down, who have had a bad time, who feel the political class in Washington is detached from them, who feel so many of their representatives are politically correct parts of that liberal media elite.”He continued, “You can go out, you can beat the pollsters, you can beat the commentators, you can beat Washington.”Farage, who has declared mission accomplished and quit the leadership of the anti-immigrant U.K. Independence Party since the Brexit vote in June, is a self-important loudmouth who should be taken seriously. His pomposity masks political guile. His bigotry is attuned to the times.
You can’t have observed Farage over the past couple of years and not think Trump may well win in November. That’s Britain’s lesson to America. There is too much smug Hillary-has-it sentiment swilling around.
Farage proved pollsters wrong. He proved commentators wrong. He made a mockery of President Obama and others who urged Britain to remain in Europe. He delivered something as unthinkable as Trump’s rise to the Republican nomination: a winning popular insurrection against the status quo, in this case the European Union membership that had undergirded growing British prosperity for more than four decades.
The thing is, the prosperity was skewed, just as it’s skewed in the United States, leaving wide swathes of the white working class in particular incensed that employment has migrated offshore at the same speed as immigrants have come onshore to take a dwindling number of jobs.
Britain, too, has its miniature version of flyover country now. The global citizens of big cities like London and Manchester who voted Remain were aghast that anyone out there in Lincolnshire (let alone a majority nationwide) could think differently, in the same way as the global citizens of New York or Los Angeles can’t see Trump’s appeal to tens of millions of Americans.
The uncomfortable truth about the Trump campaign is that, like the Brexit campaign, it is perfectly timed to ride a mood of popular revolt — against neoliberal economics, against the bankers who emerged with impunity from the 2008 financial meltdown, against what Farage called “global corporatism,” against seemingly uncontrolled immigration, and against the politicians behind growing workplace precariousness and a pervasive sense of personal control lost to impersonal forces.
One way to view Trump is that only his personal failings — his bullying, his petulance, his egomania, his ignorance, his inconsistency, his mendacity, his racism, his hair-trigger temper, his arrogance, his disorganization and his misogyny — stand in the way of his emerging as the logical victor in an anti-status quo, pro-change election that produced in Bernie Sanders the other political phenomenon of 2016.
Because Hillary Clinton, as a symbol of dynastic entitlement (albeit a female one), is such an easy target for an anti-establishment movement, she is particularly vulnerable to the forces that have produced Trump and Brexit.
As Martin Jacques observed recently in The Guardian: “We are witnessing the end of the neoliberal era. It is not dead, but it is in its early death throes, just as the social democratic era was during the 1970s.”
He went on: “One of the reasons why the left has failed to emerge as the leader of the new mood of working-class disillusionment is that most social democratic parties became, in varying degrees, disciples of neoliberalism and uber-globalization.” The most extreme expressions of this, he noted, were New Labour in Britain and the Democratic Party, led respectively by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.
Of course, those political movements also produced great prosperity and optimism in their moment. But the moment has passed. The pendulum has swung. Inequality has risen to intolerable levels.
“If the little people, if the real people, if the ordinary decent people are prepared to stand up and fight for what they believe in, we can overcome the big banks, we can overcome the multinationals,” Farage declared with Trump looking on approvingly.
They are politicians delivering ugly messages — explicit and implicit. Theirs is the last hate-filled stand of the white man in societies that globalization has irrevocably changed in composition and color. They are self-centered and cynical, manipulating resentment with half-truths and untruths, accommodating the loony extremist right.
Farage has already done great damage to Britain. But if there is one thing that Americans can learn from him, it is that we live in an age where the candidate of disruption rides a powerful wave.
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ROGER COHEN>
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