Protesters in America feel the need to call on superheroes to make their pointCREDIT:MICHAEL MACOR/SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE/AP
You don’t hear the totemic vision of a “United States of Europe” being touted much at the moment. I wonder why. That ideal of the European continent as a unified entity, presenting an alternative presence in the world to the overweening superpower across the Atlantic was once the whole point – wasn’t it? I can remember a German politician explaining to me very forcefully why it was necessary for Europe to have a single currency: this was an essential step in the creation of a parallel union of states which would be big enough to challenge the hegemony of the dollar and US political domination. The clear model for economic success and global influence was a federation extending, as an American patriotic hymn puts it, “from sea to shining sea”.
But, as I say, nobody who favours remaining in the EU is talking up that idea these days. In fact, it’s the other guys – the ones who want to leave – who are most inclined to remind us of it, to the clear embarrassment of the Remainers. Could this be because the political model itself – the American success story of a federation of states joined together under a central government – seems to be going badly wrong? The nation that appeared to have found the ultimate solution to conjoining separate states, each with its own semi-autonomous authority, under one set of national governing institutions is now apparently facing an electoral choice between the demagogic and the disreputable. At the national level – precisely the point at which its structure is most relevant to the concept of European federalism – American politics is clearly in crisis. The idea that a centrally governed confederation of states can be an unfailingly rational, functioning system seems to be falling apart.
Most disturbingly, the US seems to be prey to the same excesses which are so worrying in the European scene. American federal elections both at the presidential and the congressional level, used to be predictably, boringly moderate. For generations, both the major parties (and there were no others worth considering) could have fit within what was, in European terms, a narrow spectrum of political possibility: roughly the middle ground of the British Conservative party. Capitalism under reasonable controls and a strong defence of individual liberty were the basic tenets of a consensus which underpinned every plausible candidacy, allowing only for differences of emphasis and intonation. There were occasional substantive disagreements about foreign policy but the swings between isolationism and interventionism were not associated so much with particular parties as with idiosyncratic individuals. Since the end of the Second World War, mainstream politics in America was just that – as unvaryingly unsurprising and mainstream as it was possible to get.
Scuffles at anti-Trump demo at GOP conventionPlay!01:25
Well that’s all over. Populist fragmentation – with all its potential for volatility and social unrest – was once looked on by Americans as an exotic foreign phenomenon. Now it has arrived in their own home towns. Donald Trump, who regards himself as the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, harangues his followers with a cry of “America first!” which was the name of the most extreme isolationist campaign in modern American history, demanding that the US remain neutral during the Second World War.
Bernie Sanders, who will certainly not be the Democratic candidate but whose startling number of primary wins has put him in a strong position to influence party policy, is openly socialist – a fact which would have caused him to be instantly vaporised in any previous election campaign. The old complacent consensus that used to make the US one of the most politically stable – and small “c” conservative – countries in the world, has suddenly exploded into an epidemic of outrageous uncivil behaviour and incoherent rhetoric on the one side (Trump), and emotive, unsupported threats against the “big banks” on the other (Sanders).
Clinton and Sanders in aggressive clash at Democratic debatePlay!01:17
The only plausible alternative to Trump for the Republicans is Ted Cruz who is way to the Right of the old traditional party. He has, in fact, revived the slogan, “a choice, not an echo” which was used by Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964 when Goldwater led the party to a spectacular, historic defeat. Cruz obviously believes that there is now a much more serious shift to the Right among the electorate.
Sanders, meanwhile, is using language that has not been the currency in American politics for over 80 years: the anti-capitalist, class war, railing-against-Wall Street talk that was commonplace during the Depression. Indeed, I suspect that his personal background might not be a million miles from my own. My grandmother was a Russian Jewish immigrant to America who became a Communist trade unionist in the rag trade of the 1930s. The quasi-respectability of that life, and those views, had been dead in America since the Cold War. But here it is again, alive and kicking.
n all this excitement, it is the person who is almost certain to be the next president who provokes the least enthusiasm and the most grudging support. Hillary Clinton is damned not just by the unsavoury baggage of her past and questions about her honesty but, above all, by her association with established Washington power. And there we have it. What is going on with American politics is not at all unlike what is going on with the politics of so many member states of the EU.
Rage against the machine – the people’s furious dissatisfaction with the loss of any real sense of control over their own lives – has hit the governing classes of the West with a bang. The single thing that these phenomena have in common, whether it is the rise of the far Right in Germany and France, the popularity of Donald Trump whose foreign policy speech last week consisted of a stream of non sequiturs, the unspecified “plans” of Bernie Sanders to break up the big banks, or the ideological blinkers of Jeremy Corbyn are that they are outside the limits of the accepted order.
Hatred is directed specifically at the remote structures and people whose commands must be obeyed, and yet who appear indifferent to the wishes and concerns of the governed. Surely, this was exactly what the great democratic revolutions were designed to correct? How do we find ourselves once again under the rule of unaccountable oligarchs who are oblivious to what Thoreau called the “quiet desperation” of ordinary men? In America, suspicion of the dominance of federal government is written into the Constitution which guarantees the rights of the individual States. The US capital city, it is said, was built on a swamp so that the disagreeable weather would put off the holders of national office from spending much time there plotting to seize power. (The weather is still disagreeable but this does not, alas, prevent the power of federal institutions from spreading inexorably.)
This degree of anger and resistance is unprecedented in living memory. Even the rise in the 1970s of Leftwing protest which produced the electorally disastrous candidacy of George McGovern was less damaging, because it was more focused and concentrated in a particular section of the population. What is disturbing about the present malaise is that it is so vague and diffuse. There is no specific refrain or remedy, just a rejection of everything that is Too Big: Big Government, Big Banks, Big Bureaucracy, Big Business. And this revolt is happening in a union where the member states share a common language, a common history, and a written Constitution which they universally revere. What chance would a United States of Europe be likely to have?
Federal government in the US and EU is pushing politics to the brink