Trump and Corbyn turn tribes into cults

Partisanship writes its own facts. Armies of true believers, on Left and Right, will believe anything

Neither man will thank me for pointing it out, but Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn are becoming increasingly alike. Both hanker after the protectionism that kept much of the world poor until the mid-twentieth century. Both struggle to accept that the wealth of their countries no longer rests on manufacturing. Both are anti-Nato, though both are coy about saying so too loudly. Both think we should be nicer to Vladimir Putin. Both dislike independent media. Their respective parliamentarians privately detest them. Republican Congressmen are every bit as rude about Trump off the record as Labour MPs are about Corbyn. Yet both sets of legislators – with a few honourable exceptions – abase themselves in public. Yale historian Timothy Snyder calls this phenomenon “anticipatory obedience”, and notes that grovelers rarely get any thanks. He’s right: belatedly backing their leaders won’t save perceived ideological opponents from deselection moves. Like Trump, Corbyn intends to govern, not just despite his party, but in defiance of it.

The two men were able to bypass their party machines by creating unlikely personality cults. I say “unlikely” because neither man is obviously charismatic. Trump is bombastic, self-contradictory and repetitive. Corbyn, though wellmeaning, is dreich and slow-witted. Neither is a gifted orator. Yet both are able to call on armies of disciples who follow them trustingly – belligerently, indeed – through every U-turn.

These disciples would no doubt resent being likened to each other. Trumpsters use “socialist” as a swear-word, while Corbynistas see the American leader as the devil himself. A Manichean, with-us-or-against-us absolutism characterises both sects, blinding them to what their leaders have in common.

For example, the people who rage about Kremlin agents provocateurs and Twitterbots having backed Trump tend to dismiss the evidence that they also backed Corbyn. In fact, they don’t just dismiss it, they barely register seeing it at all.

Yet there is no getting away from it. On the core issue of economic policy, the two analogue-era campaigners are hard to tell apart. Corbyn wants to subsidise manufacturers, opposes free trade deals, rails against “cheap labour abroad” and attacks the Government for allowing a non-British firm to print our passports. Last month, the Labour leader echoed Trump almost word-forword, demanding that “we build things that for too long have been built abroad”.

Am I really saying that Jeremy Corbyn, the most Left-wing Labour leader ever, has adopted the same economic policy as a Right-wing Republican? Well, Trump isn’t really a Republican, having come late and malevolently to that party; and he is “Right-wing” only in the Labour/ Guardian/ BBC sense of “baddie”. Every previous Republican leader saw it as his job to constrain federal spending, but Donald Trump prefers to marshall the full resources of the state to reward his supporters and punish his enemies. He inherited a deficit that stood at $587 billion. Next year, it will touch $1.2 trillion, and, within a decade, it will have reached an eye-watering $2 trillion. As the Republican strategist Rick Wilson puts it, “The GOP is now the party of big government, and it’s all Trump’s fault.”

Which brings us to the cult-like nature of his followers. It’s not surprising that Trump’s core supporters applaud his name-calling, his attacks on immigrants, his scare-mongering about crime. But limited government was until now a core Republican principle. When Barack Obama allowed the deficit to rise, Tea Partiers took to the streets in an explosion of rage. Yet now, just when the Tea Party is most needed (Trump doesn’t even have the flimsy excuse that Obama had of pumppriming during a downturn) those protesters have melted away. Worse, many of them have become vocal Trumpsters. The same tribalism infects whole sections of the American Right. Fiscal conservatives overlook the deficit; evangelicals disregard the President’s adulteries; foreign policy hawks ignore his admiration for Putin; constitutionalists accept his abuses of executive power.

Corbynites likewise follow their man to the unlikeliest of places – most recently, for example, cheering Len McCluskey’s admonition of the “truculent” Jews who criticised him.

The behaviour of Corbyn cultists over the Tunis wreath-laying eerily paralleled that of Trumpsters over the Russia links. First, they unquestioningly accepted their leader’s brazen denials. Then they stuck to those denials even when the leader himself dropped them. Then they dismissed all criticism as biased. Finally, they were so compromised that they ended up defending their leader’s original action – repellent though they’d have found it from first principles.

What enables these extraordinary moral acrobatics? Simple. The profusion of online sources lets people seek out, not just opinions that they like, but purported facts that they like. More than 90 per cent of Trump supporters say that their primary news source is the President himself. A number of Corbynites seem to have convinced themselves that their man has won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Precisely ten years ago, I coauthored a book with Douglas Carswell called The Plan which argued that, as political reporting was disintermediated, and as lobby correspondents lost their market share, all sorts of previously unimaginable politicians would emerge. You know something, though? Having predicted the phenomenon doesn’t make it any less unsettling when it happens.

More than 90 per cent of Trump supporters say their main source of news is the President himself.