Flawed candidates for a broken system
Iam not aghast. Which might r ender others aghast, as being aghast appears to be the consensus position that properly thinking people take about Donald Trump. Let me explain.
Last spring, on a drive through rural Minnesota with spotty radio reception, I happened across a political speech on National Public Radio, one of the few stations I could pick up. I didn’t know who it was, as I missed the introduction, but it was compelling. The speaker was saying things that one just never hears from the standard Washington figures. He was passionate, even angry, and I didn’t agree with much of what he said. But he spoke about a problem that no one was speaking about, and I listened to him with increasing sympathy for more than half an hour — which is about 10 times longer than I can usually bear to listen to the canned talking points that customarily constitute political speeches. Indeed, it was the first time a political speaker had held my attention from start to finish in years. At the end of it, a member of the audience encouraged him to run for president. He said he was considering it — and in fact he currently is. Only at the conclusion of program did I discover who this refreshing voice was: Bernie Sanders.
With two weeks to go before the first contests in the American presidential primary system, I am hoping that the voters in Iowa and New Hampshire give thumping victories to Sanders and Trump. Do I think either would make a good president? Unlikely, but I am not exceptionally i mpressed with the president currently in office. Do I think they are outside the mainstream of American politics? Yes, and that is their attraction.
Sanders, and Trump to a lesser extent, talk about the corrupting effect of money in U. S. politics. Americans are offered periodic choices between parties that are bought and sold by the richest interests. The Clintons have an entire “charitable” foundation that exists to facilitate the selling of their influence, and to extend the opportunity for influence-buying to foreign nationals, who otherwise are excluded from the sovereign American right to purchase a politician. When Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, foreign interests were not shy about paying Bill a quartermillion here, a half- million there. In Africa or Asia, the American state department would identify such behaviour as rank corruption. But with the Clintons, whether it is bribe or not depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.
Sanders denounces all of this root and branch. And he is right. Trump boasts that, due to his personal wealth and self- funded campaign, he doesn’t have to sell himself. He’s right too. A primary victory or two for them would be a just reward.
And then there is Trump, immigration and Islam. I don’t agree with him on almost any of his policies, and quite vehemently oppose, on religious liberty grounds, his proposal to temporarily ban all Muslim immigration. Yet if the political class that insists that, whether it be mass illegal Mexican immigration in the United States or mass Muslim immigration in Europe, it is racist even to raise the question of the effect on the host population, then the fault for the rise of Trump lies with them.
Mass immigration in the U. S. helps the corporate class. It does not help unskilled workers, especially black workers. But few speak for the unskilled labour class in a system tilted toward the super-rich. That Sanders and Trump do might be surprising — a lifelong politician and a billionaire — but it is welcome.
The depredations of the Islamist expansion are with us now daily, whether it be mass sexual assaults in Ger-
TRUMP AND SANDERS ARE NOT MY CHOICES FOR PRESIDENT. BUT THEY’RE SAYING IMPORTANT THINGS (YES, EVEN TRUMP).
many, or terror killings in Jakarta and Burkina Faso. What is to be done about all this is fiendishly complicated, but it would be rather simple to say that there is a problem. On Sunday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemned the killings of Quebeckers in Burkina Faso while visiting a mosque that had been firebombed in Peterborough, Ont., after the Islamist massacre in Paris last year ( November, not January). He was more passionate about the mosque bombing than he generally is about whatever jihadist bloodbath has taken place that week. Trump speaks — with all of his manifest flaws — with an urgency about Islamist terror that is long overdue.
Political predictions are not my forte. Sanders and Trump may well fade, perhaps later, perhaps sooner. But the monied interests and conventional custodians of acceptable opinions were not supposed to let them get this far. They have. I hope they get farther still. They are flawed candidates, but a broken system needs them if it is ever to correct itself.