Tag: Federalist Papers

Next year in America

I posted a blog after the 2019 UK election which I intended as a marker to check, over the longer term, the outcome of the promises made by Boris Johnson. He failed on all counts. I’d like to do something similar for Donald Trump. I’m not, however, on such sure ground, expecting failure, as I was then. Trump has been through the hoops once and knows the route and can anticipate the snares, and he has his accomplices already in mind, if not yet in place.

I intend in a year’s time to check back with this post and see how it’s all working out. I’m not into predicting. Over the last ten, maybe fifteen years, we have seen the world turned on its head. I can’t see any kind of stability coming any time soon.

I’ll make the deep state my starting-point. Agencies such as the FBI and CIA and Federal departments have to function within government and cannot normally be held accountable in the public space. Under Trump they’ve been labelled the deep state and turned into a conspiracy against the American people which can only be rooted out by turning traditional merit-based appointments into political appointments. That includes appointments to the Supreme Court and Federal courts.

His appointment as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will ‘ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions’. ‘Drill, baby, drill’ in his mantra. ‘Government bureaucracy, excess regulations and wasteful expenditures’ are all in the firing line. Elon Musk will be a key figure.

He will continue to play games. Might he in a few cases row back on hard-line policies? His apparently amiable meeting with Joe Biden yesterday, and the orderly handover which now appears likely, took me by surprise. But, also yesterday, he’s put forward an ultra hardliner, Matt Gaetz, as the new Attorney General. He would end ‘the partisan weaponisation of our Justice System‘.

How will conspiracy theories, which thrive in this kind of environment, play out in the coming months and years? And will Trump continue to demonise opponents? He has made wild threats against journalists. Musk has helped enormously by turning Twitter into a right-wing promotional agency. Will the January 6th protesters be pardoned?

Fox News will have a free rein. The Washington Post and LA Times hedged their bets ahead of the election. Don’t alienate Trump has been the mantra. How much will free speech will be impaired? LGBTQ+ rights and critical race theory will be, more than ever, in the Trump media cross-wires.

What will be the effect on university campuses and by extension on anyone with a liberal arts education and a belief in an open, liberal democracy? The difference in voting preferences in last week’s election between locations which have high levels of college education and those that don’t were stark.

Are the old right/left dividing lines gone forever? A working class with socially conservative instincts is now firmly Republican. But might that change if Trump Republicans turn out to have feet of clay? Will Democrats realise how important it is to be a broad church on social issues?  Could the party re-discover its working-class roots? Might turncoat Latino voters turn back?

Disillusion with the Federal government in Washington has played into Trump’s hands. He has the blue Republican states very much onside and will use it to his advantage. One example may the abortion issue which he will probably leave to the legislatures of the individual states.

Trump will build his wall. His credibility depends on it. Deporting up to 12 million immigrants is a challenge at a whole other level, both logistically and in terms of the resistance and violent response it will engender. And heedless of the damage it will do to the American economy.

To what extent will tariffs, 60% on Chinese goods, 10% or more the rest of the world, impact the American economy and industry and patterns of consumption? Mercantilism, maximising exports, minimising imports, is a throwback to another age. The other side of American exceptionalism is and has always been America-behind-closed-doors. Leave it to the merchants, the industrialists and the money men to look abroad.

Taxes will fall (or, in the case the 2018 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, be renewed) and regulations cut back, with the aim of streamlining business. If high interest rates result might Trump intervene to keep then low? Might the Federal Reserve lose its independence? Can short-term stock market gains be sustained?

Related this is the rise of the plutocrats, the new libertarians, with Musk their primary example, and their likely role in a future administration, and their belief on a slimmed-down government. Michael Lewis points out that the gap between the billionaires who know how to manipulate finance and ordinary guy is getting ever wider. Financial markets will become ever more opaque.

With an avowed ‘America First ‘ and non-interventionist approach to foreign policy Trump could as easily be friends with autocratic regimes as democratic governments. We could lose any sense of American democracy as a role model for free societies worldwide

How will relations with Russia, Ukraine, China, Israel, Gaza, Iran work out? And North Korea. Might Trump have a better chance of influence because his government wouldn’t be trying to tell governments how to improve their human rights records? And what of the ‘friends’ of America and the West: the EU, the UK, India, Japan, South Korea, also Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Will they be kept onside?

The ultimate test will be 2026 mid-terms and 2028. Will Americans go into those contests with the same open debate (however fractious) and open and accountable elections as they’ve done in 2024? Trump, we know, has plans to suborn the courts. To what extent might he suborn the media, both social and imprint? Hungary’s Viktor Orban has pointed the way.

The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton – and the UK

‘…the best commentary on the principles of government ever written’.  (Thomas Jefferson)

That marvellous musical, Hamilton, has taken me back to the Federalist Papers, not normally the subject for an Englishman. They are remarkable in every way – high principle and skilled argument, without any apparent pressure of faction or dominant individuals (though that was there of course), arguing for a sustainable and, for the standards of its time, remarkably representative republic.  The very nature of the post-revolutionary America was at stake: a nascent republic pitched against a powerful anti-federalist movement.

There were extraordinary men to meet the challenge, not least Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, the two principle authors of the Papers.

I quote passages from the Papers below. They are desperately relevant, and readily overlooked, in the USA today. They are also directly relevant to the UK.

Hamilton asks at the beginning of Federalist 1 ‘whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice [my italics], or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force’.

Madison in Federalist 10 argues for a representative body, defined as a republic, as appropriate ‘for  refining and enlarging  the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations’.

What has suffered terribly over the last three and a half years in the UK has been the popular right to representation. We have been obliged by a rogue referendum to marry an emotion-driven and ill-argued and mis-represented referendum with the ordinary process of representative and consultative democracy. The two cannot and will not go together. Support for referenda by the leaders of political parties was predicated on the inevitable victory of their point of view. They were wrong. In the language of the Federalist Papers there were factions at work, not least the popular press and rogue elements of one political party, who demonstrated that faction can stir up a population, and win the day.

None of this is to argue against the real resentments over inequality and alienation felt by wide sections of the population. Representative government has been found wanting – failed in the essential requirement of engaging and looking after the interests of all sections of the population. But it is for representative government to reform itself. There is no other way.

Brexit itself, the severance at worst, long-term disruption at best, of our links with Europe, is a consequence of that failure of government. But in no way can it be an answer to that failure. But to argue this is not the purpose of this post.

I will let the passages from the Federalist Papers speak for themselves.

(Federalist 1, author Alexander Hamilton)

AFTER an unequivocal experience of the inefficiency of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America … It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

(Federalist 10, author James Madison)

From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction … such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention …

A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking…

The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.

The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand, to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose.

(Madison’s second point of difference, highlighting the benefits of a larger over a smaller republic, with the representation of a wide range of interests and points of view, and the difficulty therefore of any faction in disrupting government, is not directly my subject here.  Though always relevant.)