![Liz Truss]()
Edward
Luce writes of UK prime minister Liz Truss, pictured: ‘The entirely
foreseeable calamity of Trussonomics — the new by-word, named after Liz
Truss, for people who do not know what they are doing — finds strong
echoes among American conservatives’ © Getty Images After
Queen Elizabeth’s funeral, I promised myself not to write about Britain
for a long time. Though I am native of those parts, my base is America,
and has been for a long time. Yet Britain continues to be a
world-leader in creating news, often dire. Moreover, what happens there
is virally related to trends over here. The
entirely foreseeable calamity of Trussonomics — the new by-word, named
after Liz Truss, for people who do not know what they are doing — finds
strong echoes among American conservatives. Our politics have been
plagued for years by the curse of magical thinking — promises that bear
no relation to any realistic ability to deliver; extravagant lies that
cater to some felt need for self-delusion; gullibility dressed up as
hard-nosed “taking back control”. Conservatism
in the largest English-speaking democracies is locked in a race over
which of them can find rock bottom more quickly. For the moment, the UK
is in the lead. Apparently City traders have taken to calling sterling
“shitcoin”, which says it all. I fear America’s Trump-contagion variety
will have something to say about that in the coming months. My question
to Swampians, which I will also try to answer, is whether our
democracies can learn from the disastrous consequences of magical
thinking. Or are we too screwed up as societies to regain that habit of
pragmatism for which we were once fabled? Rana, it goes without saying
that I am also posing this question to you. It
is impossible to answer it without examining how we reached this pretty
pass. The conditions for Anglo-American populism were crystallised in
the 2008 global financial crisis. It was really just a western meltdown
(China and India kept growing and were relatively unscathed). In fact
its main culprits were from the anglosphere. Nothing enrages people more
than the wealthy and well-connected being bailed out while the rest are
left to struggle. As
fate would have it, the job of cleaning the mess fell to centre-left
governments on both sides of Atlantic — Gordon Brown’s Labour and Barack
Obama’s young administration. The centre-left thus got branded with the
recklessness that triggered the crisis and suffered most from its
bad-tempered aftermath. One of the casualties of 2008 was “expertise” —
the idea that people with degrees in economics or MBAs knew what they
were doing. The Chicago School’s efficient market hypothesis has a lot
to answer for. In
an accountable world, you would largely blame the right for the market
fundamentalism that had become dominant since the 1980s. But it was the
right that benefited politically from the 2008 fallout. The
countercyclical stimulus that helped restart growth was delivered by the
left. We then had six years of procyclical austerity from 2010 to 2016
in which the beleaguered middle classes bore the brunt of the fiscal
tightening brought about by the Tea Party Republicans in the US, and
David Cameron’s Conservative government in the UK. Again, it was the
right that perversely reaped the gains from the rage and insecurity that
resulted. But it was a different kind of right to what we grew up with.
The twin shocks of Brexit and Trump’s election in 2016 were the high
water mark of magical thinking. At least I hope they were. Opinion
polls in Britain show rising regret over Brexit — “regrexit”, as some
call it. Of course, it’s too late to re-enter the European Union, and
would be politically very hard to pull off. But it’s a sign that people
are digesting lessons from that notorious referendum. Keir Starmer’s
Labour party also has a 30-point lead over the Conservatives, which
reinforces that point. That would never have happened under Jeremy
Corbyn. Perhaps
we really are now at a low point in Britain’s misgovernance. I hope the
same applies to America but would only give slightly than better than
even odds of Biden beating Trump in a 2024 rematch. Should the latter
return to power, or indeed one of his mimics, such as Ron DeSantis,
America’s magical mystery rollercoaster would take another nosedive,
possibly fatal. The
one clear plan that Trump has for a second term, which more assiduous
types have been working on, is to give him the power to fire the federal
bureaucracy and replace them with loyalists. That’s anti-expertise,
anti-qualification politics on steroids. |