Trump: ready to steal what he can't win

Nothing Trump does surprises me anymore, but it’s still saddening to read that he’s now proposing a delay to the presidential elections.

It’s unsurprising because the US economy is in terrible condition. At the same time, deaths from Coronavirus have risen above 150,000 and are running at around 1500 a day. By way of contrast, Spain, where I live, is struggling to contain the epidemic but has a daily death toll in single figures.

The US has going on seven times the population but perhaps as much as 300 times as many daily deaths.

No wonder, then, that Trump would like the election held later, when the news, both on the economy and the epidemic, may be less damning for him.

What is even more depressing is that he’s challenging the validity of postal voting. Many prefer voting by post precisely because they don’t want to expose themselves to Coronavirus infection by attending polling stations in person. It’s true, too, that historically such votes tend to break more for the Democrats than the Republicans. That doesn’t make them fraudulent, as Trump claims against all the evidence, just less favourable to him.

Why that’s so particularly worrying is that it sounds far less like an argument for delaying the election, as for challenging the validity of the results if it’s held as planned and he loses. It’s by no means certain Biden will win, but it does look as though Trump is preparing a plan B, in the event of his losing. 

In other words, it feels as though Trump is preparing to steal the election.

Biden (left) working to win by the rules
Trump: preparing to rob him?

He could. Just imagine the following scenario.

The Democrat wins the presidential election by a small but nonetheless clear majority of the popular vote, say 50.9% to 47.9%.

And he wins the electoral college by a similarly small but conclusive margin of 39 votes over his Republican opponent.

Then things turn murky. Republicans challenge the votes of four states amounting, between them, to 20 electoral college votes, all of them for the Democrat. Removing those disputed votes from his total would leave him, exasperatingly, just one vote short of a majority – still 19 votes ahead of his rival, but not able to clinch the election.

Of course, he only needs one of the disputed electors to win. Things still look good for a Democratic victory. Republicans are worried.

After long weeks of negotiation, the two Parties agree to arbitrate the result. A special commission will adjudicate on the votes cast. It will include five members of the House of Representatives, five Senators and five Justices of the Supreme Court.

And that’s when the wheels start to come off the bus. Because on every vote, the commission splits 8:7 in favour of the Republicans. As a result, every single one of the disputed votes is awarded to the Republican candidate who emerges with an electoral college majority of just one and is duly sworn in as President.

The Democrats needed just one of those votes. They received none. And so they were defeated.

The worst thing about this scenario is that, far-fetched as it might sound, it’s no fantasy. In fact, it’s already happened.

What I was describing was the 1876 Presidential election. Samuel Tilden, the Democrat, was defeated, or rather robbed of victory. His Republican opponent, Rutherford Hayes, won the election, or rather had it stolen and handed to him. He became the nineteenth President.

Never heard of him? No surprise there. He deserves his obscurity. He achieved little and left little trace. Sadly, the same can’t be said of Trump. As the death toll from Coronavirus, and the damage to the economy, of the US and the world, have shown, his legacy is assured. Another four years, and there’s every chance it’ll be far more devastating still. And all the more difficult to recover from.

The only way to make it hard for Trump to steal the election is to make sure his defeat is so comprehensive that a challenge to any votes would not change the result.

Back in 2016, a lot of people, including friends of mine, couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary. Let’s hope that this time around, whatever misgivings they may have about Biden, they understand the importance of backing the candidate best placed to beat Trump.

Electing Rutherford Hayes was a dirty business. But re-electing Trump would be a real catastrophe. And be warned: he’s preparing the ground to steal what he can’t win.

 

Postscript

Though Samuel Tilden was, no doubt, robbed back in 1876, his campaign could hardly claim to be pure or admirable. Many of his wins came in the deep south, and were only obtained because white agitators physically threatened black voters to prevent them voting. Eleven years after a Civil War during which a Republican President, Lincoln, had freed them from slavery, the vast majority of blacks voted Republican.

In other words, had Tilden won, his victory would not have been that much cleaner than Hayes’.

Rutherford Hayes (left), the Republican
Samuel Tilden saw his victory stolen and handed to Hayes

Still. This time, though, Biden is trying to play by the rules. Let’s hope that doesn’t cost him victory.

A birthday that reminded me of a strange event

Google – or was it Wikipedia? there are so many of these things these days and it matters so little which is doing the talking – reminded me this week that William Seward’s birthday fell on the 16th of May.

It was his 218th birthday so I don’t imagine he was doing much celebrating. But I raised a glass to his memory. Because he’s one of those figures that I think deserves to be remembered with affection and a twinkle of humour.

Not perhaps the most attractive of men
but a most attractive character

He was born into wealth and into a family which owned a few slaves in the last few years of that shameful institution in the state of New York. Whether or not his family’s experience of slave ownership played any role in the formation of his ideas, he grew up with an abiding and outspoken hatred of that abuse. Inevitably, he was one of the main figures in the launching of the Republican Party in the 1850s.

That party, as well as having a powerful conservative wing, was also the home of many US radicals, including most of those in favour of abolishing slavery. It was, above all and increasingly, the party of liberal Northern, business and financial interests, against a much more strongly agrarian and conservative current in the Democratic Party, in which Southern concerns played a forceful and growing role.

Funny how things have changed, isn’t it? The Liberal wing of Republicanism seems to have sunk without trace. It’s the Democrats today who represent the liberal currents of the wealthy North East, the West and of some central states.

By 1860, Seward had served two terms as Governor of New York and was approaching the end of his second term as a Senator for that State. He was one of the best-known and powerful voices in the Republican Party and his track record of public service was outstanding. No wonder that when his name was submitted to the Republican convention in Chicago that year, for selection as the party’s presidential candidate, he seemed not just the front runner but a shoo in for the nomination.

Back home in New York – candidates in those days didn’t attend the conventions, though it was there that nominations were decided, in a time before primaries – back home, his friends and family had put together a huge celebration to mark his selection including a battery of cannon to mark the great moment.

Unfortunately, however, he’d put off many of the more moderate members of his party. Or maybe it would be more accurate to describe them as prudent or even nervous. Many felt that to oppose slavery too openly would spell doom for the country, splitting it irretrievably and possibly even precipitating Civil War. Many felt it was wiser to adopt a less radical stance, perhaps of allowing slavery to continue where it was already practised but prevent its spread anywhere else.

Sadly for Seward, while he was able to command the biggest single bloc of convention delegates on the first ballot, it didn’t constitute a majority. And through the next three ballots, his vote remained static.

Instead, the less abolitionist majority, originally split among several candidates including Ohio Governor Salmon Chase and former Missouri Representative Edward Bates, began to coalesce around just one.

And who was he?

Well, his name is known around the world today, far beyond the borders of the United States. But you need to imagine yourself back into the atmosphere of the times to realise how extraordinary his nomination was.

He was a local politician of limited education, raised in agonising poverty, who earned his living practising law in a thinly populated state, and had only made any significant amounts of money when he began to take briefs for such enterprises as the railroads. His total experience as a politician at national level was a single two-year terms as a congressman eleven years earlier, when he had signally failed to make anything like a name for himself.

No Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, recognisable anywhere today after only a few months in office and so well-known, indeed, that she can simply be referred to as AOC.

A major national party nominated for President of a United States on the brink of Civil War, and at a crisis point over slavery that was as moral as it was political, a man barely known outside his State and with limited previous political experience.

He was, of course, Abraham Lincoln. He won the 1860 Presidential Election, though without winning a majority of the popular vote. Despite all the prudence of the moderates, the result of that vote precipitated the secession of the Southern states, and the Civil War they had hoped to avoid by selecting Lincoln in the first place.

One of his first acts was to appoint his rivals from Chicago to his Cabinet. Salmon Chase became Secretary of the Treasury. Edward Bates became Attorney General. And Seward, cheated of his coronation, became Secretary of State, the most senior member of the Cabinet, second only to the President himself.

Better, as Lyndon B. Johnson would later colourfully claim, to have them in the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.

I’m only going to tell three anecdotes about Seward, three of my favourites. But, this post being more than long enough already, I’ll come back to them in my next.

Forecasts: crystal balls or a load of balls?

It is said, often by me, that it was the Danish physicist Neils Bohr who quipped ‘it is very difficult to predict — especially the future’.

It seems he may have been quoting an old Danish proverb, but ancient proverb or physicist’s witticism, it’s certainly true. I know that myself. I predicted, back in 2017, that Jeremy Corbyn would lead Labour to a catastrophic defeat in the general election that year. In fact, after a huge surge in support, he managed to lead the party only to a narrow defeat.

Sometimes I’ve got things right. After campaigning around the town where I live, Luton, to stay in the European Union, I was left with the distinct impression that we were heading for defeat. And, indeed, the nation voted by a narrow margin, and Luton itself by a substantial one, to leave.

So now I don’t know what to predict. It’s hard to see just where we’re going today. Corbyn could still pull off the trick, sadly, of leading Labour to a rout – certainly, his position in the polls gives little grounds for optimism. And as for Brexit, it’s beginning to feel unstoppable and even that the worst possible option, departure from the EU with no deal, a so-called hard Brexit, is now the most likely outcome.

Still, both those disasters may in the end be avoided. Corbyn may pull off another remarkable escape from complete meltdown, and Britain may still find a way to keep its Brexit soft. It may even find a way to avoid one altogether, though that hardly seems probable right now. Still, I’ve been wrong before, and predictions being particularly challenging when they concern the future, it seems wiser to wait and see on both counts.

H L Mencken: not always likeable, but sometimes right —
and funny with it

Instead, let’s focus on someone who seems to have got a couple of ideas spot on, even if they were only verified long after his death. That’s H L Mencken, American journalist and writer of the early part of the last century. Not the most likeable of men, not even admirable, as he was in private at least a racist in general and in particular an anti-Semite, he did get a few things right. And expressed them with a certain wit which at least makes him fun to quote.

No great democrat – he was suspicious of a system that seemed to give people he regarded as inferior to him a say over their superiors – he did at least come up with one view which later history verified in the most powerful way:

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Consider recent Republican presidents.

There was Reagan, almost certainly as we now know suffering from incipient Alzheimer’s while in the White House. He was followed by George Bush the first, who couldn’t put a whole sentence together. We thought him bad enough until we had his son, George Bush the second or simply Dubya – and boy, was he simple – who clearly entirely fulfilled Mencken’s prediction. So entirely out of touch with reality was he, that he allowed affairs to be run by Dick Cheney, the most powerful Vice President in US history, and one of the more dangerous politicians of recent times: he is responsible, in particular, for the Iraq War, dragging the US with Blair’s Britain in its wake into a conflict that left thousands of soldiers dead and killed maybe as many as 600,000 civilians.

The Republicans seem to have developed an extraordinary skill: providing us with a series of presidents, each of them making us regret the one before, awful though he seemed to be at the time. Who would have thought that anyone could make Dubya look like a statesman, but isn’t that just what Donald Trump has done?

With the Republicans: downhill all the way
Making sure the White House is adorned by a downright moron

At any rate, either of the last two Republican occupants of the White House would have entirely fulfilled Mencken’s inspired prediction. And one could make a case for saying the same of Reagan and the elder Bush too.

Now it’s our turn, in Britain, to verify another of Mencken’s aphorisms.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

I always thought that was just a tad too condescending for my taste. Too much of a caricature to be true. But now we’ve had the Brexit vote.

The people have spoken. Brexit is coming. And today it looks like it’s going to be good and hard.

It’ll be interesting to see just how much the people who voted for it find they like it.

Corbyn, leadership – and Lincoln

The British Labour Party’s tearing itself apart in a contest to choose a new leader, Owen Smith – or possibly to re-elect the existing one, Jeremy Corbyn. 

For many, the dispute is about principle or policy, but in reality it’s about something far more fundamental. It’s about leadership itself, which is hard to define, but easy to spot when we see it. And one historical figure has shown it far more powerfully than any other.

When Abraham Lincoln won the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, he started as far from the front-runner.

That position belonged to William Seward, who’d taken a strong position against slavery, the most controversial issue in the United States at the time. Another candidate, Salmon Chase of Ohio, had been even more strongly outspoken, and had the backing of the abolitionists within the party. The Republican Party was, however, new and had been formed by disparate, sometimes incompatible trends; the conservative faction, inclined to preserve the Republic’s traditions, even at the cost of retaining slavery, had its in Edward Bates, from the slave state of Missouri.

The most powerful expression of leadership

Despite his personal abhorrence of the institution, Lincoln’s position on slavery was that it had to be tolerated where it was already established, but it should not, on any account, ever be allowed to extend into any of the new territories of the still expanding United States.

Lincoln was initially in poor second place to Seward. But the latter, as well as enthusiastic supporters, had also made numerous enemies within the Republican Party. As supporters of other candidates switched, Lincoln closed the gap, overtaking him and winning the nomination on the third ballot.

At a time when it was regarded as inappropriate for candidates to campaign on their own behalf, Lincoln had to depend on others to canvass for him. In what is an extraordinary tribute to his generosity, no one campaigned more extensively than Seward. He started with a nine-state tour, addressing huge rallies; he ended with an intense campaign in his own state of New York, without which Lincoln might have been denied his victory.

If Lincoln wasn’t campaigning, that didn’t mean he was uninvolved. From his home in Springfield, he directed operations throughout the country, gave newspaper interviews and decided the content of the campaign. He kept himself astonishingly well-informed, as one visitor discovered to his consternation. Doris Kearns Goodwin tells the tale in her highly readable book, Team of Rivals: “I found that he was more conversant with some of our party performances in Oneida County than I could have desired.”

On campaign content, his view was that he would say nothing more than he had already published. But he was careful about the messages others were communicating. In another passage, Goodwin tells us:

John Wentworth, now the mayor of Chicago, was continually making references to an argument the party was trying to avoid – that a Republican win would bring an eventual end to slavery altogether. Knowing Wentworth was set to introduce Seward [at a public meeting], Lincoln asked the New Yorker to reassure the audience that Republicans “would not interfere with slavery where it already existed.” Seward readily agreed… In distancing themselves from Northern abolitionists, the Lincoln team was far more concerned with reassuring Northern conservatives than with conciliating the South.

A brilliantly-run campaign, to which Lincoln was able to recruit even his most powerful recent foe, with judicious use of silence or at least moderation on the key issue of the day, won Lincoln the presidency.

One of his first official actions was to form a Cabinet. As Secretary of State, the most senior position, he appointed William Seward. As Secretary of the Treasury, the second, he chose Salmon Chase and as Attorney General, Edward Bates. So all three his rivals for the Republican nomination were in his Cabinet.

The other four posts in the then seven-strong government went to Democrats. Not just rivals, but opponents of his party. With just one change, the appointment of Edwin Stanton, also a Democrat, as Secretary of War, Lincoln had the team that would help him win the Civil War for the Union – one of the most effective Cabinets the US has seen.

As the nation descended into civil war, Lincoln’s discretion on slavery proved invaluable once more. It was instrumental in keeping four slave states in the Union, and out of the Confederacy. And that was crucial to victory.

What about the question of slavery itself?

In January 1865, just months before he was murdered, Lincoln engineered the passage by Congress of the 13th Amendment banning slavery from the US for ever. Something he could never have done without winning the presidency and then the Civil War, by then all but over.

The lesson for us?

The road to political success is often a tortuous one. It takes a great deal of ingenuity, even deviousness, to follow it. It’s not enough to grab a megaphone and keep blaring out the message, however principled it may be, or even right. Sometimes, a little silence is far more effective.

You also have to use the political structures in which you live to bring in the changes you know are needed. Lincoln built a cabinet that maximised support for his government; he worked with Congress to build majorities for the measures he knew had to be passed; and because he handled the issue with care, he exorcised the great bane, slavery, that had poisoned his country at its roots since its foundation.

It’s too much to ask that Labour today finds itself a leader of the calibre of a Lincoln. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable that we set that kind of leadership as a benchmark to aspire to. And, sadly, our present leader, unable to win the support even of his own parliamentary colleagues, falls far below that standard.

Clinton: showing how to beat reaction

They do say that, in politics, you shouldn’t build a campaign on nostalgia for the past, but on promise for the future.

It was the problem faced by John Major, British Tory Prime Minister after Maggie Thatcher, when he launched his “Back to Basics” campaign. Going “back” is never appealing. And there’s nothing particularly inspiring about “basics” either.

As a slogan, it had none of the spark of Tony Blair’s “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.” The truth is that once he was in power, Blair concentrated on being tough on crime and much less determined in rooting out the causes, but as a slogan, it certainly had appeal, helping position him to take on the Tories and win.

Hillary: wrong on some things, right on many others, turning
into quite a campaigner. And hugely to be preferred to the alternative

That all came back to me when I saw Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. Because, faced with Donald Trump’s slogan, ‘Make America great again’, so easy as to be simplistic, she answered with words suggesting that America is great still.

We have the most dynamic and diverse people in the world.

We have the most tolerant and generous young people we've ever had.

We have the most powerful military, the most innovative entrepreneurs, the most enduring values, freedom and equality, justice and opportunity, we should be so proud that those words are associated with us.

Now, you can agree or disagree with the sentiment. You can’t question the impact. Trump is looking backwards, to a supposed time when America was great, just as Major hankered after days when, allegedly, we were back with basics. Clinton proclaims the greatness of America today. And because she believes in today, she can paint an appealing picture of tomorrow.

Democrats, we are the party of working people.

But we haven't done a good enough job showing we get what you're going through, and we're going to do something to help. So tonight I want to tell you how we will empower Americans to live better lives.

My primary mission as president will be to create more opportunity and more good jobs with rising wages right here in the United States.

From my first day in office to my last, especially in places that for too long have been left out and left behind, from our inner cities to our small towns, from Indian country to coal country from communities ravaged by addiction, to regions hollowed out by plant closures.

And here's what I believe. I believe America thrives when the middle class thrives. I believe our economy isn't working the way it should because our democracy isn't working the way it should.

Clinton’s not naïve though, or a newcomer to politics. While she wisely presented a positive, forward-looking programme, she also knew that it was no use being good and kind and decent in politics. To win supporters, you also have to beat the other guy. When that guy’s Trump, that’s all the more important than ever, but also a lot easier for the opportunities he gives you.

… don't believe anyone who says I alone can fix it.

Yes, those were actually Donald Trump's words in Cleveland. And they should set off alarm bells for all of us. Really? I alone can fix it? Isn't he forgetting troops on the front lines, police officers and firefighters who run toward danger, doctors and nurses who care for us, teachers who change lives, entrepreneurs who see possibilities in every problem, mothers who lost children to violence and are building a movement to keep other kids safe? He's forgetting every last one of us.

Americans don't say "I alone can fix it." We say "we'll fix it together!"

And I particularly liked:

He spoke for 70-odd minutes, and I do mean odd...

That got a furious Twitter reaction from Trump. Rather confirming something else Hillary said:

A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons!

She was feisty, she was positive, she was forward-looking. She’s well ahead in the polls. She may not say all the things you, or I, would like but she has a message worth listening to. And boy, she's preferable to the alternative by light years.

Let’s hope she’s stays in front, right through to polling day and beyond.

And for us, back here in Britain, let’s hope we too can find a campaigner as effective as she is.

Donald Trump and the Establishment's Ides of March

The Ides of March are here. Over two millennia ago, on this day, Julius Caesar was struck down in the forum of Rome by his inveterate enemies.

Well, it was fairly clear they weren’t fans. Stabbing knives are a bit of a giveaway.

Since that time, commentators have tended to see the event in one of two ways. There are those to whom the assassins were making a last-gasp stand in defence of the republican virtues and time-honoured freedoms of Rome against a would-be military dictator. Others instead see the conspirators as reactionaries trying to defend an old and outdated dispensation that needed a hero to overthrow it.

My own view is of the “plague on both your houses” variety. Brutus, Cassius and their mates were aristocrats of the old elite that had run, and indeed owned, Rome for centuries. They weren’t there to defend ancient liberties, or at least ancient liberties for anyone but themselves and their class. The common man? He was of interest to them only insofar as he could further or resist their plans for themselves.

As for Caesar, he was a megalomaniac with all sorts of weird delusions – I mean, what kind of man writes his autobiography in the third person? An aristocrat himself, he won an enviable reputation – for those who envy military reputations – by waging bloodthirsty war on the inhabitants of Gaul, who’d done him no harm at all but provided him with a good ladder towards power.

Then he’d used his military might to seize that power back in Rome.

Isn’t that so like what’s happening on the Ides of March in 2016?

The primary elections in the US today are pretty much the last gasp for the old American elite – the people we tend to refer to as the Republican Establishment – to try to block the road to power of a megalomaniac who, like Caesar, is convinced that only he can save his nation from itself. Unlike Caesar, Donald Trump is no military leader. On the other hand, to be a military leader Caesar had to raise millions to fund his legions; Trump too has raised colossal financial power to fund his legions of foot soldiers. Not all that different.

Are the Republicans heading off into a long dark night?
And will they drag the rest of us with them?

Caesar’s violence was of a different order. But Trump’s movement is dipping that way now, with increasing violence at his rallies. And isn’t it interesting that they are rallies? These aren’t forums for debate, they are mass adoration sessions where the providential man tells his followers what to believe, and they reward him with their worship in return.

A major difference is that the freedoms at stake aren’t merely those of an elite. One of the most striking, and admirable, characteristics of the United States is that it has a remarkable Constitution. A mere 7000 words long, it laid the foundation for a system in which no one could exert excessive power, because another body would counterbalance theirs and keep it under control.

I’m not aware of any time in history where that admirable state of affairs has ever been under greater threat than today. Sam Brownback, who is to the state of Kansas what Trump is to the entire nation (but with the additional flaw of actually being in office), has signed into effect legislation that would allow him to impeach any judge that struck down a law that he favoured. The chances are that such a step, which denies the possibility of an independent judiciary, would be thrown out by the Supreme Court in any government led by a president committed to upholding the Constitution; but would even the Supreme Court be able to resist the bullying of a President Trump, with his contempt for the Constitution?

You don’t believe he has contempt for the Constitution? Look at what he has been saying about the media. He hates journalists, he says. If elected, he claims, he will bring in legislation that would make it considerably easier to sue media outlets for libel. In other words, this keen supporter of the Second Amendment, which guarantees the right to bear arms, wants to circumscribe the effects of the First, which upholds the right to freedom of speech.

Sadly, aligned against him are only the tired old figures of the Republican establishment, as weirdly Conservative as he is. They are unlikely to succeed tonight in defeating Trump. In that respect, they are once more not unlike the conspirators against Caesar: although they did assassinate him, the act only rebounded on them, as Caesar’s party rallied its forces and crushed the assassins in war, thus ending the Republic anyway and ushering in the autocratic rule of the Roman Empire.

When it comes to Trump, there really is only one hope left of stopping him. A diminutive, not particularly trustworthy or popular woman, Hillary Clinton. An unlikely and uninspiring figure to be the last best hope of American liberty.

But, hey, we don’t always choose the weapons to defend ourselves. We just have to reach for the best we can find when we’re up against an urgent threat. That’s likely to be Hillary, and boy do we need her. 

Because being Trumped is about as threatening, and as urgent, as it gets.

Could the Jews have shot their way out of the Holocaust? Or, Ben Carson and self-caricature in politics.

When Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, Tom Lehrer announced that he would give up singing satirical songs. In a world in which that could happen, he felt there was no longer any place for satire.

Well, it’s curious to discover that things could decline still further from that low point. The US is once again providing us with a wonderful new political spectacle.

The front runner for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party – that’s the party of Abraham Lincoln, mind – is a man who prides himself on having dragged himself up by the bootstraps from colossal wealth to even more colossal wealth. Donald Trump is one of those characters who like to throw the abusive comments out there, and then apologise for any offence they may have caused, but in such a way as to suggest that their targets (in Trump’s case, principally women) are themselves at fault for lack of a sense of humour.

Behind him, in second place for the nomination, is Ben Carson. It’s a commonplace to describe something as not being brain surgery, as a way of saying that there’s nothing more complex or requiring more intelligence. Carson gives the lie to that facile notion. He’s a neurosurgeon but seems to show that either you can operate on brains without having huge capacity in your own, or having used up so much of your brain for the surgery, you have too little left for politics.

Ben Carson: proof that even if you operate on brains,
you don't necessarily make great use of your own

I suppose the clue was provided by Rupert Murdoch, who tweeted about Carson “what about a real black president who can properly address the racial divide?” Ah, yes. Carson is a real black, unlike the present occupant of the White House.

Murdoch has since said he was sorry for the tweet, proving that Trump isn’t the only exponent of the late, empty apology. 

In any case, if Murdoch likes Carson, that’s probably enough to make his candidacy deeply suspect. Carson has helped us out, anyway, and put the question beyond all doubt. First of all, we had his comment that no Muslim should run for President because Islam is inconsistent with the US Constitution. The US Constitution was written by men such as Madison and Jefferson for whom few principles mattered as much as completely equal rights between religions. Perhaps Carson hadn’t found the time to work much on the Constitution, between reading the medical journals.

No comment went so far, however, in proving the nature of the man than his crass comment, that had there not been gun control in Germany, the Jews might have been able to prevent the Holocaust happening. This is linked to the strange reasoning that the huge numbers of guns available in the US keeps people safe, against all the evidence (for example in 45 school shootings this year alone) that they put huge numbers at serious risk.

Even without that illogic, the Carson comment is based on extraordinary ignorance. There was resistance by Jews during the Holocaust, even armed resistance, most notably in the Warsaw Ghetto. And how did that work out? Inevitably, civilians – even with guns – were no match for a trained army with heavy weapons. Had the Russians intervened to support them, they might have won, but the Red Army stood still and waited while the Wehrmacht polished off the Jewish resistance. The mere possession of guns is far from enough.

Still. One wouldn’t expect Carson to know that. He belongs to the Tom Lehrer school of politicians or institutions that satirise themselves. Except that in his case, he’s more of a caricature than a satire.

Beware the right, especially when it talks about markets

Any of you who had the joy of hearing Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), on the BBC Election Debate last week, may have been struck by his frequent references to “the market.”

Maggie Thatcher: you can't buck the market. Yeah, right

Implicit in this kind of statement is the Thatcherite notion that “you can’t buck the market.” This is a recurring theme in the mouths of most right wing politicians, not just Farage, but those such as Cameron or US Republicans too. It’s untrue today as it was in Thatcher’s time, as indeed it was in the time of that great guru of market economics, the darling of today’s right, Adam Smith. What people tend to forget is that the only kind of market you can rely on at all is a free one. The problem is that a great many markets are firmly rigged – in other words, someone has bucked them.

Adam Smith knew that. He talked, for instance, of the market in labour, in which workers and “masters” strive against each other to set the price, i.e. a wage. Each side tends to pull together to form “combinations” – a word which doesn’t mean simply association, but something more sinister, with a dash of the conspiracy about it – but one of the sides has far more power than the other:

The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit, their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it.

For a time, from early in the twentieth century through to the eighties, the “combinations” of workmen did rather better than Smith suggests in The Wealth of Nations. Then Thatcher brought in serious anti-Trade Union legislation, just as Reagan did in the US, and the boot returned firmly to the other foot.

Adam Smith, darling of the right, guru of the market
Rather gives the lie to Cameron and Farage

There are times when I can’t quite work out whether Farage is as unintelligent as he likes to sound, or whether he’s just being disingenuous. I suspect the latter: he’s a knave, rather than a fool. He knows perfectly well that appeals to markets are empty if the markets aren’t free.

After all, he’s a stockbroker. One of those groups of masters, only too ready to combine to protect their own interests: we saw how they, and the rest of the financial services crowd, plunged the world into global recession in 2008 and then made sure they were rewarded for it with wonderful bail-outs, from our pockets.

So he presumably also knows why his jeremiads against migration have no place in an ideology of free markets. Again, at a time when European nations tended rather to block the free movement of labour and capital, Adam Smith lamented that:

… the policy of Europe, by obstructing the free circulation of labour and stock [capital], both from employment to employment, and from place to place, occasions in some cases, a very inconvenient inequality in the whole of the advantages and disadvantages of their different employments.

Workers moving freely, capital moving freely, are essential components of a free market. But then perhaps Conservative and UKIP politicians prefer a market they’ve rigged in their favour to a free one. Which reminds me of another fine sentiment in Adam Smith:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public…

Indeed. George Bernard Shaw expressed the same sentiment even more succinctly 130 years later, in The Doctor’s Dilemma, when he wrote “all professions are conspiracies against the laity.” Where the “profession” in question is right wing politics, we still today face a particularly toxic conspiracy.

Perhaps Farage and Cameron don’t know Smith and Shaw’s sentiments on the subject. But we do. And we should be on our guard.