Imagine, if you will, two epileptics trying to share a bowl of noodles and you will get a sense of how messy and unappetising the contest between Donald Trump, a Mussolini wannabe, and Hillary Clinton, a Nixon in a pantsuit, is going to be. (Actually, let me preemptively engage in America's favourite pastime and apologise to both epileptics and noodles. Doubtless, both would make more congenial dinner companions.) How on earth did we get here?
To start with, Trump and Clinton are not the beginning, but the continuation of the deterioration of American politics. That is not an uncommon development in mature, dare I say 'sclerotic', democracies. The Roman Republic gave way to the Principate of Augustus. The relatively competent Augustus was replaced by the degenerate Tiberius, then bloodthirsty Caligula and, after a brief Claudian intermission, insane Nero.
And so in our Republic, the relatively competent Presidents of the 1980s and 1990s gave way to the comedy of errors known as the Bush Presidency and the arrogant incompetence of Barack Obama. Ahead of us is a potential circus act that may see The Donald starting a trade war with China and Hillary dragged off in chains to a federal penitentiary for compromising the nation’s secrets. (Yes, in our celebrity-obsessed America, we now refer to our leading politicians by their first names.)
Trump and Clinton, one author has astutely observed, are:
“'The effect, not the cause, of the ways in which the two major parties have destroyed themselves by refusing to take their own rhetoric or govern seriously. The Republican Party said it stood for small government when virtually every major action it has pursued at least since the 9/11 attacks has yielded the opposite result. The Democratic Party ... lays claim to the mantle of caring about regular Americans even as its last three major presidential candidates (John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton) long ago achieved escape velocity from caring about anything resembling everyday reality.'
Bush’s 'compassionate conservatism' saw government spending and regulatory agencies at their most incontinent. His signature domestic 'achievement', the federal takeover of the education system known as the No Child Left Behind Act, resulted in a predictable deluge of regulations from Washington, but did little to raise the flat-lining academic performance of American children. Instead of reforming the financially unsustainable Social Security system, as Bush promised, he added a new and expensive entitlement to America’s seniors known as the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernisation Act.
(Don’t you love how American lawmakers conflate 'ought' with 'is'? Just because you call a law an 'improvement', it does not actually mean that an improvement will follow. Otherwise, why not have a 'Caviar on Every Table and a Porsche in Every Garage Act?' But, I digress.)
As bad as the Bush years were domestically, they were much 'badder' (as our 43
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But, far from giving Iraq a stable and democratic government, Bush undermined the balance of power in the region, thus strengthening the theocratic nut-jobs in Iran. And while it is true that the homicidal maniacs of Isis did not arise on his watch, it is equally true that Isis would not have existed if Saddam Hussein or one of his deranged sons still ruled over Mesopotamia. Even the most patriotic of Americans - indeed especially those whose loved ones perished in the sands of Arabia - can be forgiven for asking: what was all the sacrifice for?
A corrective was necessary and so it conjured up in the saintly figure of Barack Obama. We knew little about him and little did we know how little there was to know about him, for he turned out to be an empty suit filled with more hot air than General Gordon’s bagpipers marching through the Sudan.
Like his un-lamented predecessor, Obama has engorged the welfare state by passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which deprived millions of Americans of health insurance plans that they were happy with, reduced patients’ choices and set health insurers on the road to bankruptcy. No one knows exactly how much Obamacare will end up costing, but a trillion dollars over the next ten years seems like a reasonable estimate.
Speaking of bankruptcy, by the time Obama leaves office, he will have doubled the national debt from a massive $10 trillion to a monumental $20 trillion. Among his 'investments', as government spending is now euphemistically called, were such misnomers as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorisation, and Job Creation Act.
And while it is true that the U.S. unemployment rate fell from 7.8 percent when Obama took office to 5.5 percent now, the labour participation rate has fallen from 65.7 percent to 63 percent over the same time period. (Last time it was that low, President Jimmy Carter, another relatively unknown entity who believed that government spending could stimulate job growth, occupied the White House.) Frankly, a drunken manatee could have spent $10 trillion in a more productive way.
And let us not forget America’s little Tripolitan adventure, which pried Libya from the manicured fingers of an ageing drag queen, the late Colonel Gaddafi, and handed it over to a motley crew of murderers, thieves and psychopaths. Let me be bold and predict that we have not heard the last of Libya.
As a result of all this, Americans are disgusted with politics and open to the siren calls of people like Trump, Sanders and the much unloved Clinton, who had to embrace many of Sanders’ zany policies in order to all but win her party’s nomination. Americans want something new. And they are going to get it – long and hard!
Marian L. Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org and a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity