There’s more to the Trumpian landscape than the two elements that I identified yesterday: Donald Trump himself, with his capricious and instinctual style of governing, and the traditional Republican politicians who laid so much of the groundwork for him. There are also what might be called the intellectuals of Trumpism – those who have taken the primal hatreds that drive Trump and his followers and reduced them to something like a system. Most prominent among them is vice-president J D Vance.
So don’t miss a review in the Washington Examiner last week of Vance’s latest book, Communion. Vance’s project is to explain his 2019 conversion to Catholicism and to justify the integration of religion and public life, but the reviewer, Dan Hannan, mostly ignores that aspect of the book, focusing instead on Vance’s ignorance of and hostility to basic economics.
As Hannan explains, Vance and his allies, the “postliberals” or “national conservatives”, have abandoned the alliance between social conservatives and economic liberals that characterised the Republican Party in the Reagan era. I don’t think that alliance was ever as close or as durable as Hannan thinks, but there’s no doubt that anti-market thinking has now become dominant on the American right. In Hannan’s words:
Large chunks of what are still sometimes called the Right have adopted radical socialism: National Conservatives, “Groypers,” integralists, and a mass of the MAGA rank-and-file. While much of the democratic world has seen a political realignment, in which culture displaces economics as the chief division, this development makes the United States an outlier.
Far-right politics is never a friend to the free market, so some of this is just the US catching up to the rest of the world. But it’s also true, as he notes, that many other far-right politicians, for example in South America, have been content to run on other issues and let markets more or less do their thing in the background. Vance’s explicit opposition to orthodox economic thinking is unusual, the theoretical complement to Trump’s enthusiasm for tariffs.
So who is this Dan (now Lord) Hannan, bravely defending the market against the Trumpian horde? He’s appeared in this blog once before: you can read my report here of his visit to Australia way back in 2014. He was, and is, a British nationalist, a Europhobe and one of the early promoters of Britain’s departure from the European Union – but also in his way a committed free-marketer.
Two months ago, commenting on the tenth anniversary of Brexit, I pointed out that its success depended not just on the nativists but on two other groups, one of them “a section of free traders and free-marketers who focused on the EU as a bureaucratic, protectionist nightmare and dreamt of creating in its place a Britain open to the world, a north Atlantic Singapore.” That was Hannan’s dream.
The fact that the dream has failed to eventuate is in some ways the least part of the problem. Much more important, but equally foreseeable, is the boost that Brexit, that “one unavoidable milepost on the road,” has given to the forces of reaction around the world. Even if they were not personally xenophobes, Putinists or Trumpists (and Hannan quite clearly is not), its supporters cannot avoid the blame for having helped unleash those forces and for the destruction that they have caused.
Credit to Hannan for continuing to denounce the Trumpist menace. But surely a mea culpa or two would not also be out of place.
The World is Not Enough 