"Imagine if Hitler had liked Jews," I told an Israeli politician recently who asked me to characterize the Republican frontrunner. The comparison seems more apt every day. The title of this note refers to Bertolt Brecht's 1941 satire, "The Resistible Rise of Alfonso Ui," portraying Hitler as gangster in the mode of Al Capone.
Donald Trump has tapped an ugly mood in America's middle class, whose prospects have dimmed noticeably since the 2008 financial crisis.
...A lot of Americans are looking for someone to blame, and Trump is there to point the finger: It's Mexican illegals. It's the Chinese dumping goods on us. Deport 11 million illegals! Slap a 40% tariff on Chinese imports! Never mind that there aren't 11 million Mexican illegals in the U.S., and a trade war with China would blow the world economy to piece. Neither China nor Mexico has very much to do with America's economic woes. There are fewer illegals in America today tha in 2008 and the growth rate of Chinese imports has fallen to next to nothing.
...America's embattled middle class doesn't want charts and graphs, facts and statistics. It wants a leader who will identity culprits and take ruthless action. It's a different electorate than I remember. My business partner in the late 1980s, the supply-sider Jude Wanniski, liked to say that the American people in its wisdom wanted a nice guy as president. They knew that the American president was the most powerful man in the world, and if he acted out of rancor the consequences could be terrible. Not any more. Americans want a nasty president.
...We're a long way from Germany in the late 1920s, to be sure, but the parallels are disturbing. The Republican Establishment shouts from the rooftops that it prefers Hitl--, er, Trump to the horrible Ted Cruz. As Bob Dole put it, Trump could "probably work with Congress, because he's, you know, he's got the right personality and he's kind of a deal-maker." Robert Costa at the Washington Post, David French at National Review, Paul Mirengoff at Powerline, and other commentators too numerous to mention have weighed in on the same theme.
Why does the Establishment hate Cruz so much? He threatens their livelihood, unlike Trump, whose real estate and casino business has required friendly dealings with politicians of all stripes for half a century.
...The Amerian economy is cartelized and monopolized to an extent we haven't seen in two generations. Why is this so-called economic recovery so miserable? The entrepreneurs are gone. In all previous postwar recoveries, new businesses led employment growth.
...Without a return to entrepreneurship, America's economy will stagnate and America's middle class will continue to lose ground. Donald Trump represents the triumph of resentment over hope. I don't know what American voters will do. But I'm frightened.
Update: I'm not the only one that's frightened, though. Ted Cruz terrifies the Establishment, and we have had no better explanation for that terror than a Jan. 20 Facebook post from Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's erstwhile Labor Secretary |