Trump’s 2020 Trump Card: Socialism
by Jean-Louis Gassée
Moving past a brief apology for the unavoidable wordplay, we take a look at Trump’s simple motto for his 2020 campaign. Even simpler and probably more effective than his 2016 Make America Great Again.
In the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump had an admirably simple slogan or, for a better connection to the facts on the battlefield, a resonant cri de guerre, a rallying call to a cultural war. Make America Great Again made a powerful appeal to nostalgic feelings, to the post-WWII times when America reigned supreme, when employment was plentiful, when the G.I. Bill stimulated the economy by providing college education and other training benefits to millions of veterans, when the Interstate Highway System was built, crisscrossing the country for the cars Detroit built… This is, of course, a bromide, a Rockwellian false memory, or made-in-Hollywood oversimplification that consciously or unconsciously forgets ugly episodes of race trouble and McCarthyism.
I personally bought into a version of that picture. In a struggling post World War II France, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber published The American Challenge, a huge best-seller that glorified a strong and egalitarian America. In 1968, I was delighted to join Hewlett-Packard. With almost no academic training, I thought (rightly as it turned out) I’d be graded on my results, not on my belonging to the alumni association of one of France’s prestigious Grandes Écoles. In November 1970, I visited HP’s Loveland Division and one of our hosts flew us to — and inside, as It was still permissible — the Grand Canyon. The deal was sealed: I had to work and live in the US. It took 15 years for me to move to Cupertino, and another 16 after that to become a proud US citizen, by mutual choice. The naturalization ceremony took place a few weeks before 9/11.
Seven years later, in November 2008, a group of French émigrés met at our house to imbibe ourselves watching the election night on TV. We were ecstatic and remarked how France would never elect someone of African or Arabic origin to the presidency.
Eight years later, we again started drinking, serenely confident that the candidate we had voted for, in spite of not particularly liking her, would win as preordained. We were quickly brought back to Electoral College reality. Disappointed, we took revenge on the champagne and drank everything in the house. Donald Trump and his simple cultural war cry had won the day.
We’re coming up to 2020. Democrats, duly warned, won’t let it happen again. Right?
Based on what we saw in the debate between ten Democrat candidates this past Thursday, one shouldn’t be so sure. It’s not that they lack substance or relevant ideas, but those very ideas are what will give Trump an opening to use his trump card.
Universal Healthcare, taxing billionaires, controlling firearms, free or affordable college tuition… These are ideas that will leave the Democrat candidate dead on the November 2020 battlefield. Donald Trump only has to say the magic word: Socialism! The Democrats will take away your private healthcare, your guns, your hard-earned money, your ability to get your children into private institutions of higher learning. And don’t you dare point out how our country is a healthcare outlier as, in a reprise of the It Costs More But It does Less refrain, we spend far more than another country for a substandard life expectancy:
For an election campaign, such talk is dangerous, it is un-American, as is randomly looking at other countries’ gun violence statistics, student debt, railway systems and fight against greenhouse gasses.
To Trump and his supporters, it’s all Socialism, examples of what, in 1944, Friedrich Von Hayek famously called The Road to Serfdom, holding that the US had “progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past.” He was right about the Eastern Bloc, but he didn’t see or want to see how unfettered free markets can lead to winner-take-all situations of greater concentration of wealth, regulatory capture, and rising inequality.
With his trademark animal cunning, Trump sees how shouting Socialism! will rally those who harbor rational or irrational fears of having something taken from them by The State a.k.a. The Democrats. The utterance is simplistic and caricatural, but it’s even more easily memorized than Make America Great Again.
This elegantly simple framing of today’s political debate puts Democrats in a bind. Anything honest they’ll say about their goals, about what they think our country needs to heal itself of will be held against them. To their credit, some candidates are more honest than others. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren are very clear about their left-leaning agenda. Joe Biden, aware of the potential artillery barrage against universal healthcare, tries to sell a middle of the road and unrealistic You Can Keep Your Plan policy. As if this was really the heart’s desire of those who fear bankruptcy if they get cancer after losing their job. Trump will make mince meat of Joe Biden and of his neither here nor there position.
Does this mean it’s a wrap, that Trump’s easily digestible and resonant motto, supported by billions in campaign funding, will win the day?
Perhaps. But a few possibilities remain.
First, Trump might make a grievous mistake, or his taxes might see the light of the day, or there may be some other serious revelation. As if it mattered thus far.
Second, perhaps the Democrats will play the long game and concede the 2020 election while honestly, clearly promoting the Social agenda. They might calculate that Trump is/was a political soliton, a once in a lifetime combination of waves, that Trump fatigue will open the White House doors in 2024 to an Elizabeth Warren or a Cory Booker.
Third, as a friend of mine remarks, elections are won at the center, not at the irreducible extremes. In his mind, it would take just a bit of Trump fatigue to move the needle in the right direction — if the Electoral College doesn’t interfere again.
All of the above sounds rational enough, but Trump knows it and might use “all means necessary”, such as conjuring a foreign conflict to arouse patriotism in his favor. It’s been done before. One also can’t help think of what Trump would do in case of a narrow loss, such a claiming electoral fraud and trying to overturn the result.
The past twenty-two months haven’t been pretty, but the next fourteen may make us yearn for them.
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I'm off to a European road trip that may or may not interfere with my regular Monday Note publising schedule. Back in the Valley by October 5th.
— JLG@mondaynote.com
