US politics now offers the Tories a terrifying glimpse into their future

As UK politics slides further into farce, one is tempted to tune out, despairing at its complete and utter tediousness. In contrast, it is becoming hard to look away from the soap opera unfolding on the other side of the Atlantic.

Writing from “the real America” this week, as I wind my way from the Rust Belt to the Western cowboy frontier, the Americans I have encountered seem to be of the broad view that their politics is stuck on loop. It is widely anticipated that the impending re-run between Trump and Biden will be no Rumble in the Jungle, but rather a wheezing ruckus between two clapped out former heavyweights who can’t quite retire, on account of the money machines behind them. 

Attitudes range from the exasperated to the apocalyptic. As one Michiganite told me in straight-talking terms, “It feels like we are trapped in a dystopian recurring nightmare on crack.” 

This view is alluring but ultimately inaccurate. Americans can look forward to an authentic, if angry, competition at their next election. Unlike Britain’s foregone conclusion, it is impossible to say who will emerge the victor. 

On the one hand, it’s not yet clear whether Trump can win back the Rust Belt. “I’d rather vote for this mug than for Trump,” a former GM factory worker from Flint scoffed at me. Then again, there may be something in the growing speculation of a black swing to Trump – the final domino that is yet to fall in America’s collapsing old class-based politics. 

Republicans are getting excited at the notion that black men have become increasingly sympathetic to indicted Trump and his feuds with the liberal establishment. A formerly incarcerated one-time cocaine dealer of African American descent seemed bemused by this idea when I put it to him. But he did say: “Under Trump there wasn’t any war and we had a stronger economy and those are the two most important things in any civilisation.”

It is too early to say whether Trump will indeed make a comeback. But there is one thing that is already clear: Trumpism wasn’t a temporary blip, but a permanent breakthrough. Politics in America is officially no longer about Left versus Right. After all, Republicans are now more protectionist than Democrats. And Biden has moved his party decisively to the Right on border control, ploughing on with the Mexican wall.

Instead, stark political divides lines between anti-establishment populists and orthodox managerialists are emerging. In this sense, America may be a harbinger of the future of Western politics. What is of particular interest to the British observer of US politics is that the two tangible dividing lines between American populists and managerialists are identical to those that threaten to emerge in the UK.

The first is that populist Trump wants to do battle with the courts and human rights activists in order to pursue the largest scale militarised mass deportation of illegal immigrants since Eisenhower. This is in sharp contrast with Democrats who are unwilling to entertain a radical reduction in immigration, and remain adamant that they can somehow find a way to meet popular desire for border control without breaching international law or falling foul of domestic courts.

The second dividing line concerns the question of how America meets the great new economic challenge that looms on the horizon. Unlike broke Britain, America has come out of the pandemic fighting. But the two major ingredients that have been pumping its economy – billions of dollars of stimulus and an immigration surge – are potentially unsustainable.

Biden is in sync with the economic orthodoxy. This basically comes down to the notion that, having spent big, taxes will now have to go up to service the deficit. Otherwise, it is business as usual: the Fed is best left to do its own thing in the war on inflation. The flows of cheap labour should be allowed to continue largely unabated, with voters hopefully appeased by a performative clampdown on the Mexican border.

Trump, meanwhile, is gearing up for total war with the economic establishment. He is determined to avoid hiking taxes. On the contrary, he wants a drastic reduction – a move that he would ultimately prioritise over balancing the books. 

To this end, populist Trump is readying to do battle with the Fed. He has already made it clear that should he return to office he would sack its current chief Jerome Powell. This makes sense if the master strategy is to replace him with a loyalist, so that Trump can more effectively pressurise the Fed to keep interest rates as low as possible should his government need to fund tax cuts. 

Of course there are questions about whether the goals of the American populists are realistic. 

Who knows whether America could pull off a mass expulsion of illegal migrants without collapsing the economies of entire states, which have come to be dangerously reliant on illegal labour, from Texas to Alabama. Even if everybody agrees the patient must be cured of its addiction, a total withdrawal of drugs at this late stage may trigger multiple organ failure. 

Equally, it is not clear that Republican populists have a sophisticated enough understanding of what a 21st century low tax campaign should look like. Even inflation debates aside, in order to be truly populist, they will need to alleviate the tax burdens of the poor as well as the wealthy. 

If they are to move the dial against the innovational slowdown which imperils America’s long-term growth prospects, then tax breaks and incentives must be cleverly focused on reviving the kind of corporate research and development and symbiosis between academic and industry science that spurred American innovation up until the 1970s, and also be laser focused on AI. A tub-thumping Reaganite big business free for all will not cut it.

But the viability of “sensible” alternative plans are equally – if not more – subject to doubt. 

It is not clear that the Democrats have understood the pressing need to establish order in a country maligned by appalling levels of violence and criminality. Nor do they seem to grasp that America’s economic model, reliant on cheap labour, is one of the most powerful dampeners on innovation and Middle America’s wages. On the perils of America falling into the same high-tax stagnation doom loop as Britain, they are even more hopeless.

In American politics, it’s all to play for. A genuine battle of ideas is starting to evolve – one every bit as dramatic as the ideological showdown between communism and capitalism.

Surely there is a message in all this for the Tories, as rebels plot to oust Rishi Sunak and install Penny Mordaunt. The fact that MPs would even contemplate replacing one bland managerialist with another famed for her vapidness proves just how out of touch they are, not only with voters but wider Western political trends. The Right will continue to remain irrelevant, and vulnerable to an emergent populist third party, as long as they remain in denial of the fact that the Blairites have been proved wrong. 

The fragile notion that voters would accept a Third Way status quo with a mere cigarette paper between the major parties hinged on the false reality that the hyper-globalised liberal model was unassailable. From America to Britain, wage stagnation and a popular backlash against mass immigration have shattered that illusion. Voters on both sides of the Atlantic are hungry for a real choice when it comes to solutions.