Donald Trump and the GOP

The Fight for the Soul of Conservatism

Donald Trump. No name is more divisive in the 21^st century than his. He terrifies and titillates in equal measure. To the Ruling Elite Wall St Bankers he is a dangerous populist. To Social conservatives he is an immoral threat. To Neoconservatives he's a naive isolationist. How did it come to this?

The modern Republican Party consists of three main voting blocks governed by their different ideologies.

First are the real power behind the Republicans, Corporate America. Corporate America has one policy goal. To lower taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals. It's a goal they has been wildly successful at.

The second member of the triumvirate are Social Conservatives. These people are extremely concerned with issues such as Abortion and Same Sex Marriage. This group are willing to throw their not inconsiderable weight behind anyone who will back "Pro Life" positions.

Lastly we have the Foreign Policy Hawks or Neoconservatives. These militarists will back anyone who will assert American Power in the world. They are somewhat out of favour after the debacle of the Iraq war and there is a great deal of crossover between them and Corporate America, given that defense companies influence this group a great deal.

Any Republican Presidential candidate in the USA has to appease these three groups in order to be endorsed as the Republican nominee. Until now.

Inequality is rampant in the USA. Minimum wage in the USA is extremely low compared to other developed countries. The median wage has barely changed since 1973. All this has created a world where the vast majority of the population are doing worse than their parents and grandparents were.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/09/map-us-ranks-near-bottom-on-income-inequality/245315/

The 2007 Global Financial Crisis coming hard on the heals of a costly, lengthy war has created a deeply angry populace ready and willing to try something outside the box.

Into this milieu steps Donald Trump. His promise is very specific. To "Make America Great Again". Pundits (myself included) massively underestimated the appeal of this message. But we shouldn't have. With hindsight the signs were there all along.

Trump gave voters something to grab a hold of. When he said "America doesn't win anymore." many people looked at their surroundings and agreed.

Furthermore Trump gave people a reason for their problems and a solution. If you are afraid of crime. It's because of Mexican immigrants. We'll fix it by building a wall. If you are afraid of terrorism, its Obama's softness on Foreign policy. Ill kill ISIS's families. (which would be a war-crime). Lost your job? It's because of China. I'll stand up for you.

It's no wonder Trump is popular. He has simply identified the problems ordinary Americans are facing and offered to solve them. That is something that mainstream Republicans can't do because they are beholden to Corporate America to lower wages and lower taxes. The policies of Corporate America in government (They own the Democrats just as much as the Republicans) have caused the very anxiety Trump is tapping into.

That's why Trump supporters when asked will usually site the fact that Trump is an outsider with an independent source of money for his campaign. He has perfected the art of separating himself from the New York Corporate Elite, while actually being part of the New York Corporate Elite.

It's also why sighting facts to Trump supporters won't work. There is a perception that the Corporate Elite fear a Trump presidency because he is on the average person's side and attack him mercilessly. Therefore any attack on Trump is viewed through this prism. The more people attack Trump, the more this perception is reinforced, the more popular he becomes.

This leads us to the Republican Convention. Trump is on track to win a majority of the 2472 Convention delegates. If he does I'm sure the Republican Party will nominate him, but if he does not win 1237 delegates the party will do a deal to ensure that all of the non Trump delegates vote for someone other than Trump. That will most likely be Ted Cruz, but it's by no means certain.

If the Republicans nominate anyone other than Trump, I expect riots. It will be viewed by Trump supporters as the Republican party keeping the good honest Americans down.

I feel sure that the Socially Conservative wing of the party could swallow it's pride and support Trump. They will side with him against Hillary Clinton.

The Neocon's have been somewhat dismayed by what they have heard from Trump. Trump has expressed skepticism over NATO, leading The Weekly Standard (The Neoconservative publication of Record) to publically muse about a third party candidate.

What does it all mean?

Let's be clear about Trump. The man is a charlatan. He incites people by stirring the baser elements of the human condition. Sexism, racism, fear, anger and xenophobia are all part of his shtick.

But Trump has tapped into something real. There are real issues here that are not being addressed. The Neoliberal market first approach has resulted in rising inequality and a decline in the standard of living for the average person on the street. There is a real risk of dangerous instability in the American political system which will continue until inequality returns to more reasonable levels for a first world nation.  

The Road To Ruin - What does it really say?

The Road to Ruin

By now most of you will have heard of and seen the media reaction to Nikky Savva's book The Road to Ruin. The media (of course) have focused on the salacious but unfounded thought of the Prime Minister and his Chief of Staff bonking away in the PM's office. This of course is to totally miss the point.

To be very clear the book never alleges an affair between Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin. There is simply no evidence for that. However the book does allege that the two of them (PM and Chief of Staff) were simply unsuitable for the job at hand.

It's important to recognise who Nikky Savva is. She's a successful columnist with the Australian. (the conservative broadsheet owned by Rupert Murdoch.) Her columns tend towards the sensible, with a clear right wing bias. She claims to have been more leftist in her youth, but has come more to the right wing with age. She is married to Malcolm Turnbull staffer Vincent Woolcock and it's through this prism that I tend to view this book.

One of the surprising things about this book is the amount of people who went on the record to talk about their time under the Abbott and Credlin regime. In my view such intimate access could only have come with Prime Ministerial approval. I'm not saying Savva wrote the book because Turnbull asked her to, but it's my guess that Turnbull felt that an explanation in the public sphere of why his coup was nessesary would benefit his Government.

The book paints a picture of Credlin as an emotional roller-coaster. A difficult person to work with for sure, but a master manipulator. Savva alleges that Credlin jealously guarded access to the Prime Minister, but also forced anyone she disliked to resign. There were two traits that seemed to get you on her list. First was intelligence. Anyone smarter than her was a threat, not an asset. The second was gender. She seemed to dislike powerful females.

The two (other) most powerful women in Abbott's life were of course his wife Margie and Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party Julie Bishop. Both were subject to Credlin's wrath. Credlin sought to keep Margie as far from Abbott as possible, even going so far as to ask staff at Kiribilli House not to order food for Margie or to shop for the family.

Julie Bishop however could not be dismissed so easily. She was Foreign Minister and Deputy. Credlin interfered deeply in the policy realm. It was Credlin who vetoed Bishops trip to Lima Peru for a climate summit, stating that Bishop couldn't be trusted to hold the party line. Bishop was able to prevail on that occasion.

So to sum up Credlin was unable to set up the kind of environment that uses employees strengths. So focused on her own inadequacies, she moved on all the best performers, making herself the smarted person in the room. Then without a hint of irony she complained about the loss of institutional knowledge.

As for the public face of the debacle, Tony Abbott. He's portrayed as a dullard, under Credlin's thumb and caught in an unreal bubble of his own (and Credlin's) creation. She felt she had to babysit him whenever he was in the media spotlight, not to do or say something stupid. (like eat an onion for example). That led to a massive backlog in her in-tray, meaning work just didn't get done.

She would brief against other ministers to the media and he did nothing. Famously she let it be known that she had tried to stop him from knighting Prince Phillip. When the Prime Minister's own Chief of Staff is briefing against her boss, it is a sign that their relationship has failed. Abbott stalwartly held her close.

Abbott's inability to override her forceful personality was his downfall. His inability to assert himself as the boss was negligent on his part. In fact he referred to her as "the boss" in private. He could not bring himself to fire her, or at least move her on.

So, What do we make of this book?

On the whole I believe it. Nothing printed here seems to contradict the experience of those two years.

I must admit I have always felt a deep personal loathing of Tony Abbott. He makes my skin crawl. He reminded me of the bullies I used to know at the selective boys high school I attended. These were often the children of middle class professionals with higher than average IQ's who seemed to carry deep insecurities and only found relief from their inner demons through violence. While their IQ's were high, their EQ's or emotional intelligence were pathetic.

Tony Abbott, a Rhodes Scholar seems to have had a high IQ at some time, however his EQ remains minuscule. He's a shell of a man at the moment muttering "I could have won" to anyone who will listen and blames Julie Bishop and Scott Morrison for his demise. The actual author of the downfall of Tony Abbott can be placed squarely on the shoulders on one man.

Tony Abbott.