Looking across the Atlantic

So, I’m going to be starting off my first post with a brief comment on one of the biggest world politics event taking place: The United States 2016 presidential nominations. A little odd for me to be starting with this as I expect most of what I write on here will be about my own national politics (British, in case you were wondering), but it’s one of the hot topics at the moment so I’d tag my own thoughts to it.

Now I have some friends who live in the US, one of whom sent me a link to an interesting article at Politico Magazine which talks about how Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have shifted the American political environment towards one away from the traditional American viewpoint and more in-line with that of Europe. My friend actually wanted me for my views on the matter as a European, but I thought I would share them here as an interesting starting point for the blog. (Shelby, I hope you don’t mind)

In some parts of the article, I think that it is correct that both Trump and Sanders have pushed the debates and issues into different directions and different areas than are usually focussed on during the presidential nomination period and, subsequently, the election period itself. Trump has pushed immigration to the fore with a strongly populist message about opposing not only immigration from neighbouring Mexico with the construction of a wall, but also with his strong stance against allowing Muslims in the United States as a security measure, whilst Sanders has made the wealth inequality within the country a key issue for his own campaign and railing against Wall Street and the private banking system. In many ways, they serve as counterpoints to the differing issues that are dividing much of the world – immigration and financial equality.

However, I would not agree that these are issues that are inherently European. In the article, Trump is compared to Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian Prime Minister who was infamous for his ‘Bunga Bunga’ parties and seen as corrupt by many. The comparison comes from Berlusconi’s background as a businessman before venturing into politics and the comparable nature of their own political ideologies, though I don’t think that Berlusconi was quite as extreme in some views as Trump is in his (Never thought I’d be defending Berlusconi, believe me). A major difference between these two though is that Trump has never held any elected office in his life, whilst in a parliamentary system, Berlusconi did hold a seat in the Italian Parliament before eventually reaching the position that he would serve as the Prime Minister. He didn’t simply go from one to the other. Not that might be a quibble over the minutia in that comparison, but the difference is that Trump himself is not a politician and doesn’t claim to be.

Moving to the other side, Sanders is compared to the current British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who was elected as the party leader last year on a wave of anti-austerity protests and apathy towards perceived ‘career politicians’. In some ways, these actually do serve as better comparisons as both men serve their own personal beliefs whilst the Democratic Party and the Labour Party have respectively transformed over the decades into something to be considered more ‘electable’. Both Corbyn and Sanders are against the sheer amount of influence that private business, the media, and private banking have in current politics and believe there must be a radical change in both systems. At the same time, I would not agree that Sanders is someone with a more European idea of politics than an American one – he still holds true to many American values & ideals, as can be seen to his approach on gun laws, which many Europeans would not agree with.

Trump and Sanders are also both anti-establishment candidates – neither have the support of their respective parties (I won’t get into the matter of Sanders technically being an Independent Senator rather than being a party member, but go with me on this still) and are not the preferred choice by the leadership. Rather than seeing this a complete transformation of the American system into one more akin to Europe, I think there are issues that Americans focus on more than are affected in Europe.

My biggest issue with the article though is Trump himself. I don’t know of anyone, amongst my friends, relatives, strangers I overhear on the bus, or internet commentators, who would willingly vote for Donald Trump – I say that as a Brit and as a European. Much of what he says is appealing to a broad right-wing populism that is anti-Obama, in addition to being strongly anti-Islamic and xenophobic. Europe has our own version of this, with UKIP here in Britain, Front Nationale in France, etc. However, none of these seem to be the same vein or style of Donald Trump and his campaigns.

I would say that the United States presidential election of 2016 isn’t so much the beginning of a shift towards a more-European style politics for America as it is a shifting in the focus of the debate and issues. Sanders, in many ways, is a reminder of the New Deal Democrats prior to Carter and Clinton years which has been lost to generations of Americans, whilst Trump is a mix of the negative aspects of Barry Goldwater, or at least how he was portrayed during 1964, and George Wallace’s American Independent Party in 1968. America isn’t just looking across the Atlantic for 2016, it’s also looking to the past.