By John Dunkelgrün.
Of course the best sight is hindsight. The US election results, so devastating to so many, should not have come as a surprise. We live in a time when neglected voters are finally protesting.
In The Netherlands it started with Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders, in France with the Le Pens, in the (not so)UK with UKIP and in the US with Bernie Sanders. And now we have President elect Donald Trump in the US.
What are some of the causes?
Politically Correct speak and policies fuelled by misplaced guilt over a colonial past eventually make the traditional populations uneasy. This is especially so when minority groups are seen to be overly favoured. This causes “Local people first” type of political movements.
By far most people are in favour of accepting and assisting refugees, but when a trickle becomes a wave and then a tsunami that threatens the economy, the social programs and the very culture of a receiving country, it becomes too much to bear for many. No reassuring “Wir schaffen das”, will alleviate that anxiety.
Globalisation has demonstrably improved the economy all over the world. So, and even more so, has automation. However in its wake of creative destruction these developments have left behind many manual and clerical workers. It is for society at large to use part of the gains to set up facilities for retraining these people and, where that is impossible, caring for them.
The political elites are too aloof, too far away from the anxieties and real worries of the affected people. They have been blind to the damage caused by the absurd extreme differences in wealth and income between “the 1%” and the rest. It causes mistrust in the political establishment that can, is and will be be used to great effect by populist politicians.
Mrs. Clinton was made aware of the anxieties of the young liberal left by the success of Bernie Sanders and adjusted her campaign (too little, too late?). She totally ignored the states with large populations of people who were left behind by globalisation and automation. She didn’t counter Republican claims of the danger of immigrants, not did she repudiate in a forceful way the slander of crookery, untruthfulness and unreliability poured out forcefully and continually on Republican publications, radio, TV and social media. She did not heed the lessons from the policies of Josef Goebbels and Der Stürmer that lies, when repeated often enough become truths. “Truths” that have put her opponent in The White House.
If leaders everywhere don’t heed these lessons, next year we may be looking at a world not just with Donald Trump as US President and a UK in the process of leaving the EU and perhaps of breaking up, but with a Germany without Mrs. Merkel, Ms. Le Pen as President of France and Mr. Wilders as Prime Minister of The Netherlands.
