guns over butter approach

Feb 13, 2020 14:57

пара параграфов: статья в FT про сравнение Corbyn и Bernie, а также отказ Трампа от популистской экономики. Вопрос поставлен так: почему Трамп вернулся к бюджету в стиле guns-over-butter, хотя сам же пришел к власти на волне признания непопулярности такого подхода.



If there is to be a counterargument, it must do better than the claim - true as it is - that “anything can happen” after 2016. A more substantial case for Mr Sanders does exist.

To dispense with the obvious, he is a better politician than Mr Corbyn: smarter, more fluent, less surprised that a bid for leadership of a nuclear state entails some press intrusion. Nor is he as culturally estranged from the non-graduate whites in deindustrialised towns who anchor (or used to) centre-left parties across the western world. Last month, he was endorsed by Joe Rogan, the elk-eating podcaster whose heterodox views - a kind of un-woke social democracy - align with many a swing voter’s. Of late, Mr Sanders has risked his standing among these people with some liberal noises in the culture wars. There is nothing to stop him tweaking his line once he secures the nomination, though. Romantic leftists are not forbidden some tactical chicanery.

The Corbyn parallel also breaks down at another point. It ignores the structural differences between the two countries. Whoever wins a UK election has the keys to the kingdom. To choose a radical is therefore a terrifyingly high-stakes move. In the US system, checked and balanced to a fault, voters can elect Mr Sanders and count on the Republican Senate to thwart his designs. Even some of the Democrats in that chamber answer to overwhelmingly conservative voters. Mr Sanders would still have the foreign latitude of a commander-in-chief. This will be the gravamen of the Republican case against him. But his domestic programme will not survive the Bermuda Triangle of legislation known hereabouts as Capitol Hill. That his presidency is so likely to disappoint is what makes it plausible.

And none of this reckons with Mr Trump’s ongoing desertion of populist economics. With its cuts to so much other than defence, his new budget enacts the guns-over-butter Republicanism that he seemed to retire in 2016. The central mystery of the Trump years is why someone who intuited the public’s exhaustion with this dogma revived it in government. Perhaps these were his instincts all along. More likely, he is prevailed upon by ideologues who are wilier than he is. Either way, the implications for November are the same. A Democrat can be unprecedentedly leftwing and still alienate the marginal voter no more than, say, Republican plans for Medicare.

политическое

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