As this year draws to a close, America’s volatile stock market seems a fitting image for our likely future. President Trump’s petulant and isolated leadership, his careless provocation of trade wars – and impulsive withdrawal from actual wars – portends further uncertainty and chaos. With global markets poised to follow America’s lead into bear market territory, or worse, the lack of adult supervision in the White House has never been more significant.
Much of what is now unfolding has been predictable from the outset of Trump’s presidency. Huge tax cuts led to surging stocks as investors realised that corporate profits would grow regardless of whether companies had improved their performance. Many companies further inflated their value by taking advantage of historically low interest rates to buy back their own stock. This pushed corporate debt – US$4.9 trillion in 2007 but currently more than $9 trillion – to levels that will quickly become unsustainable if the Federal Reserve raises interest rates. Hence Trump’s sensitivity to that prospect. However, faced with this common-sense reckoning to his much vaunted bull market, Trump’s attitude has been depressingly typical: either bring the chair of the Fed into line – despite the political necessity of having the post remain independent – or get rid of him.
Hindsight is easy but it is clear that the administration’s lapses in responding to the market’s recent tumult are not accidental. President Trump has never adjusted to the give-and-take of democratic politics. His incivility towards any criticism has not only debased the institution of the presidency but dangerously eroded the GOP from within. Gone are the days when conservative critics could intelligently debate policy matters in the public sphere. Instead, Trump’s reliance on unashamedly partisan television coverage has empowered a sycophantic clique which reassures him that his frequent blunders are, in fact, evidence of determined and courageous leadership. Conversely, much of America’s mainstream media has become so embattled that it routinely refers to the president with borderline contempt – provoked, no doubt, by his corresponding disdain for them. At the end of a year in which Reporters Without Borders recorded an “unprecedented level of hostility” towards the press, worldwide, this loss of impartiality is deeply concerning.
It is not hard to see how our own situation might devolve along similar lines. The United States has always had strong political divisions, but only within recent memory have these decayed into implacable partisanship. Resurgent culture wars have politicised nearly every aspect of American life and the fracturing of a workable consensus on issues such as healthcare reform, climate change, or foreign policy, has produced such rabid attitudes and rhetoric – most notably amongst the American right during the Obama years – that the country often looks and sounds too internally divided to be democratically governable. In obvious ways, therefore, President Trump is the unavoidable product of a culture that shifts towards endless confrontation.
If there is any moral to be drawn from the early, madcap years of Trump’s presidency it is that unfettered partisanship can derail even the most robust democracies and national interests are soon forgotten, or abandoned, when political parties refuse to transcend their long-standing resentments and bickering.
