Ferguson is Oxbridge-educated (I'm not sure which, maybe both), now teaches at Harvard with other gigs at prestige schools and think tanks worldwide. He has a carefully cultivated image as a contrarian and an independent voice -- but his independent voice typically winds up shilling for whomever the Republican Party chooses to nominate for president at a given moment.
Yet he's not enamored of Donald Trump.
Not yet, at least.
But it's still two months to the election. Give him time.
This column explores the common appeal to working-class voters of Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US. Excerpts:
To understand what has just happened in Britain, mystified Americans are advised to read the novels of Anthony Trollope. I especially recommend “Framley Parsonage.’’ There is a wonderful parody there of a Victorian change of government, which dashes the political ambitions of the unscrupulous Harold Smith, briefly elevated to the Petty Bag Office.Harold Smith has been brought into the Cabinet by Lord Brock, the prime minister, but swiftly falls foul of his jealous friend Mr. Supplehouse, who savages him in an article in the “Jupiter.’’ Then, with breathtaking suddenness, the Brock government is overthrown.
Nothing that happened last week would have astonished Trollope: the suddenness of the fall of Prime Minister David Cameron and the ascent of Theresa May, the despondency of the ousted ministers, and above all the miraculous resurrection of Boris Johnson as foreign secretary.
The fashionable view is that the fall of Cameron, like the rise of Donald Trump, is a symptom of a worldwide populist revolt against the elites — a novel and alarming challenge to the established political order. On closer inspection, this was a political entertainment (think Gilbert & Sullivan) straight out of the early 1860s.
* * * As November approaches, US voters are going to find themselves in much the same position as their British counterparts found themselves prior to June 24. The face an unappetizing choice: on one side, the familiar but jaded; on the other, the novel but risky. I feel much the same about Hillary Clinton as I do about the European Union, and much the same way about Donald Trump as I do about Brexit.
I was for keeping the UK in the EU, not because I hum the “Ode to Joy” in the bath, but because I thought the Cameron-Osborne government was the best Britain had had in 26 years and did not deserve to be shipwrecked over Europe. At the same time, I wholly disbelieved the arguments of the Brexit camp that the UK would be economically better off out of the EU.
In the case of the United States, I feel no enthusiasm at the prospect of a Clinton presidency. She has already been pushed alarmingly far to the left of Barack Obama by Bernie Sanders’s challenge. Her reputation for honesty and judgment is in … well, whatever comes below tatters.
Yet the alternative seems even worse. I do not share the view that a Trump presidency would be tyranny, undermining the Constitution and eroding the liberties it enshrines. The Constitution was carefully designed to cope with the tendency of democratic electorates to fall for demagogues. But what it cannot do is protect us from terrible policies. Drastic restrictions on immigration, protectionist tariffs, reckless taxing and borrowing — we have seen all these things before in American history, we have seen their unintended costs, and we could see them again if Trump is elected.
Of course, as a member of the elite, I would say that, wouldn’t I? ...
And on he goes. But where he'll stop, I think I know.
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