Trump is showing us the true cost of liberalism

I heard a joke this week from the era when communists expected workers to rise up any minute to cast off the chains of paid labour. Though, told in another context, it seemed to me to contain a truth about the phenomenon of Trump.

It goes like this: after a long struggle, communism has emerged triumphant, and the countries of the world are conferencing on the policies of their new society, in which everyone contributes according to their ability and everyone receives according to their need.

Trump’s actions could lead to a useful cost/benefit analysis. Credit: AFR

“But we’ll have to keep one country capitalist,” one comrade declares. “Why, comrade?” a second asks. “Because,” says the first, “otherwise we won’t know what things cost!”

After several decades of Green New Deals, Conference of the Parties meetings, globalised markets, reduced trade barriers, world banking, increased migration, United Nations treaties, and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) schemes in the developed world, Trump 2.0 – who is busy undoing all these things – is about to show us what they cost. This might leave some pundits with egg on their faces. What if it turns out they’ve not been a net benefit, or, worse, a drag? It’s only possible to pretend that the policies countries have been pursuing are unquestionably good when there is no “control group” for comparison.

Within the USA, the panic has taken on a decidedly two-speed quality. Urbane man-about-the-globe and Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh (a favourite of mine) is concerned about the “great liberal shrug”. He frets that “liberals have allowed a healthy acceptance of electoral reality to cross into a hope that Trump’s second term won’t be so bad”. But it’ll be worse, says Ganesh, because in the first two years of his second term, Trump will be unconstrained by the need to be popular. He can’t win again, so he’ll do what he damn well pleases.

Here is where the columnist confounds the interests and people and pundocracy. Polls and anecdata give Trump a net positive approval rating. Mutterings from across one of America’s increasing number of oceans suggest that many liberals (a reminder that this is the US term for left-leaning) are not just shrugging but somewhat relieved – even secretly thrilled – that Trump is finally running the big experiment. They, too, have begun to wonder what things actually cost.

Not so the pundits, however, for whom the stakes are much higher. There is a business model to defend. And an indelible internet trail of bylined opinion that could prove embarrassingly wrong.

This is why we are seeing the liberal media and the liberal reader at odds. Far from shrugging, much of the media is, as with Trump the first time around, registering somewhere on a scale from consternated to hysterical.

Hysterical when it veers into fantasies of fascism. This week, as Trump’s executive orders were enacted, a senior reporter for CNN Politics wrote that “Trump rained blow after blow on liberal governance” (liberal here in the sense of liberal democracy, because political terminology is anything but clear). Based on a still-shot of Trump’s close ally Elon Musk throwing his heart out to the inauguration crowd, an investigative reporter for the Financial Times opined that “Nazi salutes by Tesla’s ‘techno king’ take the [car manufacturer’s] brand association into new territory”, from “clean power to white power”.

Consternated when reporting on Trump’s unconventional (but not unprecedented) proposals to buy Greenland and turn Canada into the 51st state. Emotive when covering the plight of asylum applicants to the US who have been turned down before they could arrive and submit their applications. But strangely silent on the ongoing migrant crisis overwhelming services within the US.

In the past, liberal media has yearned for a technocracy in which, as popular economist Tim Harford once put it in the FT, “the workaround for voter ignorance is to delegate the details to expert technocrats”. But now, confronted with Donald Trump’s billionaire-stacked administration, it turns out that what they really wanted was people who specialise in the theory of everything and the practice of nothing – economists, like Harford, not people who know how to successfully and gainfully execute on an idea.

In short, these media outlets have fallen back into their comfortable rut from the first Trump presidency, when the endlessly fascinating presidential spectacle could be relied on to attract audiences, spark satisfying outrage and drive online grabs, while providing absolutely none of the tricky analysis as to why, despite the manifold flaws that the media amplify, voters have chosen the “Orange Menace” again.

Conveniently for Trump, the liberal media’s business model is his as well. Without persecution, this latter-day messiah can’t be shown to be suffering for his flock. There’s no currency in being an outsider if you’re suddenly treated like the person in charge of policy in the White House. Impotent rage makes his opponents fools; measured, even generous analysis of his proposed response to real problems might end up making a fool of him.

Like it or not, everything has a cost. Open borders cost social harmony; closed borders cost productivity. The green energy transition costs money; so does diverting money into energy sources that can now power business and strategic innovation, including energy-hungry AI. Neglecting one or the other might cost America its dominance in the world. Social inequality costs wellbeing; DEI programs erode trust. Racism leaves money in the form of human potential on the table; corporate anti-racism guff gobbles it up.

For liberal pundits, the cost might be their credibility. It’s time to stop playing at being The Resistance. We know the value of the Western consensus, now we want to know the price. Comrade Trump is overturning years of self-congratulation to show us how much things really are.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.

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