What he calls "ethno-nationalism" and "tribalism" the left routinely calls "xenophobia" and "racism".
Cheered and emboldened, Pat Buchanan celebrates Brexit and looks forward to the breakup into mini-nation states of Spain, the UK, Italy, Belgium, Ukraine, Romania, Georgia, and again Russia, just for starters.
Odd he hasn't suggested Germany and Austria rethink Anschluss.
As I have written elsewhere, secession should be a lot more deliberate, and more deliberated, than the British plebiscite.
PB's optimistic description of Trumpism at home.
What might a Trumpian policy of Americanism over globalism entail?
A 10 to 20 percent tariff on manufactured goods to wipe out the trade deficit in goods, with the hundreds of billions in revenue used to slash or eliminate corporate taxes in the USA.
Every U.S. business would benefit. Every global company would have an incentive not only to move production here, but its headquarters here.
An “America first” immigration policy would secure the border, cut legal immigration to tighten U.S. labor markets, strictly enforce U.S. laws against those breaking into our country, and get tough with businesses that make a practice of hiring people here illegally.
When they tried that under Hoover in 1930 it significantly deepened and prolonged the Great Depression.
But circumstances then were quite different and the trade affected was among advanced nations and not, as now, between America and nations whose goods are cheaper than we can make them only because their workers live like ours did around 1900.
Nations to which we export precious little, anyway, as our decades of huge trade deficits testify.
Richard Wolffe has a different notion of Trumpism in the White House.
The currency and bond markets will get spooked by the dawning reality of a new president who, over the next decade, will likely add $11.5tn to the already huge national debt of $14tn.
As the traders and analysts consider that ballooning debt, they will recall Trump’s plan to default on that debt by renegotiating with creditors in some giant national bankruptcy proceeding.
“I would borrow knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal,” he told CNBC.
If all that weren’t enough to dump the dollar and Treasury bonds, the markets could always justify their panic by considering Trump’s next step.
When economists challenged his debt default idea, Trump had another brainwave that is well known to the rulers of banana republics:
“First of all, you never have to default because you print the money,” he explained on CNN.
As that financial crisis unfolds, President-elect Trump will ready his plan to declare China a currency manipulator in January 2017 and impose a 45% tariff on Chinese imports.
The result will be a trade war with the single largest holder of US debt, as well as a swift referral to the World Trade Organization.
This scenario does not faze the property developer, who helpfully explained last month: “Who the hell cares if there’s a trade war?”
. . . .
It’s not clear, seven months away from his inauguration, whether Trump will cave first on his madcap Mexican wall or his half-baked ban on Muslim visitors.
If the wall is unreal, the Muslim ban is unfathomable, just like the anti-immigration plans of the Brexit mob.
But he has already caved on the Muslim ban, in a limited way and a manner of speaking, in his latest major flip-flop.
And anyway says he can do it all on his own.
Which brings us back to the real source of the chaos.
In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, the most striking development has been the rapid collapse of political leadership on both sides of the House of Commons.
The Conservative prime minister resigned and much of the Labour shadow cabinet followed suit.
That rapid collapse could only happen because their leadership was so weak in the first place: weak enough to allow the populists to rise up.
The same is true in Washington, where Republican leaders say they will vote for Trump, but not endorse him; where they condemn his Muslim ban, but praise his performance on a golf course.
On the left, the story is the depressingly similar.
Bernie Sanders says he will vote for Hillary Clinton, but stops short of conceding the nomination.
And Clinton’s polling strength is partly built on the fact that she is not disliked quite as much as Trump.
The rapid collapse of Britain’s old world order should serve as a clear warning across the Atlantic.
The certainties of political debate, market valuations and community relations can all burn up in a few short days.
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