Saturday 3 February 2018

Trump and Anti-trump - how different are they?


From Joel Kotkin:
To be sure there is much to lament about Trump, and his European counterparts, but it’s ironic that many of those who charge him with autocracy are often themselves not great fans of democratic control. For the most part the anti-populists favor not a more vibrant democracy but, in the words of Harvard’s Yascha Mounk “rights without democracy,” dominated by bureaucracies like the EU or the EPA. Some are even open admirers of China’s authoritarian dictatorship; others swoon at French President Emmanuel Macron’s almost laughable yearning to reinvent himself as a modern day Louis XIV.
Indeed it is striking that so much sound and fury is vented at the prospect of the not-very-authoritarian Donald Trump visiting the UK while the Prime Minister can cosy up to China's definitely-authoritarian leadership without any criticism at all (even to the point of a Times cartoonist hinting human rights abuses in the UK are in some way equivalent to China's!

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