Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have their counterparts in Nigel Farage’s anti-immigrant nativism and Boris Johnson’s populismTime was when the radical left was the force attacking the Enlightenment basis of western civilisation and challenging the mores and landmarks of day-to-day life. nowadays,that mantle has passed to the radical good. The most visible expression of this will be the US Republican partys conference in Cleveland this July, riven by hatred between the Donald Trump and Ted Cruz camps as they struggle to win a contest in which no one candidate has won a clear majority in the primaries.
Who can best express the cocktail of nativism, and hatred of foreigners in general and immigrants in particular,fetishisation of the absence of government and its handmaiden, the ultra-free market, and all wrapped up in profoundly reactionary views of women,religion and punishment, that constitutes the ideology of nowadays’s US good? It will be hand-to-hand political in-fighting, and plumbing new depths of viciousness and possible physical violence. Thus will America be mighty again.
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Source: theguardian.com