“Small, empty men”

A leftish school friend tells me Trump and Johnson are ‘small, empty men’ for whom the unglamorous job of governing which means ‘compassion, inclusion and equality’ holds no interest because all they are interested in is celebrity. My reply below.

Yet, under Trump, pre-Covid, the American economy boomed, unemployment was incredibly low and, most tellingly for the “racist” President, blacks and Hispanics were “included” by their employment levels being at record highs. Achieved by the usual conservative measures of cutting taxes, small government and letting the economy prosper. Also by trying to stop the Chinese gutting the economy. Inclusion happened in a real way. It wasn’t the strange social engineering project of a ‘compassionate’ government (do sane people ever go around thinking how compassionate they are Little Jack Horner-style?). Equality of opportunity is fine and proper but trying to bring about the Kingdom of heaven on earth by ensuring equality of outcome (now called ‘equity’) is sinister, patronising to groups whose main value to you is their perceived victimhood, and a bit mad in its Utopianism. The function of government isn’t, as a fact that may not be disputed, compassion (which operates or doesn’t at the level of individual people), inclusion and equality. To say that it is is just to state the socialist creed as to what government is for. It’s an opinion (and a strangely religious one) but plenty of others are available. The irony is, as I explain above, the outcome of the right’s economics, always portrayed as mere selfishness, actually has a more ‘compassionate’, ‘inclusive’ and equal outcome. The real inequality is between working class Americans and the uniformly metropolitan and left-voting billionaires in Silicon Valley (who care so achingly about blacks and Hispanics). For this, in the UK, read the working class red wall (now blue wall) in the Midlands and the North and the metropolitan, wealthy Labour voters in London (will Labour never learn from this?). There is an irony in your saying that the unglamorous ‘job’ of government is compassion, inclusion and equality when, actually, the moral glamour that these things bring is what drives political discourse these days. It revolves entirely around the competitive advertising of one’s compassion and thoughtfulness rather than the real thing which is a matter for the personal level of human affairs.

Trump and Johnson undoubtedly love and thrive on the limelight and certainly have unattractive qualities but they have/had masterly political (and in Trump’s case economic) nous in terms of reading the runes and their very reassuringly visible flaws are far from the only thing about them. As for their smallness, who are the supposed giants in the current landscape who are coming to save us - Corbyn, Starmer, Geriatric Joe?