2019 - If We Get Lucky.

Sweet Dream Scenario:  As Vice-President Mike Pence is being sworn-in as the 46th President of the United States - following Trump's sudden resignation - he suffers a massive heart attack and dies. His constitutionally designated successor is the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi. By a strange twist of fate, the United States of America gets its first female president after all.

PREDICTING THE FUTURE is a mug’s game. If it could be done, then gambling would be impossible and stockmarkets would crash. Not that these and a host of equally strong objections ever prevented professional seers from giving us the benefit of their prognostications. Some of them, by the simple law of averages, will be correct. Most, however, will not. This is because, as a wise woman once said: “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

In that spirit, allow me to describe the coming year as it might look – if we get lucky.

If we get lucky, then Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller will present a report which damns President Donald Trump in ways unanticipated in even his worst nightmares. Republican and Democratic legislators, alike, conclude that his continuing occupation of the White House has become untenable.

Congressional leaders privately inform the President that there is more than enough support in both the House and the Senate to secure his impeachment. The President reaches for his cell-phone – only to discover that the Deep State has prevailed upon Twitter to shut down his account. Realising that the jig is up, the President resigns.

As Vice-President Mike Pence is being sworn-in as the 46th President of the United States he suffers a massive heart attack and dies. His constitutionally designated successor is the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi. By a strange twist of fate, the United States of America gets its first female president after all.

If we get lucky, then the House of Commons decisively rejects Theresa May’s Brexit Deal. Defeated and exhausted, the Prime Minister advises the Queen to dissolve Parliament and call an early General Election. May then resigns.

A Special Conference of the Labour Party votes decisively in favour of making a Second Brexit Referendum the centrepiece of its election manifesto.

With the Conservatives torn by all manner of political and personal conflicts, Labour cruises to a landslide victory. For the first time in forty years, the United Kingdom has a socialist prime minister and an unashamedly left-wing government. The Second Referendum records upwards of 60 percent of Britons opting to remain in the European Union.

If we get lucky, then the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, negotiates a general peace settlement and mutual defence pact involving Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran. The Kurds secure regional autonomy within the Syrian state, guaranteed by the Russian Federation.

If we get lucky, then the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, fearful that President Xi Jinping is about to launch a massive purge of senior party cadres, deposes him. A hastily-summoned National People’s Congress, in a climate of unprecedented independence, elects a moderate reformer as Xi’s successor.

If we get lucky, then the National Party responds to a sharp decline in public support by jettisoning its current leader, Simon Bridges, and replacing him with Judith Collins. The choice of Collins is itself a reaction to the rapid rise of the right-wing populist New Conservative Party. Collins, it is hoped, will staunch the flow of National support to the NCP.

Appalled by this dramatic shift to the far-right, thousands of moderate National Party supporters swing in behind NZ First and Labour, lifting their combined support to nearly 60 percent of voters.

The Coalition Government, buoyed by this sudden shift in its fortunes, decides to reject the Tax Working Group’s recommendation favouring the imposition of a Capital Gains Tax. The Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, is persuaded by Winston Peters that such a tax would turn every farmer, small business owner and landlord in the country into her personal enemy. Finance Minister, Grant Robertson, resigns in protest. Jacinda replaces him with David Parker.

If we get really lucky, then the leadership changes in the USA, the UK and China produce a sudden and radical shift in the global approach to anthropogenic global warming. Rather than relying on yet another international conference, the leaders of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council meet in secret and thrash out a concrete plan for keeping the planet’s remaining reserves of oil and gas in the ground while they co-ordinate a planet-wide “Green New Deal”.

According to the wise, the only sure thing about luck is that it changes.

I’m counting on that being true.

Happy 2019!

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 4 January 2019.

Looking On The Bright Side Of President Trump

Out Of Darkness ... Light? That Donald Trump possesses an enormous ego is indisputable. The question is: will that ego be better served by becoming one of America’s truly great presidents – or one of its very worst?

 

LET’S BE OPTIMISTIC about President-Elect Donald Trump. Optimistic? Seriously? Yes, seriously.

 

Oh, I know that America’s late-night liberal chat-show hosts are all hyperventilating at the prospect of President Trump. And, yes, I’m aware that the global Left is competing furiously in the self-flagellation stakes. Because, of course, Trump’s victory was all about them and their failure to retain the loyalty of white working-class males. (Although, quite how the Left hoped to do that after nearly 40 years of heaping unrelenting economic, social and cultural humiliation on Caucasian proletarian masculinity defeats me utterly!) But, if you’ll just bear with me, I’ll try to outline why a Trump presidency could end up okay.

 

Let’s begin with the comments of ex-pat Kiwi businessman turned big-time American corporate CFO and Washington insider, Chris Liddell. On TVNZ’s Q+A current affairs show, Liddell commented that Trump’s victory marks the definitive end of the era of untrammelled free-market capitalism.

 

According to this former CFO of Microsoft and General Motors, rising inequality and the hollowing-out of the Western middle-classes are trends that the global political class (and the corporate interests they represent) can no longer ignore. Trump’s victory, said Liddell, equals “Brexit x 10”.

 

Or, as Bob Dylan used to say: “The times they are a-changing.”

 

“Oh, come on!”, I hear you say. “Optimism is one thing, but peddling pure fantasy is another.”

 

Fair enough. Let me, therefore, draw your attention to the response of Democrat Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader of the US House of Representatives, to Trump’s election-night promise to launch a massive programme of infrastructure renewal.

 

The Republican and Democratic parties, she said, will be forced to “come together and find common ground”. She also reminded the news media that a massive programme dedicated to rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure was one of Hillary Clinton’s biggest election promises. If Trump sends an massive infrastructure bill to the House, then there can be little doubt that the Democrats will vote for it.

 

Which is all very well, but what about the Republicans? Is it really credible to suggest that the party which implacably resisted every economic and social reform advanced by the Obama Administration is suddenly going to embrace his much-maligned “Stimulus Package” as their own?

 

A better question, perhaps, is what will become of them if they don’t?

 

What must never be forgotten is that Trump comes to the White House carrying less political baggage than any presidential candidate since Dwight Eisenhower. His billionaire status enables him to operate without recourse to the squalid back-room horse-trading that has turned-off so many American voters.

 

It’s a situation ideally suited to a successful populist leader. Having run against “The Establishment” and won, Trump now needs to demonstrate what his victory means in legislative terms. The very best way to do that is take up a position bestriding both the Democratic and Republican parties. By demanding bi-partisan support for his plans to restore American greatness he will be offering himself a win-win proposition. If the Democrats refuse to play ball, they will merely reinforce their estrangement from “Heartland America”. If the Republican Party balks at Trump’s Keynesian solutions (which, ideologically-speaking, they are bound to do) then Trump has them over a barrel – a pork barrel.

 

A Republican congress foolish enough to resist Trump’s programme will prove to the American people that it wasn’t Barack Obama who was the problem, or even the godless Democratic Party. An obstructionist Republican majority will demonstrate conclusively that Washington’s problems are ultimately traceable to the Republican Party itself.

 

If this eventuates, then Trump’s options are twofold. Either, he reaches out to Nancy Pelosi and the new Senate Minority Leader, and makes America great with the votes of Trump Republican loyalists and the Democratic Party. Or, he turns to his “base” and asks it to deliver him a pliable congress at the earliest opportunity – the Mid-Term Elections of 2018.

 

This latter course would allow Trump to do what nobody else – Democrat or Republican – has been able to do since 2008: purge the Republican Party of its extremist, Tea Party, element. The consequent drawing together of the two major parties would restore to the Legislative Branch the bi-partisanship it so conspicuously lacks: that willing co-operation among legislators which the framers of the US Constitution deemed essential to the success of representative government.

 

Such a course of action would, naturally, earn Trump the bitter enmity of his fellow One Percenters – who would almost certainly attempt an end-run around both the Executive and Legislative Branches by appealing to the Judiciary. What better reason could Trump have for appointing a string of intelligent and independent Supreme Court Justices?

 

That Donald Trump possesses an enormous ego is indisputable. The question is: will that ego be better served by becoming one of America’s truly great presidents – or one of its very worst?

 

This essay was originally published in The Press Of Wednesday, 16 November 2016.