Similar for Spain. The populist parties we’ve had have been created and led by people with degrees in PoliSci or Law, some with years of being in a bigger party, or part of a political dinasty… (“vote me! I’m an outsider! never mind my twenty years of warming up a seat in Congress and my being named after my dad and his dad and his dad, all of whom warmed up seats in Congress, I’m totally an outsider!”)
Riiiiight. If one thing the past year has proven, its that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Plus you have Boris Johnson as your Foreign Secretary.
For all the negative things I have to say about Putin, being “unqualified” isn’t one of them. The man is a skilled political operator who has risen to the top of a deeply corrupt - and deeply dangerous - political system and has effectively or actually ruled it for over a decade. He is also a deeply intelligent and shrewd strategist who has played the West like a violin to further his (and theoretically Russia’s) interests. Trump, conversely, is unskilled, inexperienced and clueless.
Boris and his good friend Nigel both have enough rat-like cunning to gain a certain amount of public support by acting like buffoons, but the political establishment is a tough barrier to overcome and Theresa May (for all the negative things I have to say about her) appears to be applying the principle of keeping her friends close and enemies closer. Making Boris Foreign Secretary is an excellent way to make use of the political talents he has while also constantly putting him in a position to make embarrassing verbal gaffes that will keep his political ambitions in check.
That doesn’t mean that Boris will never be PM - particularly if Labour continue as they have been - but there are a whole series of other events that need to happen between now and then to get there. And he’ll still be more qualified than Donald Trump.
What now?
Have you been reading that hysterical, so shrill liberal press again; you don’t think you’ve been conned enough for one year …
Another weird statement. Johnson wasn’t elected. Giving Johnson a role he gets slapped down in seems to be making considerable tactical sense, and he does no damage.
Out of 324,000,000 people? Gee, let me think…
Given the proto-democratic, proto-capitalism timelines of Russia that make the country akin to early industrialisation/Victorian in UK terms, what is it that Putin has demonstrated a lack of ability in doing, because it would sure escape most Russians and pretty well everyone I’ve spoken with?
It would seem to me unlikely that in a parliamentary system however a charismatic/populist this prospective renegade was they couldn’t go from zero representation to PM holding a majority in a single election cycle, much less in 15 months as Trump has. If there was sufficient momentum maintained over two election cycles they probably deserve a tilt as PM.
In Australia we’ve had several mavericks have made a populist bid for the top, mostly right wing fruit-loops from Queensland. Most notably the Joh for Canberra push in 1987 which handed the election to Labor and the first incarnation of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in 1997 which fizzled into ignominy in a single parliament.
More recently Clive Palmer was a reasonable approximation of Trump. Palmer, a multimillionaire (he claimed billionaire) political novice formed the Federal Palmer United Party party in April 2013, won a lower house seat for himself and two (eventually 3) Senate positions in September 2013. With that vote he came close to holding the balance of power. From that position it would have been implausibly, remotely feasible chance that he could have leveraged that representation into being a compromise PM in a hung parliament. None-the-less the PUP has flamed out and lost all representation in the 2016 election.
This is true, but if he were to stand at the dispatch box for PMQs and irredeemably flame out that would concede the hypothetical. But I’d agree that even one session in question time under that scrutiny would be a hoot to watch.
324 million people voted?
Who’d be running against him?
Let me save you the trouble. First, 324 million people didn’t vote. Only 231 million people were eligible to vote. Of those, only about 136 million actually voted this year. Out of those, 65,444,673 voted for Clinton and 62,802,237 voted for Trump. Trump won the electoral vote, but Clinton had 2.8 million more popular votes. If those were what counted, she would be the President-elect.
You seem to be anything but sage.
I’d call Putin many things, but unqualified is not among them. While he did not rise through a democratic winnowing process, nonetheless he came up through a fairly severe winnowing process.
I cannot offhand think of any direct equivalent to Trump in a developed nation. The one that immediately sprang to mind was Uriburu, who started the Infamous decade that began Argentina’s slide from a developed, 11th richest in the world country it was in the 1920s to a second-world dictatorship.
But that was a military coup. The electing of totally unqualified candidates who promise to oust the corrupt establishment politicians tend to be a feature of poor countries often with immature political systems.
While writing that, it occurred to me that this might be a risk run by democratic elections in countries where the GINI index becomes large.
The best parallel I could come up with was Hugo Chavez, who was a career military officer. Although a distressing number of nations seem to consider that a sufficient qualification.
The question is unanswerable. We do know that no other candidate as unqualified as Trump has won in any developed nation, but that’s all we can say. Inhabitants of other nations can say that a Trump couldn’t happen there because of reasons X, Y, and Z, but before Trump, Americans could make similar arguments. We’ve just learned that those arguments failed at least once. If they failed once, they can fail again.
The same was true in the US, until this year.
Trump did those things, too: He got elected by the Republicans to be their candidate, and he got enough people to vote for the Republicans.
The position of Prime Minster in Norway is as I understand, primarily the position of being leader of the party that is in government. To become Prime Minister of Norway, Trump would need to convince a party not to select him as a candidate, but as a party leader. He would then have to either lead this party to gain over 50 % of the seats in parliament, where the biggest parties today score in the 30 % range.
Failing that, he would have to negotiate a coalition with him as head, a process witch would require finding common ground and hammering out a common platform with the other parties.
Norways political ecology is more competitive than the US one. It has its own flaws, but I believe it would be more resistant to a Trump than the US two-party system.
Eh, the systems aren’t really as different as they’re made out to be. The US has just as many political factions as anywhere else in the world. Here, those factions unite into the two parties; in parliamentary democracies, each faction is its own party, but those parties then unite into the Government and the Opposition. But when you get down to it, convincing (say) the anti-abortion faction to stay in the Republican party is the same task as convincing the anti-abortion party to stay in the coalition with the conservative party.
Not quite, I don’t think. The US is a virtual two-party system. If the anti-abortion faction leaves the Republicans, its next stop Nowheresville. If the anti-abortion party leave the coalition (they’re not strictly speaking in the coalition, more like clients atm) they will still be pulling in voters, getting parliamentary seats and be able to negotiate.
In fact, during the 2001 election, the leader of the anti-abortion party managed through some fairly brilliant negotiations to form a minority government without the aid of any major party. I don’t see any way this could have happened in the US.
I still remember the pictures of him after the election, September the tenth. Despite his party’s generally frowning on alcohol and tobacco he’d allowed himself a cigar and a cognac. Secure in the knowledge that life may have done him down before, but tomorrow the headlines were going to be all about him.
Still he did good later. Turns out he was just the guy we needed.
There are other differences too. A party that fails in the political marketplace may end up exiting parliament, and new parties can grow large if the politicians are not perceived as addressing the concerns of the public.
No, it has proved that conventional wisdom doesn’t always hold true but sometimes it does. (the far right didn’t win in Austria for example) Also that people shouldn’t place their faith in the accuracy of polls when the gap is so narrow.
For all his buffoonishness, Boris is objectively a smart guy and an internationalist and a politician that has been elected several times into his positions. Plus he is nowhere near as far right as Trump (but then neither of our two parties are as far right as the democrats either).
He has said silly things but feel free to find the silliest thing that he’s ever said and put that against a random day’s outpouring of rabid froth from Trump and see how he stacks up. Boris is light-years away from a Trump.
I have to ask, what exactly is a “colon-hammer”?
As far as in Canada, Rob Ford was on city council for years before becoming mayor. I am a little more worried about Kevin O’Leary, from Dragons Den and Shark Tank fame, who seems to think that Trump is a fine role model and is thinking of running for the Conservative party leadership.
Depends on the country; in a country like the United States, being a high-ranking military leader, such as being a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or a Joint Combatant Command commander, makes you as much or more of a diplomat and politician as it does a more traditional general, as you’re the literally the point where the political decisions become military orders.
However, in countries where the military is, for whatever reason, not as prominent in the nation’s activities at home and abroad, this may not necessarily be so.
I think the pertinent issue here is whether the head of state is popularly elected, or through some other mechanism. Popular vote was what got Trump elected; if we had something more like a parliamentary system, he’d have had to do what Grim Render suggests about getting himself elected, and made party head, and then getting the majority of the vote, etc… and that is extremely unlikely.
In theory the Electoral College is supposed to be the counterbalance for this sort of popular madness; ideally we’re voting for electors who will use their experience, wisdom and best judgment to choose a President. However, over the years, the original intent has been warped and mangled by the rise of political parties, and the associated state-level rules considering how electors are apportioned and expected to vote.
This is true but the question is more that the US presidential system is more likely to allow a political neophyte, however populist and whether skilled or unskilled to jump straight to the top rung.
In a parliamentary system a populist like Trump needs to first win a seat, then sit in parliament, work the committees and factional meetings building support to be a major player in a party which could win an election. Then become a leader and win an election.
The fastest ascendency in Australia post WWII was Bob Hawke (PM '83 - '91) who became Prime Minister after only two years in parliament, never served as a minister and was Leader of the Opposition for only one month. But he was a major player in domestic affairs as ACTU President 1969–80. The Silver Budgie was no unknown quantity.