LETTER FROM WASHINGTON
SIMON BARBER: Jacksonian revolt won Trump presidency
Trump’s people don’t think he is evil, even though he has a strained relationship with the truth, writes Simon Barber
To judge from Amazon sales, the US’s coastal chattering classes are running to George Orwell and Hannah Arendt for guidance and titivation in these disconcerting times. There is also renewed interest in Huey Long, the demagogic Louisiana governor who, had he not been assassinated, might have unseated President Franklin Roosevelt in 1936; and in President Andrew Jackson, the US’s seventh CE, who ran on a distinctly populist, America First-ish platform and was roundly reviled by the establishment he defeated in 1828 as uncouth and illegitimate. So, a seemingly dyslexic President Donald Trump is getting people thinking and reading. But to see parallels with 1984 is unnecessarily alarmist. Trump’s America is not Oceania. Indeed, his supporters would exercise their second-amendment rights to shoot Thought Police on sight. Besides, to the extent Trump has any truly totalitarian tendencies, he will quickly find himself checked and balanced. With Jackson and Long, the echoes are stronger. L...
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