Perhaps they should listen rather than sneer

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz, May 30.)

During a visit to Wellington earlier this year, John Podesta, a man described as a top American political adviser, gave a series of media interviews.

Among other things, he praised our “superstar” prime minister and said she had given hope to social democrats everywhere.

Jacinda Ardern’s election success in 2017, Podesta said, was a bright spot at a time when populist movements were winning political success around the world – a trend Podesta obviously saw as undesirable.

As a former chief of staff to US President Bill Clinton, adviser to President Barack Obama and chairman of Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful election campaign in 2016, Podesta is an influential player in the US Democratic Party.

He would feel a natural affinity with Ardern, whose soft-Left politics are broadly aligned with those of the US Democrats. 

But while it was Podesta’s glowing remarks about Ardern that captured headlines, his warning about the supposed dangers of populist politics said more about the strange political mood of the times.

He talked about social media whipping the public into a frenzy, and about democratic values being placed at risk by politicians exploiting fear and unrest.

Predictably, he cited Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as examples. He also mentioned the success of anti-immigration parties in Europe – an obvious reference to Italy, Hungary and Poland, where voters have installed Right-leaning governments that resist policies imposed by the EU.

By implication, populism is bad. It is the opposite of the “progressive” politics embraced by Podesta, our Labour-led government and social democratic parties in much of the Western world.

But hang on a minute. If Podesta looked in a dictionary, he would see that a populist is defined as a person “who holds, or is concerned with, the views of ordinary people”.

It follows that there should be nothing shameful about the word populist. It comes from a Latin root word meaning “people”. Perhaps Podesta needs to be reminded about the origin of another important word, one that we got from the ancient Greeks: Democracy. It means “rule by the people”.

The words “populist” and “democracy” are joined at the hip. But “populist” has become a dirty word used by the political elites to discredit any policies they disapprove of.

They try to deride populism by equating it with extreme nationalism. But populism is on the rise for a very obvious reason: throughout the Western world, Left-leaning elites have grown distanced from the views of “ordinary people” whom they dismiss as ignorant and worthless.

Parties that once had a working-class base have been captured by inner-city ideologues and intellectuals. At the same time, we have seen the emergence of a new breed of politician who has known no career outside politics and had no direct exposure to the issues that most concern rank-and-file voters.  

The result has been a profound re-orientation of traditional politics, with blue-collar voters moving to the Right because they perceive social-democratic parties as being elitist and out-of-touch.

As far back as the 1980s, so-called “working-class Tories” supported Margaret Thatcher. The same class of voter had a decisive influence on the outcome of the recent Australian elections.

It was the blue-collar vote that got Trump elected (wealthy people overwhelmingly supported Clinton) and it was mostly working-class, Labour-held British electorates that voted in favour of Brexit. If that wasn’t proof enough, the clincher was last weekend’s EU elections – a triumph for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.

Surely the solution to all this is not to sneer but to listen and respond. Yet blue-collar Trump voters, who would once have been natural Democratic Party supporters, were dismissed by Clinton in 2016 as “deplorables” – a remark that encapsulated the elite’s contempt for ordinary people and may have lost her the election.

Okay, so the Left hates Trump. But he won the 2016 election according to the rules, odd though they may seem to us; and until such time as the Democratic Party and the American media come up with proof that Trump rorted his way to victory, they should get used to it.

Brexit, too, was the result of a popular vote by ordinary people who, not unnaturally, wanted to be governed from London rather than by a largely unaccountable bureaucracy elsewhere. But because it ran counter to the Left’s grand project of a united Europe, the political elites insisted the majority of British voters got it wrong and went to great lengths to thwart their will.

The problem, clearly, is that ordinary people are stupid. They can’t be trusted to make the right decisions. They don’t know what’s good for them. They should have taken the advice of their political betters. Perhaps the solution is not to let them vote at all.

Three white males despised by the left-wing commentariat

(First published in the Manawatu Standard, the Nelson Mail and Stuff.co.nz., March 6.)

Donald Trump. George Pell. Benjamin Netanyahu.

On the face of things, three men with not a lot in common other than that they are all white males who are (or were until recently, in Pell’s case) in positions of power.

That alone, of course, is enough to condemn them in a world where white male privilege has been identified – excuse me while I take my tongue out of my cheek – as the root cause of all oppression and suffering.

But these men share the additional distinction of being the three world figures most loathed by the Left-leaning elites that dominate the public conversation. North Korea's despotic Kim Jong Un? Venezuela’s lethally incompetent Maduro? Syria’s genocidal al-Assad? Not even in the race.

Let’s take Trump first. Last week his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, testified before the US House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform. 

The media hung on every word and would have been bitterly disappointed that Cohen failed to confirm suspicions that Trump had colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election.

Never mind; the media eagerly lapped up Cohen’s other damning assertions about Trump’s character, apparently forgetting that only months ago the same Michael Cohen had been portrayed in the same media as a man who couldn’t lie straight in bed.

Is Trump a crook? On the balance of the evidence, the answer is almost certainly yes. His every action and statement suggests he’s a man with the integrity of a cockroach. Yet there’s something disturbing about the way once-reputable news organisations have abandoned all pretence of balance and objectivity in the way they report him.

I listen most days to America’s National Public Radio. I'm a great fan except for one thing: it’s  obsessed with Trump and spends endless hours analysing his iniquities. 

You would never guess, listening to NPR or reading the Washington Post, that Trump currently has an approval rating of 44 per cent – hardly stratospheric, but no disgrace either. Ronald Reagan, generally considered one of the most popular occupants of the White House, enjoyed only 40 per cent approval at the same point in his presidency.

As puzzling as it may seem to us, many Americans like what Trump’s doing. The US economy has surged during his presidency and unemployment is the lowest it has been for decades, but this is either ignored or played down in most of the media.

There’s something not right here. The American media are supposed to reflect the mood of the nation, but they invite the accusation that they are elitist and out of touch. Many Americans no longer feel they can trust their newspapers and broadcasting organisations – a fact Trump is happy to exploit.

Now, Cardinal Pell. Did he sexually molest two choir boys in the sacristy of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne? A jury decided he did, but at an earlier trial on the same charges, a different jury had voted 10-2 to acquit him. He was convicted the second time after a retrial. Other charges against him had previously been dismissed.

The Australian media decided early in the piece that Pell was a molester. He wasn’t helped by the fact that he’s an ecclesiastical conservative, which wouldn’t have endeared him to the liberal media, and neither did he do himself any favours by conveying the impression of being cold, aloof and unsympathetic to the victims of abuse.

The case is being appealed, but in the meantime it’s reasonable to ask whether a fair and impartial verdict was possible against a backdrop of public outrage – entirely justified – over the epidemic of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

The trial took place amid such a climate of public revulsion and media condemnation that it’s hard to imagine jurors not being influenced. The appeal judges will have the last word on whether Pell is guilty, but no one can rule out the possibility that he has been made a scapegoat for grotesque perversions perpetrated by others.

Finally, Netanyahu. The tough Israeli prime minister is facing corruption charges and most commentators can barely conceal their delight.

You can see why he’s not liked. More than once, I’ve seen Netanyahu coolly demolish smug, condescending TV interviewers who thought they could skewer him over Palestine.

Granted, Netanyahu is probably not a nice man, but effective leaders are often imperfect human beings. The sainted John F Kennedy, to take an obvious example, was an alley cat and a voracious sexual predator. Winston Churchill saved Britain from Nazism but he was coldly ruthless when it suited him.

Netanyahu may be a crook, for all I know, but I suspect that if I were an Israeli, surrounded by hostile forces wanting to kill me, I would be reassured by having him as prime minister.

How Trump weaponised distrust of the US media - and how the media obliged him by playing along

(Published in the Manawatu Standard, Nelson Mail and other Stuff regional papers, December 12.)

Whenever I read something about Donald Trump, my eyes go straight to the credit line at the bottom of the story to see where it came from.

If it’s sourced from the Washington Post or the New York Times, I read it with a degree of scepticism. These once-great newspapers have dangerously compromised their credibility by allowing their almost obsessive dislike of the American president to contaminate their reportage.

This is made worse by their tendency to allow fact and opinion to become so entangled that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other starts. It’s open season on Trump, and many American journalists make it clear that they despise him.

And actually, I understand why they feel that way. I despise Trump too, and worry about the damage his presidency might do to America and to the world. He’s a man who appears to have no moral compass and no respect for the truth.

He has also, consciously and deliberately, made an enemy of the media. The terrible mistake made by news organisations such as the Washington Post and the New York Times is that they have been suckered into playing his game.

There is always tension in the relationship between politicians and journalists, but it’s usually kept under control by both sides. Not so with Trump.

He has weaponised public distrust of the media in much the same way as Robert Muldoon did in New Zealand 40 years ago. Trump knows, as Muldoon did, that it can be politically advantageous to portray the media as biased and elitist.

Trump plays this political card more blatantly and unscrupulously than even Muldoon did, repeatedly branding the American media as the enemy of the people.

Sadly, by buying into the adversarial relationship and adopting an openly hostile stance toward the White House, the media have perversely enhanced Trump’s political capital.

He can point to their antagonistic coverage as proof that the liberal media can’t be trusted to report things fairly and accurately. This played well to his supporters on the campaign trail in 2016 and it continues to play well for Trump now, because there will always be an element of the public that is prepared to believe the worst of supposedly elitist, out-of-touch reporters.

And it has to be said that many journalists are elitist and out-of-touch – especially in the US, where the big media organisations are headquartered far from the neglected heartland where Trump’s support base is located. That helps explain why the media so dismally failed to foresee Trump’s victory in the presidential election.

The best counter to Trump’s game, surely, is to do what reputable newspapers used to do as a matter of course: play it straight.

News columns are not the place for editorial opinion. They should be concerned only with detached, factual accounts of what Trump has said or done.

This doesn’t preclude journalists from documenting inconsistencies and obvious untruths, or from reporting the turmoil created by Trump’s erratic behaviour. Neither does it stop columnists and editorial writers from expressing themselves freely in opinion sections.

But tone is everything, and what passes for news coverage in papers like the Washington Post and the New York Times is often freighted with emotive rhetoric and laced with the reporter’s obvious contempt. In those circumstances, even readers who dislike Trump are entitled to wonder whether they are getting a reliable, unbiased account, or whether the media are reporting only what happens to align with their perception.  

Many liberal Americans share this concern. A recent programme on National Public Radio, which is anything but pro-Trump, attracted calls from listeners who called out media bias. As one said, “I think they [the media] have decided what’s right for everyone and think it’s their job to convince people.”

All of this leads me, in a roundabout way, to last month’s declaration by Patrick Crewdson, editor-in-chief of Stuff, that his organisation will no longer give space to the views of people he classifies as climate change sceptics and “denialists”.

Okay, the parallel with Trump isn’t obvious, but Stuff’s stance does raise a serious question relating to trust in the media.

When a news organisation decides to shut down dissenting comment on an issue as important as climate change on the basis that the debate is “settled”, it assumes a position of omniscience that will rankle with many readers. But far more importantly, it raises doubts in readers’ minds about its commitment to free and open debate.

I would have thought the media faced enough challenges in the current environment without incurring accusations of elitist bias. That threatens to take us into Trump territory, and who wants to go there?

Stuff appended the following editor's note to my column:

Stuff has not shut down discussion on climate change, but we will not provide a forum for its factual existence to be countered with fictions and call it "balance".

It added: Stuff accepts the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is real and caused by human activity. We welcome robust debate about the appropriate response to climate change, but do not intend to provide a venue for denialism or hoax advocacy. That applies equally to the stories we will publish in Quick! Save the Planet [a Stuff project highlighting climate change] and to our moderation standards for reader comments.

Cultural stereotyping: a licence to sneer

(First published in the Manawatu Standard, the Nelson Mail and Stuff.co.nz on October 3.)

A fellow columnist – one whose work I usually enjoy – recently wrote: “Americans are not like us. They don’t get irony, for one thing.”

Whoa, I thought – let’s hold it right there. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard it said that Americans don’t understand irony, I could have retired by now.

The statement is usually made in relation to humour. Somehow, it has become accepted wisdom that American humour is irony-free whereas English humour is rich with it.

But hang on. Think of a comedy series such as M*A*S*H, which ran for 11 seasons and became one of the highest-rating TV shows in history.

M*A*S*H was drenched in irony. Hawkeye Pierce probably delivered more ironic lines than any other character in television history.

That’s not surprising, given that the series was created by Larry Gelbart. Gelbart was Jewish. Jewish humour oozes irony; that’s its signature. And Jewish writers and performers are the beating heart of American humour – think Mel Brooks, Roseanne Barr, Lenny Bruce, Judd Apatow, Jerry Seinfeld, Bette Midler, Woody Allen, Ben Stiller, George Burns and Joan Rivers, to mention a few.

Seinfeld (nine seasons) and The Simpsons (29 seasons)? All about irony. Most of the talent behind both shows was Jewish.

Join the dots. Jewish humour depends heavily on irony and much American humour is Jewish. Ergo, the argument that Americans don’t “get” irony just doesn’t wash. 

But it persists because it plays to a sense of cultural superiority. Americans are supposedly loud, brash, boorish and unsubtle.

Donald Trump fits this stereotype perfectly. One of the tragedies of his presidency is that he reinforces the prejudices of people who think all Americans are stupid. These prigs look at Trump and say: “See – there’s a typical American for you.”

It’s a theme that fuels countless dinner-party conversations in New Zealand. “Look at what Trump’s done now,” someone will say. “Oh God, those ghastly Yanks.” And off they go, sniggering at what a godforsaken country America is and pausing only for gulps of Central Otago pinot noir.

In my experience, such people usually have minimal experience, if any at all, of America. It’s a country they fly over to get to supposedly more sophisticated places like Britain, France and Italy – although sharing horror stories about the supposed ordeal of a stopover in LA is always good parlour-game material too.

The reason they don’t want to spend time in the United States – unless it’s in New York or San Francisco or a tiny handful of other American cities that the cultural priesthood deems cool – is that they have convinced themselves America has no redeeming virtues.

Anyway, why spoil their fun? As long as they remain ignorant of America, they give themselves licence to go on sniggering at Americans and congratulating themselves on their infinitely greater sophistication.

Another manifestation of anti-American priggishness, besides the “Americans don’t get irony” myth, is the prejudice often shown toward country music – again, usually by people who condemn it from a standpoint of ignorance.

Because some country music is crass (which can’t be denied), they dismiss it all as tawdry and mawkishly sentimental. Essentially it’s the same mistake made by people who assume Trump is representative of all Americans.

Where does this sense of cultural superiority come from? I suspect it’s basically a British thing.

The Brits never entirely forgave the Americans for breaking away and going it alone. But they console themselves that while America might now be infinitely wealthier and more powerful, the Mother Country is distinguished by its rich history, the refinement of its educated classes, its monarchy, its glorious imperial past and its … well, its sheer Britishness.

New Zealand, having drawn most of its cultural inspiration from Britain, seems to have inherited that sense of inherent British supremacy. You might say it’s in our genes.

I’m not blind to American failings. I cringe at American excess and brashness and I’m repelled by the religious and political extremes of American society.

But while these traits confront us daily in the media, they don’t represent the totality of American society. Spend time in the United States and you quickly realise that most Americans are not brash, loud, ignorant or extreme.

Try listening to America’s National Public Radio. NPR leans to the left politically, as public broadcasters invariably do, but it’s the flip side to the America of Donald Trump: rational, civilised, low-key, informed and articulate.

And I shouldn’t have to point out that America is the source of much of the popular culture and technology that New Zealanders enjoy: the music we listen to, the films and TV we watch, the clothing we wear, the books we read and the digital devices we depend on.

So let’s ease off on the conceited and hypocritical anti-Americanism that flourishes in some New Zealand circles. And while we’re about it, let’s bury the myth that Americans don’t “get” irony.

Spare us the sanctimonious hyperbole, Nancy

Leading US Democrat Nancy Pelosi says the Trump administration’s migrant family separation policy, now hastily rescinded, “leaves a dark stain on our nation”.

Well, perhaps it does. But against the broad sweep of history, it pales into insignificance against other stains on the American soul. American history is littered with episodes the nation would doubtless prefer to forget, most of them involving appalling mistreatment of vulnerable minorities.

There were massacres of Native Americans, of which Wounded Knee is the most infamous example. There was the Trail of Tears – the forced relocation of American Indian tribes from their ancestral homelands, which resulted in thousands of deaths from exposure, disease and starvation. There was slavery, and later the institutionalised oppression of the descendants of those slaves. There were mob lynchings of black Americans – too many to count, and often accompanied by acts of unimaginably sadistic cruelty. There was the Ku Klux Klan, whose brutal enforcement of white supremacy was often condoned and even encouraged by politicians. There was organised crime and corruption on a massive scale, its perpetrators secure in the knowledge that the people charged with enforcing the law could easily be bought off. In foreign affairs, the US government has repeatedly propped up repressive totalitarian regimes - another stain. And even on the battlefield there has been at least one act of unfathomable American savagery, the My Lai massacre.

America remains a fundamentally decent society, its people genuinely committed to doing the right thing. That’s apparent from the widespread revulsion at the forced separation of migrant children from their parents. But there’s something distasteful about Pelosi making political capital out of the migrant crisis and indulging in sanctimonious, hand-wringing hyperbole by calling it a dark stain on the nation, when she must know that far, far worse things have been done in and by America – many of them, moreover, perpetrated by Democratic Party governments.

Trump gives us a new reason to parade anti-Americanism as virtue

(First published in The Dominion Post, April 6.)

This column comes to you from America. Yes, that’s right, the America of Donald Trump.

The current occupant of the Oval Office has given us a whole lot of new reasons to make condescending jokes about America and Americans. But the America of Donald Trump is also the America of Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, Franklin D and Eleanor Roosevelt, John Steinbeck, Benjamin Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Martin Luther King Jr, Francis Ford Coppola, Cesar Chavez, Ernest Hemingway, Rosa Parks, Bob Dylan, Frank Capra, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Meryl Streep, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ella Fitzgerald, Bruce Springsteen …

I could go on, but you get my drift.

New Zealanders are conflicted about America. It sometimes seems as if the people mentioned above, who are widely admired and even worshipped, come from a different country than the America we sneer at over dinner tables.

But of course they don’t. America comes as a package deal, the good and the bad all bundled up together.

It’s fashionable to regard the US as a country to be avoided. When I told a colleague that my wife and I were going to California for a few weeks, she mentioned that she had once lived in San Francisco for a year and loved it.

She thought Californians were a unique breed of Americans, “in a good way”.

Perhaps I misunderstood her, but she seemed to be saying that Californians were OK but other Americans might not be.

This would not be an uncommon view in New Zealand. Generally, among sophisticated metropolitan types, America is considered, at best, a place to fly over on the way to somewhere more civilised.

Even then, many people try to avoid it. Conventional wisdom has it that LA Airport is the worst airport in the world, although I’ve had far worse experiences in Heathrow and Sydney.

A few American cities are considered hip – San Francisco, for example. Portland, Austin and New York are considered fashionable too. It’s permissible in sophisticated circles to visit these places and say you love them.

Stockton, Amarillo, Duluth or Flint? Not so much. But while it might suit people to divide America into the good bits and the bad, it’s all the same country from sea to shining sea.

Where do we get this aversion to America? I can offer a few suggestions.

The Americans have done some bad things. They treated Native Americans appallingly, dispossessing them of their lands and putting them on reservations where they almost lost the will to live. 

America has propped up corrupt, totalitarian regimes from Asia to Latin America and was despised for what it did in the Vietnam War (although we should remember that it was the American people who eventually demanded US forces withdraw from that conflict).

America is also the home of the Ku Klux Klan – a country where until the 1930s, a black man could be hanged if a white woman didn’t like the way he looked at her.

It has a deeply flawed justice system and a gratuitously harsh and vindictive way of dealing with people accused of crime. Many states still administer capital punishment, often by grotesquely cruel methods, long after the civilised world abandoned it.

In addition to all this, distaste for American ways is almost embedded in our cultural DNA. New Zealanders inherited British reserve and are uncomfortable with America’s fervent, hand-on-heart nationalism. We balk at American exuberance and exhibitionism.

We were grateful to them when they were here during World War II but we also resented them. American soldiers had more money than our boys and wore much smarter uniforms. Our women couldn’t help but be attracted to them, which touched a very vulnerable spot in the national psyche.

But this same America is the source of much of our popular culture. The same people who despise Trump will queue for tickets to a Springsteen concert, use an iPhone, communicate with their friends using Facebook, wear Levi jeans, read the New Yorker, watch the latest Martin Scorsese film and admire the wit of American late-night TV talk shows.

And the Americans I’ve met over the past six weeks, as on past visits, have been unfailingly warm, friendly, open and almost embarrassingly courteous. They strike me as fundamentally decent people who want to do the right thing.

Can you admire America and despise it at the same time? Maybe, at a stretch, but I think we should admit that Trump has given us an excuse to parade a lot of blind anti-American bigotry as if it were some sort of virtue.

Trump: the dog that keeps barking long after the car has stopped

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, Sept 20.)

I’ve been trying to make sense of Donald Trump. It’s not easy.

It’s now 10 months since he was elected president of the United States and eight since he was inaugurated – time enough, you’d think, to prove that he’s fit for office.

I know people who have defended him throughout that time and continue to insist that he’s the man for the job. I've given them the benefit of the doubt and waited for some evidence that they were right. I thought that perhaps they saw something in him that I couldn’t see.

Besides, the contrarian in me instinctively rebels when I see the weight of public and media opinion so overwhelmingly arrayed against one person. Mass groupthink carries its own risks.

But here we are, almost one-quarter of the way through the Trump presidency, and I no see sign that his critics are anything but correct.

Hillary Clinton is hardly an impartial judge, but I believe she was on the mark when she recently described Trump as “immature, with poor impulse control”.

She went on to say that the president has a limited understanding of the world. “Everything is in relation to how it makes him feel.” My own impression is that he’s a man who has probably never read a book.

One of the striking things about Trump is that he behaves as if he’s still in campaign mode. In his tweets and at his rallies, he rants and blusters just as he did when he was contesting the presidency. He’s still fighting the same enemies.

It’s as if he didn’t give much thought to what he would actually do if he found himself in the Oval Office. Perhaps he never seriously expected it. 

He’s like the dog that chases cars and doesn’t know what to do after they’ve stopped, so just keeps barking. I keep waiting for someone to take him aside and gently explain that he’s the president now, and that people expect him to behave presidentially.

It may be significant that the only major policy initiatives Trump has ticked off so far involved undoing things – namely, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris Climate Accord, both of which he’s pulled out of.

Otherwise he doesn’t appear to have achieved any of the key policy objectives that he campaigned on.

There's no sign of The Wall and attempts to roll back Obamacare turned into a fiasco. He has back-pedalled on some promises – America’s military commitment in Afghanistan, for example – and substantially watered down others. On the deportation of “illegals”, he’s all over the place.

He seems to have little respect for either truth or consistency. He will say whatever occurs to him at any particular moment, but thinks nothing of doing a handbrake turn later. As some commentators have pointed out, he doesn’t appear to be guided by any coherent ideology.

He promised to be a man of action, but the supposedly forgotten Americans who voted for him must feel betrayed and disappointed. Trump has delivered mainly chaos and uncertainty.

In the meantime, the White House has been in a state of almost constant turmoil. Key appointees come and go like pizza delivery boys.

The most entertaining of these bum appointments was the spectacularly brash Anthony Scaramucci, who roared in like a hurricane, promptly got offside with crucial people and was fired – all in the space of 10 days.

Those who have clung on, including members of Trump’s extended family, have reportedly been in a state of war as the Trump purists – the reformist zealots bent on re-inventing the way Washington does politics – vie for influence with those advocating a more pragmatic, conventional line.

The Republican Party is in disarray and Trump has been publicly at odds with such respected party grandees as former presidential nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney.  

This is an incredibly disruptive and destabilising way to conduct affairs of state, and it’s not only Americans who should be worried. The frightening brinkmanship currently being played out between Washington and Pyongyang is a sobering reminder of the possible consequences if Trump were to make a reckless call. The rest of the world can only hope that wiser minds would restrain him.

Through all of this, Trump has behaved like the braggart and buffoon that his detractors always said he was. But how could that be? Underneath all that vulgarian bluster, there must surely be an intelligent man. I mean, a stupid man could never have become that rich.

Or could he? I have a theory that some dumb people succeed in business because they are so blinded by greed that they don’t see the potential downsides of the big risks they take. They might experience embarrassing failures along the way (as Trump has) but it’s always possible that sheer greed and gall will pull them through.

In any case, success in business is no guarantee of success in politics. Trump comes from a world where he was the boss and expected everyone around him to do his bidding.

Politics is different. Politics is messier. Politics works through compromise, consensus and collaboration. Trump shows no sign of being able to make that transition.

The question is, will he last a full term, or will Congress tire of the whole demeaning pantomime and find a way, consistent with the Constitution (perhaps the 25^th Amendment, which has never been put to the test), to get rid of him? No doubt some of America’s finest minds are working on this question even as I write.

Donald Trump and the decline of objective journalism

(First published in The Dominion Post, February 3.)

One consequence of the Trump presidency is that it has accelerated the decline of detached, objective journalism.

Most people outside America, me included, despise Donald Trump. This has apparently made it permissible for the media to abandon all pretence of neutrality and to treat him as fair game for contempt, disgust and ridicule.

An example was an article on Monday by Paul McGeough, the chief foreign correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald. The SMH is a paper that could once be relied on for balanced reportage, but McGeough’s report on Trump’s decree banning immigration from seven Muslim countries was drenched with emotive rhetoric and hyperbole.

It began with the words: “This is the face of selective, lily-livered hate.” It went on: “Donald Trump holds it in his heart, but he manufactures it too, masking state-sanctioned religious persecution as a national security endeavour – all to stoke the ‘us and them’ hysteria that drove his election campaign”.

McGeough’s article continued in similar vein, telling us that Trump had severed the torch-bearing arm from the Statue of Liberty and plunged America into darkness. (I presume he meant in a metaphorical sense.)

You didn’t need to read far to realise that this wasn’t a classically restrained piece of reportage. But mixing comment with fact, to the point where the two become almost indistinguishable, is already routine in media coverage of the Trump presidency.

When a man is as widely loathed as Trump, journalists feel safe putting the boot in. But these may be the very times when we most need sober, cool-headed journalism that reports the facts without further inflaming already overheated passions. There’s enough hysteria around already without over-excited journalists heaping petrol on the fire.

In any case, much of the rage about Trump overlooks a couple of important points.

The first is that he was fairly elected according to the rules of the US Constitution. We might view those rules as flawed, since Electoral College votes can outweigh the result of the popular ballot, but they were deliberately designed that way to protect smaller states from being disempowered by more populous ones.

Protest banners shrieking "Dump Trump", just because the presidential election delivered a result some people didn't like, are not only spectacularly pointless after the event, but indicate contempt for democracy.

The other point is that nations are entitled to protect their borders against possible external threats – in this case, a very real one. People might dislike the brutal, pig-headed manner in which Trump has gone about this, but the principle is unarguable.

Now, back to that McGeough piece. There has always been a place in good newspapers for robust, provocative editorials and opinion columns, but traditionally they were kept separate from news. That’s no longer necessarily the case.

Editorial bias has so pervasively invaded the news columns of once-esteemed papers like the SMH, its sister paper the Melbourne Age, Britain’s Guardian and even the redoubtable Washington Post, that they can no longer be regarded as reliable papers of record. Much of their reportage is coloured by the journalist’s personal perception of events or by the paper’s editorial stance. 

But the mixing of news and comment isn’t a phenomenon that suddenly materialised with Trump’s emergence. It’s a trend that has been gathering momentum for years.

Its origins lie in journalism schools, where ideologically motivated tutors tell students that objectivity – the professional obligation to remain impartial and tell both sides of the story – is a myth promulgated to protect the wealthy and powerful.

Many of the journalists now working in newsrooms here and overseas have been taught that their mission is not so much to report events as to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable – often using exactly those words.

This is activism, not journalism. Journalism can and often does produce outcomes that afflict the comfortable, but that is not its primary purpose, which is to inform people on matters that may be of interest to them.

But there’s another factor, besides the politicisation of journalism training, that has led to the increasingly opinionated tone of news coverage. The internet, by giving people instant access to an almost infinite range of news and opinion outlets worldwide, has imperilled the traditional “broad church” newspaper – the one where you could expect to see a wide range of views expressed.

News and information junkies now gravitate to the websites that most closely reflect their own world view. News outlets on both the Right and the Left have responded by taking on a tribal character, promoting opinions that parallel the views of their followers.

After all, it’s easier to have your prejudices confirmed than to be challenged by unpalatable new ideas. Not so good for democracy, though.

One of those years when the world changed

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, Dec 28.)

There have been a few momentous years in my lifetime. I don’t mean for me personally, although obviously there have been those too.

I’m referring to years when you got a sense that history had suddenly lurched in a different direction; that a new era was starting which would be significantly different from the previous one.

There was 1968. What a turbulent year that was.

America seemed a dangerously unstable place where anything could happen. All the post-war confidence of the Eisenhower and Kennedy presidencies seemed to have evaporated.

There were the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy. It was also the year when public discontent over the Vietnam War (dubbed the living room war because it was played out nightly on the television news) seemed to crystallise. Military setbacks – the Tet Offensive and the siege of Khe Sanh – were a profound shock to a country that was accustomed to winning.

In Chicago, the protest movement flexed its muscles at the infamous Democratic Party Convention in Chicago. To TV viewers watching the vicious police response, it must have seemed the American Dream was disintegrating before their eyes.

But the unrest wasn’t confined to America. Capitalism and authority was under attack throughout the Western world.

In France, student and trade union street protests brought the country to the brink of revolution. Neo-Marxist protest leaders – Daniel Cohn-Bendit (aka Danny the Red) in France and Rudi Dutschke in Germany – became household names worldwide.

The European unrest of 1968 gave birth to urban terrorist groups such as Germany’s Red Army Faction and Italy’s Red Brigades. America’s Symbionese Liberation Army – famous for kidnapping newspaper heiress Patti Hearst – would later emerge from that same ferment of protest and disorder.

The world had to come to grips with the new phenomenon of urban terrorism, fomented by alienated middle-class misfits striking out with extraordinary ferocity against the capitalist society that had nurtured them.

It was profoundly destabilising and continued to unsettle the world throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. In fact you could argue that it was instrumental in shaping the terrorism-attuned world we live in now.

Fast-forward now to 1989, an epochal year in a very different way. That was the year the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet empire began to unravel.

At the time – in fact even now – it scarcely seemed credible that the Soviet Union, which since World War Two had competed with the US for global domination, should collapse with barely a whimper, along with its repressive satellite states. But when challenged by people power, the Soviet bloc, economically exhausted after decades of trying to out-muscle its ideological enemy, had no fight left.

The American political scientist and economist Francis Fukuyama famously wrote that the defeat of Soviet communism represented “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution”. In future, he theorised, capitalism and liberal democracy would prevail unchallenged.

Already that bold prophecy seems to have been, er, a bit premature. America, so ideologically triumphant in 1989, is now weakened by self-doubt. The ascendant power is China – a capitalist country all right, but hardly a liberal democracy.

Russia, meanwhile, is again a force to be reckoned with – just not a communist one. Nonetheless, 1989 was unquestionably a watershed year.

So we come to 2016, and I’m wondering whether it too will turn out to be a year that changed the course of history.

In a June referendum, 52 per cent of Britons voted in favour of leaving the European Union. This was a stunning rejection of a long-established political consensus. Few people saw it coming.

Voting took place against a backdrop of unprecedented immigration levels as Europe absorbed millions of displaced people fleeing insecurity and instability in the Middle East and Africa.

Many commentators simplistically interpreted the referendum result as a racist backlash against immigration and free passage across borders, but the overriding factor was that British people had grown increasingly resentful of control by a remote and unaccountable elite in Brussels. They wanted their country back.

But Brexit was merely the appetiser before an even more cataclysmic political event: the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States.

This was such a momentous setback for the liberal agenda that the full consequences will take time to absorb. Some of those consequences will almost certainly be ugly, but many people will welcome what they regard as a long-overdue rebalancing in Western politics and culture.

The liberal Left, which has effectively controlled the political agenda in the West for decades, even when nominally conservative parties (such as National here, the Liberals in Australia and the Conservatives in Britain) were in power, is suddenly on the back foot. Political correctness is in retreat.

Some on the Left are hurt and demoralised. Others are buzzing like angry wasps. But they’d better get used to it. The balance of power in world politics has shifted profoundly and the dominant narrative has changed. We’re finishing 2016 a radically different world than when we started. 

Trumpophobes in the media need to get over it

(First published in The Dominion Post, November 25).

It’s now more than two weeks since Donald Trump became US President-elect, and I’m wondering when the weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth (to use a biblical metaphor) is going to stop.

Many commentators in the media, both here and in the US, just don’t seem to get it.

Yes, Trump is a thoroughly unappealing man, but the political narrative was rewritten on November 8. There was a sudden change of scriptwriter. The world has moved on and whether we like it or not, we’d better get used to it.

Unfortunately the US media seem determined to compound the mistake they made during the election campaign, when they were so blinded by their virtuous metropolitan liberalism that they failed to see what was going on around them.

Now, rather than admitting they gravely misread the public mood, they’re further undermining their credibility by attacking American voters for supporting the wrong candidate.

You’d think, when traditional media are struggling for survival in the face of disruptive digital technology, that they would do everything in their power to make themselves more relevant to the lives of ordinary people. Instead they seem intent on accentuating the perception that they are remote and disconnected.

Earlier this week I read a report in the Washington Post – one of the most brazenly biased of the major American papers – that purported to be an account of Vice President-elect Mike Pence’s attendance at the hit Broadway musical Hamilton, where he was pompously lectured from the stage at the end of the show.

The Post’s story was heavily coloured by the reporter’s own opinions and freighted with questionable assumptions. It opened with the sentence: “Mike Pence was elected vice-president by a coalition of mostly white voters nostalgic for what they thought of as the good old days in America and galvanised by promises to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.”

There you have it, right there – the same elitist disdain that was evident in Hillary Clinton’s ill-advised dismissal of Trump supporters as “deplorables”.

Well, even deplorables have a vote, as Clinton discovered. Trump, whatever his shortcomings, pitched his rhetoric directly at the large number of American voters who felt forgotten by the political establishment.

There seems little doubt that these voters felt as poorly served by the news media as they were by mainstream politicians. Trump capitalised on that too.

But rather than step back and critically assess their own performance, the US media elite insist it was the electorate that got it wrong.

There’s a fierce antagonism toward “uneducated” voters who apparently don’t know what’s good for them. This was also evident in the recent rant by the British celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins, who suggested that Britain and America are now uninhabitable following the Brexit vote and the presidential election, and that New Zealand suddenly looks a highly desirable bolthole.

Dawkins explicitly attacked “anti-intellectual” voters. He was just one step away from arguing that plebs shouldn’t be allowed to vote at all.

The irony is that Dawkins and his ilk smugly think of themselves as liberal. In fact their bitterness at the outcome of the election reveals them as deeply intolerant of dissenting opinions – the antithesis of liberalism.

Even now, the US media seem to have learned nothing from the election result. The playwright Arthur Miller’s famous observation that a good newspaper was a nation talking to itself no longer seems to apply. Like the politicians, American journalists have become remote from the people they purportedly serve.

The Washington Post article went on to say that Pence’s attendance at Hamilton – written by a Puerto Rican and starring a multiracial cast – brought him face-to-face with a symbol of “the new America”. It might have been truer to say that like it or not, right now Pence himself is a symbol of the new America, if only the myopic reporter could see it.

Admittedly, the world was dazed by the speed with which the political ground shifted under everyone’s feet with Trump’s election. If political events were measured on the Richter scale, it would have been at least an 8.

But Trumpophobes need to get over it. They need to move beyond anger and denial to acceptance.

A week after Trump’s election, I read a hand-wringing lament by a left-wing New Zealand commentator. What struck me was how pointless and irrelevant it suddenly seemed.

The world had moved on and left the writer stranded on an island of her own outrage. She was shouting "Help!", but the passing ship had already vanished over the horizon.

New Zealand: a bolthole for disillusioned liberals?

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, November 16.)

I see Richard Dawkins, celebrated scientist, atheist and author of The God Delusion, is talking up New Zealand as a possible bolthole for disillusioned liberal refugees from the northern hemisphere.

Dawkins thinks our little country suddenly looks very attractive following Britain’s exit from the European Union and Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election.

He suggests New Zealand should seize the opportunity to lure great scientific and artistic minds from America and Britain – “talented, creative people desperate to escape the redneck bigotry of their home countries”.

I’m not entirely sure we should be flattered by Dawkins’ attention. He’s the personification of what is pretentiously termed a “public intellectual” – a towering figure to whom we lesser beings are supposed to look for enlightenment and moral guidance.

But I note that his intellect doesn’t stop him from resorting to simplistic, undergraduate name-calling. What he calls “redneck bigotry”, others would call democracy: ordinary people exercising their right to choose who will govern them.

Most of us accept the outcome of democratic votes even if we don’t always like it. But when voters make choices that people like Dawkins don’t approve of, their arrogance and intolerance is exposed for all to see.

He’s angry that “anti-intellectual voters” should have been allowed to wreak “catastrophe” in the world’s two largest English-speaking democracies. The unmistakeable sub-text here is that in the ideal political system, voting rights would be restricted to the right-thinking intellectual elite. People like Dawkins, in other words.

But never mind – he finds hope of redemption in our remote corner of the Pacific.

Dawkins regards New Zealand as a “deeply civilised” country that cares about the future of the planet, and suggests we should promote ourselves as the Athens of the modern world. Cue visions of a glorious, golden new realm where Trump would become just a nightmarish memory.

We’re on other people’s radar screens too. US Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsberg told the New York Times in July that she couldn’t contemplate America under a President Trump, adding with a rueful smile: “Now it’s time for us to move to New Zealand”.

The actor Billy Crystal is another who visualises New Zealand as a potential sanctuary. Asked for his reaction to Trump’s success on the campaign trail back in April, Crystal said he might consider buying a “nice little ranch” here.  

Of course they would be welcome, but it all suggests a rather idealised vision of New Zealand – one far removed from the reality of a country blighted by some of the same social and economic ills, albeit on a lesser scale, that afflict America and Britain. 

Still, the attention of such luminaries reminds us that we inhabit a very desirable little haven, safely distanced from the world’s pressure points and weeping sores.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Dawkins’ glowing assessment of New Zealand is that it conflicts sharply with the image we have of ourselves.

Day after day the media bombard us with gloomy reminders of all the things we imagine are wrong in God’s Own Country. The picture is of a nation permanently mired in crisis.

There’s a housing crisis and an inequality crisis. The health sector is struggling to cope, our rivers are shamefully polluted and our major cities need huge infrastructural investment.

Our prisons are bulging and we’re not doing anything meaningful to arrest climate change. Our native birds are in danger of extinction. The Maori language is dying and there’s a booze outlet on every corner. Children are going to school hungry and there’s an epidemic of morbid obesity.

I could go on, but you get the picture. Listen to Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report any day and you’re likely to hear a litany of grievances from agenda-pushers and interest groups clamouring for government action (which invariably means money) to ease their grievances.

If you’re easily taken in by alarmist propaganda (and many Morning Report listeners are, judging by the anxious emails they send in to the programme), you could easily get the impression that New Zealand is a country perpetually teetering on the brink of collapse.

It’s both ironic and amusing that it should take an anti-establishment figure like Dawkins, who's generally regarded as a hero of the Left because of his fierce denunciation of religion, to put things in perspective by reminding us how blessed we seem in the eyes of others. 

His sunny assessment is sharply at odds with that of the glass-half-empty New Zealand Left, but it lines up with other views. Only two weeks ago New Zealand topped the Legatum Institute’s worldwide prosperity index, which takes into account not only economic factors but also education, health, personal freedom and the environment. 

We scored especially highly for the strength of our society - a rating that could only have been enhanced by the way communities reacted to this week's earthquakes. 

Sure, there’s always a plethora of things we could be doing a lot better. But we have one of the world’s most stable democracies and we enjoy freedoms and a standard of living that much of the world’s population can only dream of.

We are a civilised, liberal and tolerant society. Dawkins got that bit right – although, speaking personally, I’m not sure our tolerance should extend to pompous, condescending intellectuals who don’t bother to conceal their disdain for people who disagree with them.  

When supposed liberals turn out to be anything but

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, July 27.)

It’s been an extraordinarily turbulent few weeks in international politics.

Two patterns have emerged. The first, which has been much commented on, is that alienated voters are rebelling against the political elites which, for the past couple of decades, have been calling the shots.

People are looking for something new from politicians. For want of a better word, they seem to be looking for some type of authenticity – a sense that politicians actually stand for something, even if it’s not very well articulated.

In the US, this is obvious from the extraordinary groundswell of support for Donald Trump. Trump’s campaign has been based on simplistic slogans rather than clearly defined policies, but they strike a chord with American voters who feel they have been neglected for too long.

Over on the left we saw a similar phenomenon in the unexpected surge of support for the Democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders.

In ordinary circumstances the tag “socialist” is the kiss of death to any American politician, but these are not ordinary times. The socialist Sanders was able to mobilise enough of a following to give his rival Hillary Clinton a hell of a fright on her way to the Democratic nomination.

In Britain, the political establishment got a bloodied nose when voters decided, by a margin of 52 to 48, that they wanted out of the European Union. This was another triumph for the “outsiders” in the form of the United Kingdom Independence Party, or Ukip.

Ukip capitalised on a mounting feeling, outside the prosperous bubble that is London, that Britons wanted to regain control of their own country.

Brexiteers were characterised by their opponents as racists who were concerned only about immigration, but there was much more to it than that. The Britons who voted to leave the EU resented being governed from Europe by bureaucrats over whom they had no control.    

The EU originated as an idealistic plan to avoid the risk of another European war, but it has grown to the point where it’s hopelessly out of touch with the people whose interests it supposedly represents. It’s also seen as undermining the autonomy of member countries and restricting their ability to act in their own best interests. 

Speaking of Britain, Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party is further evidence of disenchantment with the political status quo. Corbyn’s a cloth-cap leftie who is not liked by his own MPs, but has the backing of the party grassroots.

He may be unelectable, but people know what he stands for. That counts for something.

Closer to home, Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull – a bland, middle-of-the-road pragmatist in the same mould as John Key and David Cameron – called an election in the expectation that he would be returned with a thumping majority and be rid of obstructive individuals who had been making life difficult for him in the Senate.

As it turned out, his coalition government barely squeaked back into power after a cliff-hanger election which saw the opposition Labor Party restored as a political force.

What’s more, Turnbull will have even more contrary mavericks to contend with in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

Turnbull ousted his predecessor Tony Abbott in an opportunist coup (many called it treacherous) last year, but ran a lacklustre campaign and must now be casting anxious glances over his shoulder.

Many commentators have been saying that for all Abbott’s failings, the former PM would have run a far more stirring campaign – one that would have connected with voters in the conservative heartland.

Abbott, like Sanders, Corbyn and Ukip’s Nigel Farage, is a conviction politician rather than one guided by focus groups and highly paid professional strategists. Trump has convinced Americans he’s a conviction politician too, though it’s hard to say.

Another is Pauline Hanson, one of the mavericks elected to the Australian Senate. Hanson is a conservative Queensland politician whose career has been built on her outsider status.

That brings us to the second pattern to emerge from the recent upheavals. It seems that in the eyes of some people, democracy is fine only as long as it delivers the results they want.

Both the EU referendum result and Hanson’s election in Australia triggered ugly, hysterical backlashes, mostly from people who probably think of themselves as liberal.

In Britain, four million bad losers signed a petition demanding that the referendum be held again. This is like the All Blacks losing a test match 48-52 and demanding a replay.

In New Zealand, a loudmouth radio host wrote a newspaper column arguing that people over 65 shouldn’t be entitled to vote (this, because older Brits voted to leave the EU while younger people, many of whom were too lazy to vote, wanted to stay in).

Similarly, the vicious media attacks on Hanson suggest the liberal elites would prefer it if the people who support politicians like Hanson were disenfranchised, presumably because they’re too thick and too redneck to be allowed anywhere near a polling both.

But Hanson’s supporters are as entitled as anyone to vote for whoever they think will best represent them. It’s called democracy.

Trump v. Clinton: a democratic malfunction?

(First published in The Dominion Post, April 29.)

You have to say this much for Donald Trump: no aspirant for political office in America has created so much interest in distant New Zealand.

In fact you’d probably have to go as far back as 1964, to the contest between Lyndon Johnson and his arch-conservative Republican rival Barry Goldwater, to find a US presidential election that aroused more interest worldwide. Trump can take credit for that, if nothing else.

The difference with 1964, of course, is that he isn’t even the candidate yet. The Republican convention that will choose the party’s nominee is still three months away, but already Trump is the subject of conversation around the water coolers (or would be, if our workplaces had water coolers).

New Zealanders have watched the rise and rise of Trump with fascinated loathing and horrified disbelief. Distaste for him cuts across the usual political boundaries.

A recent UMR poll found that 82 per cent of National Party voters would back Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton over Trump. Even if it came down to a choice between Trump and Clinton’s “socialist” rival Bernie Sanders, National voters would support Sanders by a margin of 76 to 13 per cent.

New Zealanders can’t understand why so many Americans seem to love an uncouth sideshow barker. It tends to reinforce the common perception that all Americans are crass and ignorant. But America wouldn’t be the world’s strongest economic power, and the pacesetter in every field from technology through to art and entertainment, if it were populated by idiots.

We tend to forget that voting in the presidential primaries involves a relatively small number of people, and that Trump’s backing comes from a disillusioned faction within that minority. Far more Americans dislike him than like him.

A better picture of his standing among Americans generally is provided by an NBC-WSJ poll earlier this month that showed only 24 per cent of respondents gave him a positive rating compared with 65 per cent who saw him in a negative light.

So Americans don’t want Trump. They don’t want Clinton either, judging by the same poll which gave her a 56 per cent negative rating. Only 32 per cent liked her.

That leaves us with a puzzling question: how can a country so rich in human capital deliver such a dispiriting set of candidates for the most powerful office in the world?

You have to wonder whether we’re witnessing a failure of democracy. It’s not working the way it’s supposed to.

Trump and Clinton are polar opposites politically, but in their own way, each represents a democratic malfunction.

Clinton is the consummate political insider – a cold, calculating, slippery, artful schmoozer. Polls show that Americans don’t trust her, and neither should they. She can barely shut her closet door for all the skeletons rattling around inside.

Trump, on the other hand, makes a virtue of being an outsider. He feeds off a deep and widespread sense of alienation.

By posing as a man of the people, which he demonstrably is not, he has harnessed resentment of the political elite. Unfortunately, not being part of the political establishment doesn’t, by itself, give him presidential credentials.

And what of the other contenders? There’s Sanders, whose pitiful ignorance on crucial policy issues was shockingly exposed in a recent newspaper interview. And then there’s Ted Cruz, a repugnant Texan fundamentalist who manages, against the odds, to be even less attractive than Trump.

How has it come to this? How could American voters be faced with a choice between candidates so few of them want?

And what happened to the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F Kennedy? All articulated noble visions for their country, even if their personal lives – especially in the case of the alley-cat JFK – didn’t always bear close scrutiny. But we’ve heard little in this presidential campaign that has been either noble or visionary.

Democracy seems to be on its knees in Australia, too, where the brazenly opportunistic Malcolm Turnbull seized power last year from a wounded Tony Abbott and is now floundering in the polls himself, raising the prospect of yet more political convulsions in a country that’s starting to make Italy look like a model of stability.

There are common factors here. Democracy, supposedly the property of the people, has been hijacked. Power now resides with elites, factions, spin merchants, wealthy donors, lobbyists and politically partisan media outlets.

It hasn’t happened here, at least not on the same scale – but that’s not to say it won’t.

The enigma that is American politics

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, November 4.)

As you read this, I’m in the United States. It’s a country I’ve visited several times, but it remains an enigma to me.

The people I meet here are friendly, courteous and helpful. I see no trace of the crazy America that we read about in the headlines: the mass shootings, the religious fundamentalism, the overheated patriotism, the rabid political views, the nasty outbursts of apparently racist police violence. I find it hard to reconcile these with the Americans I encounter.

It’s a country of extremes, which is probably inevitable given its turbulent history, diverse populace and tradition of rambunctious individualism. But in between those extremes, there’s a vast mass of ordinary people just trying to get on with their lives – people whose values are not so different from our own.

There’s another striking aspect of the American enigma that’s very much on display right now: its politicians.

This is a dynamic country full of clever, energetic, creative people. Even people who profess to despise America devour its culture.

We read American books, listen to American music, watch American films and television, wear American-inspired clothes, are kept alive by American drugs and rely on American technology. There’s hardly a place on earth that isn’t influenced in some way by America.

So, given the incredibly rich human resources with which it’s blessed, how is it that we see such a dispiriting line-up of candidates for the presidency?

Surely in a nation of 320 million people – the country that accomplished the most audacious feat in history by putting man on the moon – it must be possible to find more inspiring candidates than those whom American voters are currently considering for elevation to the most powerful political office on earth?

The highest-profile Republican contender is a braying braggart with a frighteningly simplistic, one-dimensional world view. If we thought George W Bush was a monstrous practical joke, a President Donald Trump would be an even more tragic mistake.

His pitch for the support of American voters seems to depend on two things. One is his sneering criticism of the other Republican contenders; the other is his reputation as a man untouched by political correctness. In the absence of any coherent policy or vision, these are not convincing credentials for the White House.

What of the leading Democratic contender, then?

Hillary Clinton is the polar opposite of Trump, and not just in ideological terms. While he plays up his status as a maverick, untainted by connections with the Washington establishment, Clinton is the consummate political insider.

She’s capable, intelligent and a seasoned schmoozer. She has a track record as Secretary of State and happens to be one half of the world’s most famous power couple.

Her performance in TV debates, and under the blow torch during a gruelling 11-hour congressional hearing into American deaths in a terrorist attack for which her Republican rivals held her responsible (rather unreasonably, it seems to me), has been polished and assured. She gives the impression she would make a tougher and more decisive president than Barack Obama.

But she has a few skeletons rattling around in her closet and opinion polls suggest many Americans don’t trust her. Besides, the Clintons, like the Bushes, have had their time in the White House. 

Trump and Clinton aside, there’s a supporting cast of lesser presidential hopefuls, consisting of the usual ragtag collection of egotists, misfits, no-hopers and fumblers – proof that ambition and overweening self-confidence can take you a long way in American politics even when there’s a gaping ability deficit.

American TV satirists are never short of material, least of all at election time. Some contenders for the White House seem unprepared for questions on even the most basic policy issues.

You could call this the Sarah Palin Effect. The Republican nominee for vice-president in the 2008 election had never travelled outside America until 2007 and, when questioned, couldn’t name a single newspaper or magazine that she regularly read. This presumably inspired her fellow Americans with the realisation that anyone could run for high office.

It wasn’t always like this. American politics once resounded with soaring, visionary rhetoric.

Consider the speeches of John F Kennedy, bits of which are still routinely quoted more than 50 years after he died. Kennedy may have been a shameless libertine – a man whose alley-cat personal morality was sharply at odds with his virtuous public image – but he knew how to inspire his fellow Americans with words that created a sense of hope and opportunity.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, arguably the greatest US president of the 20^th century, had a similar gift. His “fireside chats”, broadcast over the radio, reached into millions of homes and helped carry America through the Great Depression and the Second World War.

Like Kennedy, Roosevelt never talked down to his audience. He spoke eloquently, even loftily, confident that his audience would get his message – and they did.

Somewhere along the line, America has mislaid this element of its political culture. I was reminded of this watching a recent documentary film called The Best of Enemies, which recalled a famous series of cerebral 1968 television debates between the American intellectuals Gore Vidal, on the left, and William F Buckley Jr on the right.

Both the protagonists struck me as thoroughly obnoxious, but the debates, broadcast to coincide with the Democratic and Republican national conventions, fizzed and sparked with vicious but sophisticated humour.

Broadcast in prime time on the ABC network during the presidential primaries, the debates were a surprise ratings hit. It would never happen today – a risk-averse media would dismiss the concept as too highbrow. And even more sadly, the same is true in New Zealand.