The big schmooze
IN EUROPEAN politics a useful distinction is sometimes drawn between the “clean right”, a group which can include pretty flinty conservatives, and the “dirty right”,
meaning those who cross the bounds of democratic decency, whether with race-baiting, threats of political violence or snarling challenges to the rule of law. That distinction has proved powerful in its day. In the French presidential elections of 2002, the main parties of left and right united behind an unprincipled machine politician, Jacques Chirac, to defeat his opponent, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a brutish demagogue. Parisians fondly remember the posters that popped up, urging: “Vote for the crook, not the fascist”.
Donald Trump, front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, is of the dirty right. He showed that when he called for a blanket ban on Muslims entering America, and advocated both the use of torture and the punitive killing of terrorists’ families, a war crime. He whips up crowds by lamenting that he cannot punch protesters in the face. He accuses the Mexican government of sending rapists to America, and promises to round up and deport 11m migrants who are in the country without papers (though, like Caesar weighing lives in the Coliseum, as president he would let “good ones” back in). In a television interview on February 28th he declined three times to disavow statements of support from a veteran leader of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), murmuring that he needed to “research” that white-supremacist group. Bringing history full-circle, the ageing Mr Le Pen sent word from France that, if American, he would vote Trump...
... Conservative grandees preparing to back Mr Trump are arguably the worst snobs of all. For they know that he is making promises to his supporters that are both nasty and impossible to keep. Like every tribune of the dirty right, Mr Trump thinks his voters are dupes: that is why he panders and lies to them without a qualm. If Republican bigwigs have shame or sense enough, there is still time—just—to disown him.
Cartoon: Kevin Kallaugher
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