Reflections on an Election

And some observations on Simon Wilson's "progressive" comments

Simon Wilson with his by now trademark faux indignant outrage poses the question “Why Did John Key endorse Donald Trump”.

John Key did an interview with Samantha Hayes. During the course of the interview Key expressed a preference for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris as President of the United States of America.

After a column devoted to Simon picking apart John Key based on the interview (and it is a selective commentary) as well as aspects of the Right that he deplores, Wilson answers his question in the final paragraph.

“As for Key, he isn’t a disinterested observer. And he’s not just looking for a new golfing buddy, either. He’s got skin in the game, as a shareholder and board member of the Silicon Valley firm Palo Alto Networks.

Palo Alto is a cybersecurity company.”

The significance of that comment lies in one of Trump’s platform planks which is to reduce red tape and bureaucracy. Key commented in the interview that the entrepreneurial capitalist culture is stifled by regulations and said:

“Go back and look at 2016-2020 ... Chris Liddell spent a lot of time ... actually cutting huge amounts of red tape out of the system. That’s where I think Donald Trump is good for the economy.”

Wilson then observed

“Liddell, a New Zealander and friend of Key’s, was Trump’s deputy chief of staff and is a former top executive with Microsoft and General Motors.”

Whether that was to clarify who Liddell was and what he did or to identify Liddell as involved in large enterprises is difficult to tell. Wilson does not develop that connection.

He goes on to list three groups who will benefit from a Trump victory.

The first are those who stormed the Capitol on January 6 – Trump has said he will pardon them. Not a very influential cohort when you look at the big picture.

The second group of beneficiaries according to Wilson will be the fossil-fuel economy, including General Motors. Trump’s climate denialism will give it a ridiculous late reprieve. This of course is an area of industry that Wilson has criticized interminably. If Wilson were to have his “progressive” way there would be no cars and we would be riding bicycles to get around.

The third group of beneficiaries are the billionaires of Silicon Valley. This is the connection with John Key – as a director of a Silicon Valley tech company. That might explain his preference for Trump because as Wilson states, in a demonstration of the politics of envy and the progressive loathing of individualism and success. Wilson states:

“Musk and his mates don’t want to pay higher taxes, despite being the best-placed people in the world to do so. But paying a bit more tax isn’t actually going to hurt them.

What they really want is to be free from regulations – that red tape – and the threat is real, because the rest of the world is starting to understand the dangers of social media and AI.

So they’re buying their freedom to keep doing what they want, even though it may mean the collapse of American democracy….

Middle class” and poor Americans will not get the relief Trump promises them. And the world may warm past the tipping points that make catastrophe inevitable.

The Silicon Valley billionaires could stop a lot of that. But they don’t care. Not really. They’ve got boltholes, or plans for them, on this planet, or the Moon, or Mars.

And they know there’s money to be made, so bring it on. The greater the collapse and the freer they are to exploit it, the greater the opportunity.”

In a by now text book example of “progressive” thinking Wilson suggests that taxing the tech billionaires isn’t actually going to hurt them. And this is where the Left gets it wrong.

Wilson and his ilk are of the view that those who are better off, who are “richer”, who have taken risks to get where they have reached, who have used initiative and creativity to develop products which the market clearly wants – they should be made to pay  - for what. Wilson isn’t clear on this.

The approach seems to be that the Silicon Valley elites have more than many others and so they should have less because they can afford to do without. It is this thinking that underpins the criticisms of the socialist approach made by Ayn Rand in “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead”.

As far as the US election is concerned I find it astonishing that out of a population that contains the wealth of talent present in the United States two such mediocre candidates have been nominated for the most powerful office in the world.

Trump may be better for the economy than Kamala Harris and if John Key is looking through a purely economic lens, Trump is ahead. Harris is Left – certainly by US standards – and favours Federal intervention and an increased bureaucracy which is despised by the Right.

The problem with Trump is that he is a crook. He lies, he has no respect for the Rule of Law, he is authoritarian and has little time for democratic principles or for the Constitution which he has previously sworn to uphold and, if he wins, will swear to uphold again on Inauguration Day. The damage that he might do to the US system could be immense as he attacks “the enemy within” and he will allow the dictators and fellow authoritarians in Russia, North Korea, Iran and China to flourish and become more powerful.

Personally I would find it difficult to vote for either Trump or Harris and I lean more to the classic Reagan Republican side of the spectrum than the Biden/Harris side.

Harris will do damage to the economy and it is doubtful that she has the heft to maintain the US position on the international stage.

Anyone but Trump, sadly, is not an answer.;

Perhaps it is the supreme irony that the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November (the Constitution’s prescription for voting day) falls on 5 November. Four hundred and nineteen years ago a group of terrorists attempted the destruction of Parliament and the King by the use of gunpowder.

One wonders if 5 November 2024 will see the beginning of the destruction of the American experiment with democracy.