An interesting reflection by The Economist‘s US editor, John Prideaux, in a subscriber-only newsletter is worth quoting at some length (“How to Cover Trump 2.0,” Checks and Balances, January 10, 2025):
Perhaps the least important thing about the awful fires in and around Los Angeles is Donald Trump’s response to them. And yet he’s about to be the president again, so his hot take can’t be ignored either. “Gavin Newsom should resign. This is all his fault!!!” he wrote on Truth Social.
An underrated part of Mr Trump’s political method, and his appeal, is that he doesn’t say what he is supposed to. Any normal person, or any politician taking advice from a communications pro, would lead with sympathy for those who lost loved ones and whose houses have burned down and say something comforting about how, when he takes office, he will help LA to come back stronger. Mr Trump doesn’t bother with that. He knows his voters don’t like Mr Newsom. Blaming an appalling natural disaster on him is therefore a thrill. Henry Adams wrote that, “politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organisation of hatreds.” Mr Trump’s success makes me think he was right.
One may relate Henry Adam’s striking aphorism to Anthony de Jasay’s theory of the state. Since, for de Jasay, any action of the state amounts to discriminating against somebody to help somebody else (“maximizing aggregate utility” is a convenient rationalization), it can understandably generate hatred from the discriminated against. However, de Jasay’s theory (or part of his theory) is different: in a democratic state, the victims of discrimination will instead demand some discriminatory privilege in their own favor, which will in turn generate discontent from other individuals discriminated against, and so forth up to the “Plantation State” (see his 1985 book The State).
On this road, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, to take two recent examples, will just have been milestones among others.
Under the Plantation State, everybody would be more or less equal, except for the equalizers. Will all the equalized hate the state? Perhaps, but they would have to hide their hatred.
