Upon taking a glance at the race for president having recently started in the USA, we can note that the major players are, roughly speaking, at the retirement age. They’re deep in their 70s, which looks quite weird as the energy usually ceases at this age and it’s more difficult to work with the audience.
Of course, as far as Trump is concerned, it looks disputable, but we don’t know what he was like a quarter-century ago. He most likely was far more active than now. But in total the situation looks rather unusual for the Americans who prefer young and active candidates. And I seem to have at least one plausible explanation of that.
The matter is, a crucial moment in any politician’s career is when he starts active politics and gets acquainted with basic social, economic and foreign-policy life-description structures. He’ll then contemplate and design his activities, develop his relations with partners, look for allies, counter the opponents and interact with his electorate within those structures.
Let’s remember Hilary Clinton and her husband. They joined the Democratic party in early 70th, i.e. at the moment of the sensational attempt to impeach the Republican’s President Richard Nixon (who in 1972 was re-elected for the 2nd term by a wide margin). From that time on, the contemporary liberal ideology began developing to hold top position by 1980 after Ronald Reagan had won the elections (let me repeat once more that it’s not the liberal ideology as a whole but is its modern social and political form, which has nothing to do with the formal philosophic description of liberalism).
If we also remember that both of them were 20 years old at the time, we’ll see that those who were born after 1955 cannot consider the world other than from the liberal paradigm point of view. And if we also note that this paradigm has monopolized all social and political discourse, we’ll see that people over 65 don’t even completely understand that any other type of discourse may exist at all. Thus, all their attempts to describe existent social and economic problems make all the suggested models be of totally liberal nature.
And the liberal (in Russia it may be called «liberalistic» to differ from the conventional classical liberalism, though the rest of the world may have no means to deal with such a confusion) discourse, applying the strictest criteria, reduces answers to all the questions to a single formula: bankers must be given money to pay all their affiliate consulting companies and provide the only proper answer to all the questions. Which answer will undoubtedly leave the bankers in power and with the maximum profit from all the suggested measures.
The problem is, the model is totally idle under the current economic crisis conditions. Mostly because (as it’s written in my book, the whole chapter devoted to it) the liberal economics, as a science, taboos the reasons for the current crisis. Thus, there are no answers as to the reasons of the crisis in the liberal discourse (and there cannot be any), and if the reasons are unclear, there may be no formula for economic recovery. To be more precise, there is no accurate formula, as there are a lot of doubtful arguments from Summers or Roubini. But it speaks for itself that no Nobel Prize, the major award of the liberal economics, for research of the cause of the crisis has been issued since 2008. The liberal community refuse to discuss the major present-day problem.
Though the people, who had already have set personalities by 1975 (remember, Trump was born in 1946 and he was 20 in 1966 when Kennedy-Johnson’s Democrats were in power), are much more flexible as to taking up new ideas (or old ones, the abovementioned book of mine is called «Reminiscences about future» not without reason) than their younger competitors. Consequently, they can afford to overcome the borders of the liberal discourse, which no more than 10 years ago guaranteed disappearance from the politics forever, 5 years ago — led to severe problems (though upon the results of the off-set elections in 2014 I could predict a high possibility of the «Trump phenomenon» occurrence), and nowadays is mandatory.
It’s next to impossible to teach politicians over 25 years old the non-liberal attitude (not to mention anti-liberal, which is yet to come). They are ready to accept «the girl Gretta», to accuse Russia of poisoning Scripal and Litvinenko, etc., but they are unable to discuss the real reasons for the crisis. They don’t have the appropriate notions and vocabulary, which may be obtained only if they postpone all their business and set off for studying non-liberal concepts for at least 10 years. A separate question is, who is going to feed them there, how they are going to return to politics and where is the place for such studies. Thus, there is no way round, very young people will come to politics after Trump, all the middle-aged politicians (in 5 years they’ll become the older generation) are doomed to leave. By the way, the situation here in Russia is slightly different.
The old politicians are capable of saying something considered by the public as an adequate description of reality, which is beyond the younger politicians’ abilities, thus, the old ones win, even in the USA. As to the further consequences, it’s a separate question.
