It will be like Godzilla vs. King Kong. What a few months ago seemed impossible, today has some chances of occurring: a final confrontation between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the battle for the White House.
It could happen. With every passing day, the United States' political composition more closely resembles Europe's. Donald Trump reminds us of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the quasi-fascist founder of the National Front, a party from which he would later be expelled.
Trump does not have -- like Le Pen -- a thick political and military biography, but a long and basically successful experience as a businessman. What the two share is a nationalist vision, a rejection of immigrants, and a penchant for intimidating their adversaries. They are, in the words of the Spanish ballad, two twin souls.
In addition, both share the same sources of admiration. Trump's and Le Pen's supporters belong to a working class of injudicious, poorly educated people who enjoy direct, unfiltered language and who are capable of calling a spade a spade, and use any vulgarity that comes to their mind.
Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, is not a communist despot who would rise to power to create a dictatorship. He's something else, neither Stalin nor Fidel Castro. "Let's not panic here," as comedian Chapulín Colorado used to say. Sanders is a kind of Olaf Palme born in Brooklyn. He says he's a socialist. What does that word mean in his case?
He's a redistributer, a populist who will hike federal taxes and assign the revenue to a "social task," convinced that the needs of some people must be converted into an obligation to all people, unaware of the fact that that translation of individual responsibility usually antagonizes and confuses the whole of society.
It is a pity that Sanders, when he studied at the University of Chicago, didn't attend the classes given by Gary Becker, at the time a professor in that institution. Becker was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics, among other reasons for describing the unforeseen damages that might derive from the good intentions in welfare.
How much would Sanders increase taxes if he manages to overcome the resistance of Congress (something I doubt)? As explained by Josh Barro in The New York Times and analyzed by Tim Worstall in Forbes magazine, between federal, state and other levies, taxes would consume 73 percent of everyone's revenues. That percentage goes over the peak of the Laffer Curve and therefore will collect a lot less money than expected.
It will be a failure and will end up pauperizing us all, as happened in Sweden until the Swedes began to set aright the welfare state (1992-1994). That was brilliantly described by Chilean economist Mauricio Rojas in "The Rise and Fall of the Swedish Model." Rojas, a former communist who lived in Sweden for several decades, understood that he had erred, had the decency and the courage to recant, and was elected a member of the Swedish Parliament for the Liberal Party.
In any case, the presence of people like Trump and Sanders in the political landscape of the United States totally wipes out the notion of U.S. exceptionalism supported by so many thinkers and ideologues who are convinced that this country has a moral responsibility to mankind.
It marks the end of the much-debated and slightly Messianic proposition that the United States is a unique nation, the leading modern republic, different from all others, chosen by God to serve as a model and defend republicanism, freedom, individualism, equality, and democracy, to roundly defeat the fascists, Nazis, and communists, and to confront the murderous Islamists of the new Caliphate.
It's a pity. At the end of his brief Gettysburg Address, Lincoln affirmed that the task of Americans is to ensure "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." That's another version of exceptionalism.
Ronald Reagan liked to play with those ideas and with the following metaphor: The United States is "the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid," as Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mountain.
Not at all. The United States is a nation like all others. With its Trumps and its Sanderses. Like all others.
(AP photo)
