Raging élites

Dear Editor,
Until the May 2017 issue, ABR had managed to keep its anti-Trump animus relatively subdued, but with James McNamara’s review of two satirical books on Trump, the levée has broken and the magazine has fed its tributary into the liberal élite’s torrent of rage and resentment at American voters for electing a bozo and/or fascist.

When, after a flurry of ad hominem anti-Trump jabs, McNamara’s invective finally abates and he gets around to asking how such a cruel buffoon could win, he ticks off all the obligatory, but largely innocent, suspects: the Russians, misogyny, Fake News, James Coney [sic], and the ‘hideous racism, sexism, and xenophobia that has always run through American society’. Absent, however, is any mention of Trump’s major policy theme of the malignity of neo-liberal globalisation. Unmentioned by McNamara are the factory-shuttering effects of ‘free trade’ and the off-shoring of manufacturing industries to low-wage countries; the job-displacement arising from the import of cheap immigrant labour; and the community-eroding effects of open borders.