If Trump wins, liberals will be flying this flag too

With the first presidential debate tonight, I thought it might be a good time to chuck in my twopenny’s worth on the US presidential election. If Hillary hasn’t taken her Benylin she’s in trouble…

Let’s be really generous and say turnout in the presidential election will be 60 per cent. Roughly half of that number will vote Trump because they think Beltway politics - epitomised by the loathed Hillary Clinton – is effete and corrupt. The other half will fear that the election of a racist demagogue proves beyond doubt that civilised politics is imperilled and the US is self-destructing. And then there’s the other 40 per cent who won’t vote at all because in one way or another they think it’s a waste of time.

There’s two ways you can look at this. First case: One of this dismal duo gets elected, America shrugs shoulders and says ‘this is a blip, we had a bad choice, we’ll just wait till 2020 and have another go’  knowing Congress will constrain everything he or she wants to do. But that would make a boring blog. So let’s take a racier scenario – that in either event one third or more of the US population will be as mad as hell with the result and will feel alienated from the administration in Washington. Where will that take us?

I think it takes us inevitably into a discussion about how and where political power is exercised. Brexit shows that the more remote the exercise of power is, the less legitimate it appears and the more pissed off people are. In one way or another, this election is showing that the US faces precisely the same issue and therefore as a result the centre will lose legitimacy first and political power second. Let me explain the logic.

Conservative states have always been suspicious of the federal government and have been vocal defenders of states’ rights. That will inevitably get much louder if Hillary wins because she is seen as the ultimate big government meddling liberal. Conservative states can't stand HRC and will push back against her in the courts, in the media and through the political process. This will be on a level that Obama's administration caught a glimpse of during ACA.  

More interestingly, if Trump wins both right and left may come to agree that it’s time to look constitutional settlement between the states and the federal government. We could easily see liberal states join that chorus because they'll want to keep Trump as far away from their politics as possible. Take California. It’s a liberal and strongly Democratic state. It has 40 million inhabitants and an economy not that much smaller than that of the UK. It has a huge Spanish speaking population. It is the home of the economic powerhouses that are Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

It is also one of the least Trump places in the Union. The citizens of that state may feel that Trump is so unable to represent them that they, over time, become advocates for much greater control of their own political lives (this has already begun to happen on social issues such as medical use of cannabis and gay marriage, neither of which the feds recognise). The implicit understanding (threat?) is that California could easily survive outside the Union should it choose to so the centre had better not try to push it around.  

At its most undiluted you could see the emergence of a politics of Californian secessionism along Texan lines (unlikely but remember Scottish Independence was once a joke. Less than twenty years ago). But more realistically, I think  you will see liberals starting to embracw the ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ idea so popular with libertarians and the modern right.