COMMENT | Trump, Hitler and Malaysian politics

COMMENT | Do you like fairy tales? Here’s one -- the evil wizard Donald Trump has been defeated and America lives “happily ever after”. The End.

But hold on. We know that life and politics don’t work out that way. Trump may have lost but Trumpism is still very alive -- in fact, half of America voted for it. Can we in Malaysia learn some lessons from this?

The Conman-in-Chief was just the symptom of a deeper disease - mainly of inequality - that has plagued the country for decades. Real wages for ordinary Americans (after adjusting for inflation) in 2018 had not gone up in 40 years (yes, forty!) even though GDP and corporate profits have soared many times over.

Hilary Clinton lost the Democrats’ “blue wall” (of industrial states such as Michigan) in 2016 because her husband had promised back in the 1990s that free trade deals like Nafta would bring many high-paying jobs. Instead, factories closed down and jobs went overseas.

Small towns were devastated - the only work available was to flip burgers - and in the despair, many turned to drugs (the opioid epidemic). While it’s easy to dismiss all Trump voters as irredeemable racists, we easily forget that they were also driven by bread and butter issues.

What about us? History does not repeat itself directly, but it does rhyme. In 2018, half of Malaysians earned below RM2,000 per month -- thanks to the national policy to bring in cheap foreign labour.

Given that situation, was it politically wise for the Pakatan Harapan government to cut certain subsidies to the poor, who were mainly Malays? Especially, when Harapan got only about 20 percent of the rural Malay vote in the 2018 general elections?

While the reason for cutbacks was supposedly the high national debt, money was still found to pay RM4.7 billion in GST arrears to companies. (In fact, Lim Guan Eng now says the ...