"The Donald"

First, to be quite clear, I find Donald Trump an odious, over-bearing, misogynistic, blow-hard with puerile "solutions" to tough problems. So it came as a bit of a shock to find that he believes in several of the things I do.

For example, on Face The Nation today he said he thinks hedge-fund managers aren't paying enough tax, that CEOs are overpaid, that corporate governance is plagued by boards packed with insider cronies, and that the middle class has been eviscerated by off-shoring.

Here are some of his comments: "They [hedge-fund managers] are all supporting Jeb Bush and Hilary Clinton. ...Hilary and Jeb are totally controlled by the hedge-fund guys". That should be music to Larry Lessig's ears.

"We're going to be reducing tax for the middle class but for the hedge-fund guys - they're going to be paying up".

On high CEO pay and corporate governance: "It does bug me, but it's very hard if you have a free enterprise system to do anything about that; you know the boards of companies are supposed to do it, but I know companies very well and the CEO puts in all his friends... ...and you they get whatever they want because the friends love sitting on the board. So, that's the system that we have and it's a shame and it's disgraceful and sometimes the boards rule but I would way it's less than 10% and you see these guys making these enormous amounts of money; it's a total and complete joke".

And as NPR noted last week, he's come out in favour of a single payer health care! Given the Republican's stance on ACA, this is worse than heresy.

He might have more in common, at least as far as issues go (probably less so in terms of solutions), with Bernie Sanders than he does with Jeb!

The risk, of course, is that he is fickle and inconstant and in the (hopefully) unlikely event of his being nominated, still less elected, he would discard these positions as he "makes an unbelievably great deal for America"...

What I think we are seeing this year is a maturing manifestation of the anger and frustration that fuelled the tea party 7 years ago. The sense that Washington works only for those with great wealth and doesn't represent the majority of the electorate is a common theme in Sander's, Lessig's, and Trump's rhetoric. It's in the Warren Wing. That, combined with the now evident failure of the Thatcher-Ragan revolution that put blind faith in free markets and "trickle-down" and the sense that a government controlled economy (China's) is doing demonstrably better than ours for it's citizenry, at least economically, is leading to a resurgence of left-wing ideas.

Identifying the problems is one thing; fixing them, however, is quite another.