Turnberry is among 18 golf courses that belong to The Trump Organization in the US, Scotland, Ireland and Dubai. It represents his best chance of landing the British men’s Open Championship, the only one of the four golf majors to take place outside the US.
Then came his campaign for the Republican nomination. Though golf’s ruling body in the UK has avoided commenting on that situation, Turnberry’s immediate future as an Open destination is arguably in doubt, despite it having played host four times, most recently in 2009. Given that Trump’s golf courses are at the heart of a global property and hotels empire, events in this quiet corner of Scotland look like an interesting case study in the risks of mixing business and presidential ambition.
Insulting Mexicans and Muslims might have played well with some blue-collar Americans fed up with cookie-cutter politicians and afraid of terrorism and losing their jobs to illegal immigrants, but they may not be going down well with the ruling bodies of golf. The sport is increasingly keen to lose its white men’s elitist image and embrace far corners of the world – witness the recent embarrassing row over allowing female members at Muirfield Golf Club in the east of Scotland.
Turnberry has already come perilously close to losing one major championship since Trump purchased the resort in 2014. The Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) openly contemplated withdrawing the British Women’s Open last July in protest at his comments linking Mexican immigrants with rape, crime and drugs.
While Trump told the LPGA to go elsewhere if they felt so strongly and that he wouldn’t sue them for breach of contract, losing the championship would still have seriously damaged his reputation and caused enormous commercial embarrassment.
Donald’s Mexican fanclub
The decision on where to hold the men’s Open Championship rests with golf’s governing body outside North America, the Royal & Ancient (R&A). It chooses the destination from a rota of ten courses around the UK, which has included Turnberry since 1977.
It already surprised some golf observers by agreeing to Trump’s plan to substantially change the Ailsa course at Turnberry – particularly the stretch of eight holes along the craggy coast. While the traditionally conservative body has allowed minor tweaks to all courses on the rota over the years, Trump has realigned fairways; changed greens and relocated them closer to the sea shore; and even introduced completely new holes.
The end result, according to computer-generated images, is an undeniably spectacular course that will place Turnberry truly in a category of its own. The experience will not be cheap, however – anywhere between £195 and £275 for a round depending upon whether you stay at the hotel. In a country where Trump was already notorious before his presidential campaign for fighting with both the Scottish government and landowners over his other golf investment, the Trump International Golf Links in Aberdeenshire, this will not help attract local players.
Granting permission to change Turnberry is also a different matter from allowing the Open to be held there, of course. The R&A avoided answering questions about Turnberry’s place on the men’s rota when it announced in late 2015 that Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland would host the championship in 2019 following a break of nearly 70 years.
It then confirmed that Turnberry would not be considered to host any Open prior to 2022, apparently chipping a decision on holding the event at the course into the long grass.
Though Trump’s supporters argue Turnberry may have lost its place on the rota without his investment, the R&A will likely be hoping that Trump moderates or backtracks on his more controversial comments, perhaps even that his 2016 presidential bid fails. If he does win in November, one assumes that pronouncements concerning temporary bans on Muslims entering America, deporting 11m illegal immigrants and building a wall along the Mexican border will come to nothing. Even so, a President Trump would be sufficiently unpredictable that the R&A could well feel that a Turnberry Open was an unnecessary risk.
And given current golf politics, Trump might still be damned without winning the presidency. Last month’s bold decision by the R&A under new chief executive Martin Slumbers to withdraw the open from Muirfield – arguably the most acclaimed test of golf on the rota – is a clear sign of dramatic change.
Moderniser McIlroy
Tellingly, men’s number three Rory McIlroy was quoted as saying Muirfield needs the Open more than the Open needs Muirfield. The values of proprietary club owners like Trump will probably no longer be off bounds in determining the venue of the game’s leading men’s competition in future. There have meanwhile been calls in the US for Trump’s course at Bedminster, New Jersey to lose another of golf’s majors, the 2022 PGA Championship.
So notwithstanding his immense wealth and the unparalleled visual magnificence of his championship-quality course at Turnberry, Donald Trump may not have any lever to pull to get his way with golf’s regulatory body. One suspects he has become the obstacle to his own ambitions in international golf. It will be interesting to see if he encounters similar difficulties in other parts of his empire.
William Walton, Senior Lecturer, Northumbria University, Newcastle
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
In one of the conservative establishment’s most forthright anti-Trump broadsides, 2012 candidate Mitt Romney reminded his party that “Ronald Reagan used to quote a Scottish philosopher who predicted that democracies and civilisations couldn’t last more than about 200 years” – namely Alexander Fraser Tytler, professor of universal history at the University of Edinburgh in the 1780s.
The Tytler quote used by Reagan is probably apocryphal, but it’s fair to say it’s representative of 18th-century opinion. Another Enlightenment man cited by Romney, John Adams, believed that “there never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide” – striking words coming from the second president of the young American republic.
Why did Enlightenment writers display such pessimism about democracy? Just as today’s democratic pessimists have the 20th century’s totalitarian nightmares as a natural point of reference, 18th-century thinkers had their own. And these gave them ample reason to be sceptical about whether democratic regimes could survive, let alone thrive.
Tytler was a scholar of ancient Greece and Rome. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed their respective histories illustrated the inevitable failure of democratic and republican systems of government. After all, they had inspired few imitations: the Italian city states of the 16th century, the Swiss republic of Geneva and a few others had to some extent followed their example, but they had strictly limited the size of their polities and carefully selected their citizens.
The new American republic, by contrast, inspired little optimism. Tytler and his colleagues thought it too large and potentially too wealthy for its own good, and doomed to repeat Rome’s transition to military rule and empire. It seemed exceedingly reckless to put political power in the hands of little-educated masses with no real stake in the country’s political or economic stability. As history had shown, the people could easily be seduced by warmongering demagogues.
As it turned out, the US managed to defy this pessimistic prognosis. But Tytler’s Scottish colleagues in Edinburgh and Glasgow had other concerns besides.
Scottish Enlightenment writers were particularly interested in the emerging modern global trading economy, and not least among them was Adam Smith. Smith is today remembered by many as the “first economist”, but his real interest lay in deciphering the moral and political side effects of modern commercial economies.
For example, he identified the division of labour as an extraordinary tool for raising economic productivity, but also worried about its dehumanising consequences for workers condemned to repeat the same handful of simple tasks. He praised the virtues of commerce, but he also believed the appeal of consumerism risked promoting selfishness at the expense of citizenship.
To go by this analysis, wealthy commercial or industrial societies make for particularly fragile democracies: their politically disaffected citizens risk turning a blind eye to the loss of liberties which they value beneath material goods.
This argument was developed at length by Adam Ferguson, Smith’s friend and Tytler’s colleague in Edinburgh. Ferguson feared that in such modern commercialised democracies, the depoliticised electorate would make an easy target for aggressive demagogues coasting on promises of national glory.
What would 18th-century Scottish philosophers have made of the current state of American democracy? Some aspects would have appeared utterly alien to them: the idea of universal (not least female and non-white) suffrage, the ease and rapidity of communications, the concerns of de-industrialisation.
But they may also have recognised several of the worrying mechanisms they described in their own emerging commercial society. Most concerning to them were the alienation of voters from the political process, and the prevalence of economic individualism over public spirit.
As they saw it, democratic political systems were a risky proposition at the best of times, and the modern US may well have appeared an especially worrying case. It is a nation that celebrates louder than most the benefits of commercial exchanges, individual freedom and consumerism. For Smith and his colleagues, this would have meant it was particularly vulnerable to the appeal of charismatic, aggressive demagogues – and Donald Trump, perhaps the ultimate example, is now in full flight.
Anna Plassart, Lecturer in History, The Open University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
