Seeds of dissent in the US were planted long before the Trump administration
Trump has accepted some blame for the mob that invaded the Capitol this week, but the seeds of dissent were planted four years ago, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
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An uneasy calm has descended on Washington but unless the real questions raised by the storming of the Capitol are answered the storm will not dissipate.
President Trump has accepted some blame for creating the mob which invaded the political heart of America, but the seeds of dissent were well planted and watered during the 2016 presidential campaign by Hillary Clinton’s activist supporters.
Clinton herself branded Trump’s supporters as the “basket of deplorables”, ensuring that resistance to her brand of liberal (in the US sense) politics would harden.
Embracing the hard-Left, as she did, and giving extremists like some involved in the Black Lives Matter mob a licence to loot and burn and murder and take over cities like Portland without immediate censure, as The New York Times and CNN did, was always only going to fuel the resentment of Trump supporters toward the elites who have traditionally run the nation.
Those in the middle of the country legitimately complained that their voices weren’t being heard.
J.D. Vance’s best-selling work Hillbilly Elegy, now a film starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close, captured the essence of that overlooked heartland and many turned to the book to try to understand what motivated those who had been ignored to turn to a political outsider like Trump for salvation.
The scenes of a small number of the estimated 30,000 Trump supporters who broke into the House and Senate chambers last week do not portend the end of the American experiment.
They demonstrated, if anything, that the District of Columbia, a Democrat stronghold, continues to fail its obligations to maintain order and that the Capitol Hill police are a joke.
Little wonder that the chief of the Capitol Hill police force, Steven Sund, and the Senate sergeant-at-arms, Michael Stenger, have already resigned.
Trump supporters had rallied in Washington before but there was a total failure of the local police to prepare for last week’s protest and no contingency plans for backup from surrounding states or federal forces.
Trump has but 10 days of his presidency left in which to attempt to claw back some cover for his achievements or his four-year term will be painted as a total disaster — which it was not — and he will go down in history as a destroyer of the democratic ideal.
As far as Australia goes, the Trump presidency was a force for the good and served to refocus the attention of the US on the Indo-Pacific region so woefully neglected by the Obama administration.
China was put on overdue notice that it could not bully its way to global domination without fear of challenge.
The multilateral forces, the UN and NATO, were also given short shrift by the Trump administration, again, an overdue reminder that inaction in the face of threats is just appeasement and he did more for peace in the Middle East than any post-war president.
President-elect Joe Biden hasn’t a record to defend. His problems include his family’s obvious conflicts of interest, but his blandness may be a blessing if can avoid the tug of the extremists who have dominated the Democratic Party since the Obama years.
There isn’t any acceptable level of violence in a riot, despite the cheer squad for the Marxist-inspired BLM movement in the US and among the me-too crowd here who ape every fad and adopt every catchcry to emerge from the US.
That there were five deaths is alarming but three seem to have been due to underlying health reasons, one protester was shot by police and one police officer died apparently after being hit on the head with a fire extinguisher.
We know about these deaths because America is a democracy and has a level of transparency only dreamt of in Putin’s Russia or under Xi’s crushing totalitarian regime.
The transition from Trump to Biden will take place on January 20, probably without incident but certainly with more security than any previous inauguration and I’ve attended a few. The days of turning up to the ceremony with an embossed invitation and being ushered to a seat are over. The power of America to reinvent itself is not to be underestimated. The Great Powers which have done so in the past have regretted their mistake.
Long live America, still the world’s best hope for freedom.
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