From Tokyo to London, through the presidential palaces of Europe and rippling across the Pacific to Canberra, a shockwave roils the halls of power as the establishment quails at the resurrection of Donald Trump.
His defiant return underscores the wisdom in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s observation that the world is witnessing great change not seen in a century.
In an era defined by chaos, a rough beast now slouches towards Washington. Again.
But chaos can be destructive and creative, and Trump brings both, if in unequal measure. What should be creative is the opportunity to finally break through the intellectual barricades Western elites have erected around some of their more risible ideas.
Because, although they always paint themselves as revolutionaries, progressives are the new aristocracy and their ideas dominate national and international institutions. Here they have the commanding heights of the bureaucracy, universities, public broadcasting and big business.
Internationally the same ideas animate the bureaucrats at the UN, EU and just about any institution you can name in the blizzard of abbreviations that populates the globe. Even once sensible organisations such as the International Energy Agency have moved from producing data to peddling propaganda.
Trump is an assault on the sensibilities of the plutocrats, a Hun who has breached the castle wall. But he is just the loudest signal among many that point to an angry mob lighting torches from Nashville to Naples.
Too often the progressive class cries democracy while holding its exercise in contempt. Too often the people’s will is met with patronising claims that they were misled or misinformed. That they are too dumb to understand what is good for them. The dark mood of the mob is dismissed with the pejorative populism.
Here, the best recent example was the elite response to the overwhelming rejection of the voice. There were two choices after the referendum: to trust the wisdom of the people or to denigrate them as fools. What should have been read as a people rejecting an ill-formed plan to divide them by race was turned into commentary that branded them racist.
Gaslighting is a term beloved of the progressive class. It’s ironic because they do it so often to dismiss legitimate grievances. The mob is apparently wrong to believe that mass migration puts pressure on housing or increases competition for jobs. That globalisation has offshored blue-collar jobs and hollowed out once-thriving communities. That climate plans are an assault on the poor that drives up the cost of living. In Queensland, concerns about youth crime were dismissed as a media beat-up and university studies were produced to prove the people wrong.
Everywhere you care to look in Western democracies there is deep division between the in and out castes. The castes often can be defined by geography: those who hug the cities and those in the far-flung commuter suburbs or regions. The ideological chasm is between those who have access to all the benefits of the world and those who bear the costs of a world that has changed beyond their recognition.
So, the good chaos that Trump brings is that he unsettles the global establishment and, hopefully, gives them pause to reflect.
But some fear of Trump is rational. What happens in the world’s most consequential democracy has consequences for all, and Trump is more than willing to mete out retribution on real and imagined slights. His list of miscreants, like his memory, is long. In Washington, Australia’s plenipotentiary, Kevin Rudd, is busy purging his Twitter account to erase all trace of an unfortunate bout of truth-telling. He, apparently, used the platform in 2020 to accuse the once and future president of dragging “America and democracy through the mud”. An opinion a reasonable person could hold.
Rudd removing the offending post recalls being caught smoking in the school toilets as a teenager. You can try to flush away the butts but you can’t erase the smell as you stand, denying everything, in front of a teacher with a small cloud drifting over your head. Predictably, the attempt to scrub the post from history only rebirthed it as a news story.
A big cloud is drifting over the rest of Washington, where 92 per cent of its voters dutifully turned out for Kamala Harris. The shadow of Twitter looms large as the eccentric billionaire who turned the platform into X has stamped a great big cross on the entire city.
Elon Musk just may get handed a cabinet job with the chilling title of the Department of Government Efficiency.
Musk has assured a member of Trump’s transition planning team that he will have no trouble ripping out “at least” $US2 trillion ($3 trillion) from the $US6.8 trillion federal budget. This seems a tad excessive.
Other capitals, such as Kyiv, also will fear the flow of weapons will falter, exposing its people to a real beast.
In Moscow, Vladimir Putin must now be contemplating pushing as deep as possible into Ukraine’s heartland, planting his flag in it and awaiting a favourable, temporary, peace around expanded Russian borders.
In Jerusalem there will be jubilation at the return of a staunch ally to the White House. Benjamin Netanyahu was among the first to call and congratulate Trump, but the president-elect has made it clear he wants an end to the wars by the time he assumes office. The question there is how, and on what terms, a peace can be struck between combatants who now all seem committed to a one-state solution.
In Beijing, Xi will be thinking more deeply than most about how to ride this wave from Washington. If the US retreats from trying to preserve the world order it established, China will fill the void. Beijing is already using the wars in Ukraine and Gaza to stoke global opinion against America and blame it for waging a new cold war.
There will be turbulence with tariff walls and attempts to retool supply chains to bypass China. But in a wide world there are always ways around a wall and some supplies simply can’t come from anywhere else. One example: China now accounts for 95 per cent of the world’s global polysilicon, ingot and wafer production. As this is an essential material for the production of solar panels and semiconductors, slapping tariffs on that will be a big call.
Beijing will know tariff walls also will drive a divide between the US and many countries, including its allies in Europe.
The rise of Trump fits with Xi’s view that the world is facing a protracted period of disorder. He will take it as yet another sign that the sun is rising in the East and setting in the West.
Maybe the liberal world order was always an illusion
The fundamental ideas that grounded us are shifting, for better or for worse. What is for sure; we will miss America when it is gone.
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There is nothing that the left in Australia likes more than high-profile Liberals who turn on the institution that made them politically famous.
It’s all disquiet on the Western front as the world digests the return of America’s id to the White House.