For more than 70 million Americans, Donald Trump represents hope. He won the 2016 election against a sure-bet Democrat with a political pedigree and the global media on her side. He won the second-biggest popular vote in US electoral history last week despite a four-year onslaught by the political media elite. On present numbers, he has increased the Republican share of Hispanic voters and improved his standing among African-Americans. Trump has forever changed American politics and the breadth of his achievements impresses where his style, and his handling of the pandemic fail.
The 45th US president restored law and order by defending police against militant racists and nominating black-letter lawyers to the Supreme Court. He chipped away at left-wing orthodoxy in the public service and on campus by testing the limits of free speech. He demanded equal treatment for America in foreign policy by telling free-riding allies to boost their military spending and pay their fair share for defence. He called the bluff of bully states and withdrew US money from the Paris Agreement, which rewards totalitarian regimes with Western workers’ money. He protected Americans from illiberal enemies by closing the border to terrorist-producing states. He defended Israel by negotiating the most celebrated Middle East peace deal in recent history. He encouraged the revival of American manufacturing in towns gripped by unemployment and sliding into the despair of intergenerational opioid addiction. And he worked to restore the democratic norms established by the founding fathers. Trump stood for the millions of Americans that globalists treat like an unpleasant aftertaste of the industrial era. For all of that, the politically correct will forever regard him as an enemy.
As the votes rolled in on Wednesday night, Trumpism was the topic of discussion on the ABC. Although the host noted the Democrat landslide had failed to materialise (again), he could not resist describing Americans who support Trump as a cult. But the description is more aptly used for Democrat voters given their call to blacklist political dissenters in the wake of the election. Democrat congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested the names of people who worked with the US president should be recorded for their “complicity.”
Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 6, 2020
Michael Simon, a former Obama administration staffer, affirmed that a group was recording the names of “Every (Trump) administration staffer, campaign staffer, bundler, lawyers who represented them – everyone”. He is in league with another former Democrat staffer, Emily Abrams, who tweeted on November 6: “We’re launching the Trump Accountability Project to make sure anyone who took a paycheck to help Trump … is held responsible.”
In other media, journalists worked hard to define the contours of Trumpism to confirm their bias against him. They regurgitated speaking points from the 2016 Clinton campaign, smearing the Republican base as uneducated, white, working-class and stupid. In other words, deplorable.
Ahead of the election, The Guardian’s David Smith lamented that even if Trump were to lose, it would not “defeat Trumpism”. Smith characterised crowd support for the former president on the campaign trail as “cult-of-personality” rallies. Consistent with many articles against Trump, an academic was used to strengthen the prosecution. Eddie Glaude, author of Democracy in Black, said Trump flourished because of white voters.
In The Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Hartcher interviewed Francis Fukuyama, an academic whose end-of-history idea was one of the most popular and spectacularly flawed theories of the late 20th century. Like many globalists who dreamed of a virtuous internationalist order that never was, Fukuyama stereotypes Republican voters as a “narrow and unrepresentative base of white, working-class, poorly educated people resentful about all the changes going on in society”. When globalists so belittle conservatives, the charge of resentfulness is an exercise in projection.
Despite the many headlines celebrating Joe Biden as a moderating force, the future of America under the Democrats is not centrist in any meaningful sense of the word. Even if Biden were to remake himself in the image of Arthur Schlesinger’s centrism, the challenge of containing Chinese communist aggression abroad and tempering the increasingly belligerent left in government would remain. He has shown little talent for either.
To get a taste of the political struggle to come, consider how Ocasio-Cortez uses race as a weapon. In a congressional hearing, she said: “The people who are producing climate change … [are] predominantly white, correct?” In August, vice-president elect Kamala Harris and Ocasio-Cortez jointly introduced the Climate Equity Act, which uses climate change as a rationale to embed inequality and anti-democratic processes in policy. It would introduce an equity score for environmental legislation based on race and economic status.
In a press release, Harris explained the Act would require climate legislation and grants be developed by a designated office and “frontline communities”, defined as: “Those that have experienced systemic socioeconomic disparities, environmental racism … low-income communities, indigenous peoples and communities of colour”. Ocasio-Cortez took it a step further and openly embraced the new form of apartheid, demanding: “Environmental policies must be written by the black, brown and low-income people … just like the Green New Deal envisioned.” This is not a case of white supremacists headbanging for Hitler and tattooing each other in a backyard shed. It is the incoming government of the US.
When Trump won the 2016 election, the shock was registered on the downcast expression of TV anchors worldwide. The public berated pollsters who got it wrong while journalists rushed to revise their crude liberal bias for fear of being seen as irrelevant. Now the tables have turned and so has the media, whose barely concealed contempt for dissent has been liberated by the prospect of a Democrat president. But Trump is not a ghost of presidents past, he represents a movement of people who want formal equality, freedom of speech, strong borders, an impartial judiciary and depoliticised education for children. With a party that supports formal inequality, racist governance and political censorship about to form government, the battle for the American Dream has only just begun.
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