Trump’s victory may or may not be a reason to rejoice, but it’s definitely a reason to gloat. The anguished contortions of left-wing faces are precious.
And yes, there is such a thing as a left-wing face. You can recognise it by the smug expression of someone who knows what’s good for you better than you do. It’s Gnosticism without the gnosis.
Nor is it just facial reactions. Lefties are keen to bewail the depth of the tragedy that has befallen the world. Reading their whingeing comments, one can be justified to think that the SS has come back and is rounding up all lefties. Hail to the Chief ought to be replaced with Heil Hitler.
The impression is strengthened by The Guardian’s call for “resistance”. I think the word they were looking for but for some reason didn’t find was ‘opposition’. That’s what political runners-up do in civilised societies. ‘Resistance’ evokes the images of Frenchmen wearing berets and shooting Nazi occupiers with Sten guns dropped by SOE planes.
What happened yesterday caught the ‘liberals’ by surprise, but I can’t imagine why. The result has been confidently predictable for quite some time.
Appearing on a New York podcast a fortnight ago, I broke my lifelong custom of never predicting election results. “Trump will win,” I said, “and he’ll win comfortably”.
My host, a MAGA Republican, said, “Well, yes, common sense would suggest…”. “Common sense has nothing to do with it,” I replied. “The polls say so, as long as you know how to read them.”
My plebiscitary prescience has been acquired not by an exercise of any extraordinary gifts, but simply by the experience of closely watching US elections from Nixon onwards. And extreme Left candidates only ever win there by subterfuge, when they successfully put on centrist airs.
Biden took the trouble of doing that in 2020 and won. Harris didn’t in 2024 and lost. Kamala didn’t even bother to conceal her unwavering allegiance to the NYT version of woke socialism – and her feeble grasp of the visceral instincts of Middle America.
She’d even introduce herself at mass rallies by informing the audience that her pronouns are she/her. Though I haven’t lived in the US for 36 years, that’s too short a time for Americans to have changed so much as to countenance such glossocratic power grab.
The electric-hybrid and Prosecco states bookending the continent on either coast predictably went for Harris. The more numerous pickup-truck and Bud states in between just as predictably didn’t.
Having played Cassandra once, I’m not going to do so again by trying to second-guess Trump’s policies. As everyone knows, he is rather unpredictable, although I imagine domestically he’ll try to do roughly the same things he did the first time around.
It’s his foreign policy that makes me look to the future with apprehension. Trump wasn’t a bad peacetime president, although he wasn’t quite the saviour of MAGA fantasy. However, the West is no longer at peacetime, and we can no longer make do with just a reasonably competent if eccentric administrator at the helm. We need a war leader, and that calls for a different DNA.
Churchill, for example, has few equals among statesmen who have ever led their countries at war. As a peacetime prime minister, on the other hand, he was unremarkable. Mind you, looking at our government today, I’d happily settle for unremarkable, but the fact remains: good at peace doesn’t necessarily mean good at war, and vice versa.
Speaking of Trump’s foreign policy, one obvious development requires no crystal ball to predict: Foreign Secretary Lammy can’t possibly remain in his job past Inauguration Day. Yes, I know our national pride can’t allow a foreign power to dictate our cabinet appointments. But needs must.
Trump doesn’t strike me as a magnanimous type who is likely to forgive the epithets Lammy has been throwing at him for years. A narcissist is like an elephant, and Trump will never forget Lammy’s vile insults, such as calling him a “neo-Nazi sociopath”, a “fascist” or a “KKK type”. Hence the poor chap won’t be welcome at Trump’s new home, and Britain needs America more than America needs Britain. Lammy should start looking to life on the backbenches or ideally out of public life altogether.
Unlike my New York host, I’m not overcome with joy. I’m only glad we’ve been spared the gloom of Kamala ‘She/Her’ Harris at the White House. However, under normal circumstances either candidate should only have been able to enter that building by going on a guided tour.
Yet our circumstances throughout the West are anything but normal. We are witnessing a tectonic shift in political strata, with the centre being crushed by the two extremes.
The seismic activity is brisk: the whole bulk of Western politics has been pushed so far out of kilter that the old notions of left, right and centre have lost whatever meaning they ever had. I’ll leave it for the wielders of such terminology to sort themselves out, but I only hope they’ll stop referring to the likes of Trump as conservatives.
Conservatism no longer has a reliable constituency anywhere in the West, which is why I can’t think offhand of a single Western leader who merits the conservative sobriquet. Yet it’s not only nature but also politics that abhors a vacuum. The space vacated by conservatives has been filled by radical right-wing demagogues.
What goes for right-of-centre conservatives also goes for left-of-centre socialists. Most of today’s Democratic (and Labour) politicians are closer to Lenin and Trotsky than to Humphrey or Gaitskell. And a clash of the two extreme poles is fraught with danger.
Newton’s Third Law says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This law works in politics too because the two extremes see each other not as opponents, friendly allies who happen to disagree on some points. They see each other as implacable enemies and act accordingly.
Hence, when one extreme emerges victorious, it seeks to expunge every trace of the other extreme’s policy. Such an action produces an equal and opposite reaction when the roles are reversed. No one minds how vindictive the reaction is and how many babies are thrown out with the bathwater.
Swift’s brilliant satire features Big-Endians and Little-Endians locked in eternal arguments about how best to break a boiled egg. The writer satirised his contemporaneous Tories and Whigs, pointing out in his lucid style how trivial the political differences between them were. We should have such risible problems, those typical of a civilised society.
The sharp polarisation of today’s politics is a characteristic of a disintegrating civilisation. Ever since the Girondists took their place right of the aisle at the National Assembly, and the Jacobins left of the aisle, Western civilisation – certainly including its political expression – has been coming apart.
The present clash between a right-wing demagogue and a left-wing nonentity incapable even of coherent demagoguery emphasises this point, drives it home with deafening force. Still, as I’ve been saying throughout the campaign, given the two extremes, sensible people should choose the more acceptable one.
Thus Americans have made the right choice, although I’m sorry that was the only choice on offer. The simulacra of their dilemma dominate the politics throughout what used to be the civilised world on either side of the Atlantic. So my congratulations have to be tinged with sadness.