Welcome to Trumpton

by Brian Patrick Bolger (December 2024)

The US has a national debt of 36 trillion dollars which has accumulated sharply in the last few years. Revenue is estimated at approx. 4.2 trillion dollars this year. It doesn’t take a PhD in Fiscal Ruin to see the calamity ahead. Interest on the debt will be 23 trillion dollars per year. The partisan policy promises of both Trump and, earlier, Harris, are not based on economic reality. Money will be printed to stave off the inevitable whilst massive inflation (possibly above 50%) rocks the liberal democratic world. The harsh denouement of this macabre theatre of the absurd, is a future drastic cut in spending. This will adversely effect the poor. It will mean slashing benefits, pensions, Medicare and Medicaid. It means huge increases in income tax. The upshot will be catastrophic social unrest. This will have a knock on effect to Europe where the economies, especially Germany, are almost in recession. This will not be a temporary blip: it will be a permanent feature of western democracies. There is no doubt a structural shift to the Orient.

Trumpton was the old British 1970s children’s TV programme featuring an idyllic town ‘Trumpton’ where there was no crime and the cute little shops all functioned, the trains ran on time, there was a Clockmaker, a Milliner and a Mayor. It was just before capitalism’s glory days began to fade, when we had strikes and punk rock and Mrs Thatcher. The rest, as they say, is history. Trumpton, the American dream, is no more. The aging population, an aging workforce, deindustrialisation and outsourcing to China, has turned Trumpton into Dante’s Inferno. The ‘Trumpton Effect’ will be in Europe sooner than later.

The realpolitik in foreign policy then will mean that supporting the Ukraine will end. Europe will have to go it alone. It was the statesman of ‘realpolitik,’ Bismarck, who asserted that ‘Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.’ Yet now, in 2024, war is a commonplace. Not just of the traditional knightly type, i.e., against other soldiers, but it is a war versus civilians, across the globe. It is an era of Keynesian war for the Orient. Europe produces weapons, then exports them. The root cause of today’s debacle is not Putin or Kim. It is the weakness of a grubby cohort of European leaders and bureaucrats. Bismarck’s founding of the Reich in 1871 was not so much to increase German power per se. It was to protect itself of the possible aggrandisement of its neighbours. European bureaucrats, mired in a self serving circus of grants and corruption, employ the latest green trend or fad to avoid existential matters or choices. It was no wonder that Bismarck was surrounded by his beloved Great Danes. Better them than the nauseous spectacle of todays European poodles. This week’s revelations that the only beneficiaries of EU Farming subsidies are a few billionaires, comes as no surprise[1].

The recent Kiel Institute (Germany) report on the military situation in Europe is alarming[2].We are not only sleepwalking into war, but almost comatose in a melange mix of woke and green policies. Decarbonisation by 2050, the policy of the EU, is merely rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. At the present rate of procurement of military stock, it would take Germany 100 years to revert even to 2004 levels. Whilst Britain fiddles over the question of another battleship ( i.e., two rather than one), China and Russia have embarked on a Keynesian policy of war production. The institute concludes:

A long-term European armament strategy is needed. Germany and Europe need to focus on speed in procurement, on cost effectiveness through economies of scale in an integrated European market, on innovation, and on technological superiority. Tracking military rearmament is essential to the security of the continent.

This is hugely optimistic. In fact, all the goals of the EU set out by the EU is the antithesis of long term planning. José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission had described the European Union 20 years ago as an ‘Empire.’ Unfortunately, Empires have two choices to survive the Spenglerian torrents of history. They can militarise and utilise their expanding dominion and its human and material resources. This was the nature of the Roman Empire, the British Empire.  Then the Empire strikes back. Unless it has a coalescing civilisational glue, things , as Yeats reminded us, fall apart … eventually. The Chinese model, one of soft loans and soft colonialism, operates with a solidifying glue, as the satellite states develop notions of dependence. Chinese policy unfurls in the long term, independent as it is on the whims of four year parliaments.

Western societies have abandoned pluralist consensus for partisan policies. Populist movements in Europe reflect the discontent. Riots in Britain, riots in Trumpton. Britain’s Trumpton has morphed into a crime ridden, authoritarian safeguarding state. Safeguarding being another term for ‘control’. The little Butchers shop, the Florist have all gone. Now a few corporate supermarkets celebrate ‘Black History Month.’ Sainsbury’s has a board member responsible for ‘ethnicity, religion and belief.’ What a huge remit. Amidst the righteousness at work in the corporate world, however, is a process of ‘Realeconomic.’ Despite Nike and Apple being implicated in forced labour issues in China[3], Corporate woke is part and parcel of an economy of righteousness. However, inflicting this type of cultural paternalism on people has its negative kickback. This is highly visible in the European victories for conservative parties. The kickback now, with Trump, in the US is visceral. It is a lesson against proselytizing amidst a cost of living crisis. It seems Starmer’s government will be slow to learn the lesson as it kicks on with more and more prescriptive laws against one thing or the other. There is a cultural paradox in both the US and Britain. Despite the policies of liberal elites, the majority of people want stricter borders, tough on crime and a neutral social and cultural sphere. The British, by nature, just aren’t contrarian. The ‘National Trust’ (organisation for parks and gardens) tells us the countryside is racist. Welsh ministers say they want Wales to be ‘racist free’ by 2030.  Whilst Trumpton rots, however, there will be the need to drop all this and concentrate on existential issues such as defence and economy. A cloud of idiocy engulfs the west. The sun is rising in the East. The Trump victory is the harbinger of things to come.

[1] https://www.irishexaminer.com/farming/arid-41508986.html
[2] https://www.ifw-kiel.de/publications/fit-for-war-in-decades-europes-and-germanys-slow-rearmament-vis-a-vis-russia-33234/
[3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-02/aspi-uyghur-china-forced-labour-report/12017650

Table of Contents

Brian Patrick Bolger LSE, University of Liverpool. He has taught political philosophy and applied linguistics in Universities across Europe. His articles have appeared in the US, the UK, Italy, Canada and Germany in magazines such as The Independent, The Times, The American Spectator, Asian Affairs, Deliberatio, L’Indro Quotidiano Indipendente di Geopolitica, The National Interest, GeoPolitical Monitor, Merion West, Voegelin View, The Montreal Review, The European Conservative, Visegrad Insight, The Hungarian Review, The Salisbury Review, The Village, New English Review, The Burkean, The Daily Globe, American Thinker, The Internationalist, and Philosophy News. His new book, Nowhere Fast: Democracy and Identity in the Twenty First Century, is published now by Ethics International Press. He is an adviser to several Think Tanks and Corporates on Geopolitical Issues.

Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast