Trump turns the tide

By Conrad Black

The entire political atmosphere in the United States has miraculously changed: the ludicrous lamentations about possible violence have come to nothing, and there have not been any allegations of election irregularities. The new administration has a clear majority, and a seat change has occurred down to sweeping out the criminal-coddling district attorney of Los Angeles and evicting the inept Democratic mayors of San Francisco and Oakland. The ballots are still being counted, but so far, it appears that the Democratic majority in California has shrunk by more than two million in 2024, and, in New York, by almost one million, and the Republican majorities in Texas and Florida have both
grown very substantially. More tellingly, although Trump’s vote has increased by almost two million since 2020, the Democratic popular vote has decreased by approximately eight million, which may be partly explained by the extensive use of harvested ballots in 2020. We will never know for sure but I would argue Trump may be the only U.S. president except Franklin D. Roosevelt to have won three consecutive elections.

The appointment of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to try to identify US$2 trillion (C$2.8 trillion) of government spending reductions is a magnificent and long overdue assault on overbearing and bloated government that almost the entire world could, and probably will, emulate. Woke is dead, and after the Barack Obama-originated orgy of divining systemic racism everywhere and endlessly subdividing American society into huddled groups agitating noisily, either from guilt or confected resentment of the abuses of white privilege, Trump has raised the American flag like the U.S. Marines at Iwo Jima as an emblem of qualified pride and national self-respect.

This can and should be seen as the triumph of the trend that will sweep the democratic world. After our bloodless but overwhelming strategic victory in the Cold War, the West was beset by a sense of unworthiness and self-reproachfulness. Despite being routed, the international left astutely clambered aboard the environmental bandwagon, which, 35 years ago, was an authentic movement for conservation and pollution-reduction, and converted it into a juggernaut assaulting capitalism from a new angle in the name of saving the planet. This gigantic fraud has finally collided with the refusal of democratic electorates to make the unsustainable sacrifices in disposable income that the programs for zero carbon emission targets require. This process is contemporaneous with increasing evidence that the dangers of climate change have been exaggerated to provoke public fear and drive support for action. The United States is about to pass under the influence of an administration that considers the climate threat is vastly overblown. It was a faddish cause that is no longer fashionable or even plausible as the existential threat it was claimed to be.

The post-Cold War era of critical introspection has yielded to a resuscitation of western self-respect and recognition that western capitalist democracy has been the principal engine for civilized progress in practically all forms since the rise of the nation-state 500 years ago. Uniquely in modern history, we have been led in this direction by Italy with its governing Italian Brotherhood led naturally by a woman, the agile Giorgia Meloni. Since Italy was probably the most poorly governed of all the major western countries in the postwar years, it is appropriate that it should be the first to pursue a path of dissent from the practice of compulsive involutional fault-finding.

But the earthshaking election in the United States last week signals a general change of course in the West. The collapse of the ramshackle German coalition between Social Democrats, militant Greens and the bourgeois conservative Free Democrats will lead to a new German election, apparently in two months. In German terms, this will be as great a watershed as last week’s American election. Germany has been the most powerful country in Europe since it was unified by Bismarck in 1871, but the only period in the intervening years when it acted responsibly in that role was until Bismarck was abruptly fired by the man-child emperor Wilhelm II in 1890. He was an irresponsible monarch and was more blameworthy than anyone else in the terrible hecatomb of the First World War. Germany, defeated, then behaved responsibly, but was weak and sullen under the Weimar Republic until 1933. Then, despite being one of the world’s most distinguished civilizations, Germany began its descent into hell under the Third Reich, 1933-1945, and wrought total aggressive war across Europe and unspeakable mass atrocities. After four years of occupation, the Federal Republic was born, and it has been an exemplary democracy, but heavily cocooned in alliance with the other principal democracies in NATO and the European Union. It is possible that in January a more self-confident German government could emerge, which will deploy the inherent strength of that country in positive leadership of Europe towards a greater and more independent influence in the world. Certainly, the Davos-inspired Euro-federalism of Brussels is fading. The election will also be an opportunity to test the new German left under Sahra Wagenknecht, a somewhat glamorous socialist who feels the traditional forest murmurs and wishes to withdraw from NATO in favour of an alliance with Russia.

There is little doubt that in 11 months, Canada will emancipate itself from the Peter Pan, pacifist, world-fraternal, post-national, zero-economic-growth fantasies of the current federal government and exchange it for authentic and creative conservatism. And it appears likely that 18 months after that, France, which never keeps the same political parties for long, will conclude that the Ralliement National is adequately housetrained at last and elevate it to fill the place of the Gaullist nationalist but pro-western-alliance conservatives in France. Because the United Kingdom produced five failed Conservative prime ministers in seven years, it had to do its penance with the Labour party, which is off to one of the clumsiest launches in living memory in any serious democracy. No previous British Labour prime minister except Tony Blair has won consecutive full-term elections, and the new British leader, Keir Starmer, shows every promise of being ejected in four years and of bringing Britain into line behind Italy, the U.S., Germany, Canada and France in this promising new conservative era. The new Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, is the the first authentic conservative in that position since Margaret Thatcher.

All of these principal western countries and a number of smaller ones also are responding in similar ways and for similar reasons to the need for better, more sensible, government. It is often difficult to discern, but we will all show that democracy does work, even though, as Winston Churchill famously said, it is the worst system except for all the others.

First published in the National Post