Trump destroys the West

Our dismal hopes expire

Photo by Max Letek on Unsplash

At a moment like ours, just as the Second World War was about to begin, W.H. Auden was in New York and wrote how

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade

It’s too early to head for a dive, although I wish I could. But it’s not too early to despair at the triumph of the low, dishonest Trump movement.

Before I go any further, I must apologise to readers. I normally pride myself on being the most miserable pessimist in town. But, as you may have noticed, in the past few days I convinced myself that Kamala Harris would win.

I could not believe that tens of millions of otherwise decent Americans would vote for a man like Donald Trump.

Which only goes to teach me that I should always, always expect the worst.

The recriminations on the American liberal-left will last for months. What am I saying? They will last for years.

Because I have spent time fighting the far left and arguing against its authoritarianism, I have sympathy for writers who say that wokeness has made ordinary people view progressives as a source of oppression.

The first reaction of the political theorist Yascha Mounck to Trump’s victory was that citizens’ trust in institutions was shattered by their insistence that they subscribe to a series of highly tendentious propositions from white racial guilt to the denial of the reality of biological sex.

So bad has it got that, in Pennsylvania, many voters saw Harris as a greater threat to democracy than Trump.

“We must admit that the wound is to a significant degree self-inflicted. A small cadre of extreme activists obsessed with an identitarian vision of the world—a vision that pretends to be left-wing but in many ways parallels the tribalist worldview that has historically characterized the far-right—has gained tremendous influence over the last years. And even those institutional insiders who were able to keep this influence at bay through clever rearguard actions were rarely willing to oppose them in explicit terms. This was one of the most consequential vulnerabilities of Kamala Harris’ campaign.”

Attractive though I find the “go woke, go broke” argument – not least because it confirms my prejudices, and we all like arguments that do that – it is not a sufficient explanation.

If you are looking for personal failures, don’t blame Kamala Harris’s inability to stand by gender-critical feminism, but look at Joe Biden.

His reputation is about to be shredded. He and his wife ought to have had the sense to realise in 2022 that he was far too old to run again. He ought to have announced his intention to retire and given his party time to find the best candidate.

As it was, like an American Lear, Biden demanded flattery.

Americans had had enough of Biden, not only that he was far too old for the presidency, but because he presided over the great inflation of 2022. Like incumbent governments all over the world, the Democrats have learned the hard way that voters the world over loathe inflation.

It hurts nearly everyone. And those it benefits strike the rest of the population as profiteers getting rich at their expense.

“The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose” wrote J.M. Keynes in 1919, and that is still true today.

The public does not forgive that destruction or forget it.

I would not normally worry too much about American elections. I would feel for all who will suffer from Trump’s victory, of course. But US voters have made their choice and must live with the consequences.

But then I stop and think about Ukrainian soldiers on the front line and civilians hiding from Russian attacks. What on earth must they feel?

Before the election Donald Tusk, prime minister of Poland, said that Europe could defend itself and the time for outsourcing our security to the US was over.

On paper, of course we can defend ourselves. Why should a rich continent of 450m need help seeing off a gangster state, with a population of 120m and an economy the size of Italy’s?

But the EU is divided, and Putin has his Trojan horses inside its walls. It has no coordinated military force. The UK left at the worst possible moment, and I do not see how US leadership and intelligence gathering can be replaced.

If Trump gives Russia a free hand, where does it stop? More to the point how do we stop it?

The West we knew for all of our lives is over now. Ukrainians will be the first to suffer the consequences but they won’t be the last.

Auden continued

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Elderly rubbish is indeed everywhere. As for mismanagement and grief, they will follow shortly.

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