There’s a good piece up at American Greatness by Edward Ring about the War on Trump: “Trump and the Fate of Western Civilization.”
Ring talks about how it isn’t just Trump in the USA.
Trump represents a movement. It is bigger than him, and it is bigger than MAGA. Trump and MAGA have counterparts all over the world, especially in Europe.
People “don’t want their national cultures destroyed, and they don’t want their standard of living destroyed.” E.g., by immigration, and by NetZero.
The world rulers refer to this movement as the “far right.” What does that mean?
To summarize: We’re too white, and the oceans are going to boil. If you object, you’re a racist and a “denier.”
Why do the rulers want mass immigration? Because they sense that they need more poor people to vote for gubmint programs. Why do the rulers want to fight climate change? Because every ruling class gotta have a war, and in the age of nuclear weapons, a war on climate is so much safer. The rulers think.
The result of this regime and its agenda of mass immigration and climate change is that the rich get richer — because all the cool government-subsidized climate projects — and the poor stay poor and the middle class faces headwinds because of the labor competition from immigrants and the impoverishment enforced by the climate change agenda.
The other point is the use of the radical left as regime foot-soldiers.
But the economic dead-end that everyone in the West now faces has been sold to the left as the last gasps of a racist and privileged white middle class sucking the life out of an exhausted planet. Their solution? Redistribution.
Like that’s going to help! But I think the point is to give the radical left an enemy to fight. Because there is no politics without an enemy. The radical left believes in politics as a religion, so the rulers sensibly give them an enemy to fight. And call it “mostly peaceful protest.”
The regime is perfectly happy with AntiFa harassing Christians and with pro-Gaza protesters harassing Jews, and with Just Stop Oil protesters stopping traffic. But don’t you dare try an armed insurrection at the Capitol in Washington, DC!
But the problem is that the middle class gets screwed by this, as we see. With spiraling energy prices from the curtailing of “fossil fuel” use and spiraling home prices from the urbanist movement that wants to regulate suburbia out of existence and force everyone to live in cities and use mass transit.
And there is the little problem of western women that aren’t having enough children. But if life were more affordable would it make a difference?
If people could more easily afford to start families, would women choose to do so? Or would they still prefer their careers?
I think that, at some point, western women will decide that marriage and children is much better than career, which is a guy thing. But that day is not yet.
So, my Real Simple understanding of the world of politics is that we have a ruling class with a political formula that sees itself as fighting against oppression. Problem is that it is making things worse for the oppressed and is converting the ordinary middle class that was neither oppressed nor oppressor into an oppressed class of deplorables. It is breaking up the cultures of the European-based nations with reckless immigration. And it is wrecking the economy with a war against climate change.
The people most directly damaged by the ruling class, the ordinary middle class, have slowly coalesced into the world-wide movement that we know today as populist nationalism and our liberal friends deplore as “far right” racism. I believe that in America this movement started with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 with the votes of the Silent Majority. Nixon was run out of town on a rail, but was replaced by Ronald Reagan in 1980 with the votes of the Reagan Democrats. Then, in the Presidency of Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich in 1994 created a Republican Congress with his Contract with America. Then, in the Presidency of Barack Obama a movement called the Tea Party in 2010 created another Republican Congress. Then, of course, out of nowhere came Donald Trump in 2016 who reinvented the Republican Party that was once known as the party of the country club as a party of the ordinary middle class.
Now we see that populist nationalism is not just an American movement but a Europe-wide movement, as the ordinary middle class experiences the same injustices from the same educated ruling class, all over the world.
Nobody knows how it will turn out. But I suspect we have not seen that last of the ordinary middle class. All over the world.