I made no comment on Mr Trump before the American election partly because the Libertarian Alliance is a charity, and we must have no part in electoral politics. Mainly, though, I said nothing because, try as I could, I felt no enthusiasm for the bare possibility of second helpings of something that had not been so good the first time. In 2016, it was possible to take a most optimistic view of his election. It followed our own success in the European Referendum, and could be taken as the next and larger step in a revolution against a malign ruling class. But this is 2024, and Mr Trump in office was a firm disappointment. It may be that the experience of the last four years has radicalised him. It may be that he will this time avoid appointing people who see their job as voiding his various promises. Or perhaps he is simply out for revenge – which may amount to the same thing. But I will try to avoid enthusiasm this time until he has been in office for a year.
But he has won, and, if I can think of nothing positive to say about him, there are substantial negative benefits to his re-election. The first is that the Democrats are a dangerously nasty group of people, and the world is a better place when they are not immediately in charge of even a diminished superpower. Mr Trump will not abolish freedom of speech in America. He will not steal guns from the American people. He will at least try to avoid starting a war with Russia. These negatives are all good things for the rest of the world. The avoidance of war needs no explaining. But freedom of speech in even one English-speaking country goes far to countering the cruel censorship regimes in the others. As for the guns, it is a useful reminder for the rest of us that victim disarmament is not a natural state of affairs. Even if he does nothing particularly good, Mr Trump can be expected to do nothing particularly bad – and this, given the present state of world affairs, probably counts as something good.
But enough of America: my main interest is what Mr Trump’s return means for England. Back in 2016, we could hope for close friendship and cooperation between the two countries as they changed what had seemed their inevitable downward course. But that was before Mr Trump found himself dealing with an evil, stupid hag in Downing Street, and a cast of snooty incompetents in the Foreign Office. A more realistic hope now is that Mr Trump will, for the duration of his time in office, treat the British ruling class with some share of the venomous loathing it deserves from any man of reasonable intelligence.
Much has been made of what the British Foreign Secretary has said about Mr Trump – that he is “not only a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath. He is also a profound threat to the international order that has been the foundation of western progress for so long.” Or there is footage of Boris Johnson waving his arms in joy when the BBC made its lying announcement that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election. Or there are all the other public displays of contempt. I suggest, though, that too much has been made of all this. Mr Lammy is singularly stupid – he beats even the record for stupidity made in his office by Liz Truss; and she was impressively stupid. Mr Johnson was the worst Prime Minister since Churchill. But these are at best the front men of our ruling class. Britain is ruled by people of much greater evil; and these are people who hate Mr Trump and fear what he represents. No doubt, they took it for granted that their American counterparts would make sure he was never declared the winner of another election. They were wrong, and now they must pay the penalty.
And how does that help us? If sad, the answer is simple. Our ruling class is the third or fourth generation of a gang that has taken this country from the world’s hegemonic power to the world’s laughing stock. They have not done this from incompetence, but because it suited their own group interest. Running a great empire needs an imperial governing class that might compete for power. Better to get rid of the colonies and insist that the men who ran them were evil. Having a vast industrial base needs an industrial working class that has the confidence and ability to stand up for its own interests. Better to deindustrialise and turn the working class into a balkanised mass of ill-paid skivvies. I will not mention the four historic British nations, each with its individual solidarity and consciousness of ancestral rights. Those had to go as a matter of course. The British ruling class has what it has wanted since at least 1945 – a secure trading platform plus shops and the occasional fancy dress ball. The rest of us can shiver in whatever accommodation we can arrange, eating bugs and believing in absurdities.
A second Trump Presidency is as much a threat to this as it is to similar developments in America. Mr Trump may not deliberately sweep it away, but will be a cause of instability that prevents the system from working as it was designed. His presence allows for further happy accidents. It may give time for some as yet unformed new force that will sweep the system away. An immediate effect will be a frosting of relations between London and Washington. This will be good for the world, so far as fewer bombs will be dropped on brown people who have done nothing to deserve their violent deaths. It will be good, so far as our ruling class will be seen to be shunned. Our ruling class will have lost international prestige – and it is loss of international prestige that is one of the symptoms of a revolution.
Now, turning to an associated matter, I have been asked what I have against the Zelensky Regime in Kiev. My brief answer is that it is not in the interests of my people which post-Soviet ruling class possesses the Crimea and the Donbass, and I resent any force, internal or external, that seeks to involve my people in these matters. My longer answer is that I see the Russians and Chinese and Iranians as objective agents of liberation for my people. I have no illusions about their goodness or their likely intentions for me and mine. What I have seen, though, is a third of a century in which the British and American and associated ruling classes came close to fixing an unbreakable extractive domination over the entire world. The old European empires were established with much bloodshed, and maintained by means that fell short of the entirely just. On the other hand, they gave advantages on balance to the ruled that they could not have obtained for themselves. If it was never quite parcere subiectis et debellare superbos, the enterprise did have large elements of nobility and generosity. The New World Order is purely about money and the unlimited violence needed to keep the money flowing. The conquest of India was followed by the emergence of an anglicised middle class and the building of railways, the conquest of Iraq by a carnival of asset-strippers.
I will repeat – the “Axis of Resistance” is not a coalition of freedom fighters. The ruling classes in Moscow and Peking and Teheran have no concern for the welfare of my people, and little for the welfare of their own peoples. But they represent different and competing systems of misrule. The multipolarity they are working toward will be a world with hard national borders, behind which some countries can emerge or re-emerge as free nations. This is not, I will emphasise, to say what will happen – only what can happen. It cannot happen in the present order of things. Therefore, while we have no legitimate concern with what happens east of Slovakia, my people do have a legitimate interest in the defeat of the parasitic growth that has power in my country – in its defeat, or simply in a humiliation that may enable its later defeat. Once again, Mr Trump’s lack of desire for a war with Russia is useful. It buys time.
In closing, Mr Trump may have learned his lesson. This time in office, he may behave more like Lenin than Elmer Fudd. I am not holding my breath on that. At least, however, the cast of freaks and monsters employed to supervise his country’s drift into tyranny at home and a gigantic war abroad will have been cleared out. As said, that is something.
