Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Though America is not my country, I have the right to some standing where American politics are concerned. Britain is a satellite state of America, and whoever rules in Washington has much power in London. A further consideration is that what may loosely be called “the right” is a joint American and English movement. Therefore, I hope my American friends will not be offended if I now comment on their politics as an outsider.

I was excited when Donald Trump stood for the Presidency in America. He ran a campaign of dark and glittering brilliance. Getting Monica Lewinsky along to one of his television debates with Hillary Clinton was one of those wonderful moments in politics when it seems that nothing will be the same again. Even better, though, were his campaign speeches. Here is the key quote from the whole series:

“Our great civilization, here in America and across the civilized world has come upon a moment of reckoning. We’ve seen it in the United Kingdom, where they voted to liberate themselves from global government and global trade deals, and global immigration deals that have destroyed their sovereignty and have destroyed many of those nations. But, the central base of world political power is right here in America, and it is our corrupt political establishment that is the greatest power behind the efforts at radical globalization and the disenfranchisement of working people. Their financial resources are virtually unlimited, their political resources are unlimited, their media resources are unmatched, and most importantly, the depths of their immorality is absolutely unlimited.”

What conservative or libertarian could not hear these words and be thrilled? The problem is that, once he was elected, Mr Trump did nothing to follow through on his policies. Now, I have had a number of sharp private exchanges on this claim with various American friends. How, they ask, am I able to say that he did “nothing”? He did X. He did Y. He started no new wars. All true, I agree—but of no strategic importance. Doubtless, there are tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of people alive today who would have been dead had Mrs Clinton won in 2016. But this, though important in itself, is of no strategic importance.

Mr Trump ruled like a man of modest income who decides to become a rich man. He spends his income and savings on a larger house and a nice car and fine clothes. For a while, he gives the appearance of wealth, but has none of the underlying substance of wealth. Mr Trump tried to do many things as President, but he believed that it was the November 2016 election that had given him the power to rule, and he never seemed to understand that real power derives from control of the machinery of government and from at least the neutrality of the media.

A President really committed to “draining the swamp” should have begun with a ruthless purge of the administration. By presidential decree, policies and whole departments should have been ended. His own people should have been put in charge of what was left, and these should have been told carry out their own purges and replacements. Classified information should have been published to bring discredit on all his predecessors. He should have gone into the 2018 elections with a list of his own approved candidates, and he should have campaigned for his people and against all the others. He should have used his own prerogative powers and the powers flowing from control of the administration to bring the big Internet companies to heel. They benefit from civil and criminal immunity on the grounds that they are just carriers—rather like the Post Office and the telephone companies—while using the fig leaf of “community standards” to run their enterprises like campaigning newspapers. All this being done, he could have allowed his revolution to proceed under its own momentum.

When I say he did nothing, this is what I have in mind. He seems to have appointed people who disagreed with him or despised him, and who did what they could to neutralise him. He did so little against the Internet companies that he stood by while his Twitter postings were censored. He complained about electoral corruption last November—after four years of potential control over the whole administration of his country. He may have lost because of a rigged election, but he had before then done little to deserve a victory.

The damage Mr Trump did to the right is not simply that he wasted an opportunity. He may have wasted the opportunity. He won in 2016 because the leftist rulers of his country and the West in general failed to realise the appeal of his campaign. They fought that election without feeling the need to use all their reserve power. They are now on their guard. They will show us what a real purge is. They will treat the past four years as the political equivalent of a vaccination. You can already see their antibodies at work against the enemies of their system. Mr Trump’s implosion may not be the end of our hopes. At the same time, I cannot see any chance in the near future of another electoral coup.

If there is any hope, it lies in the continued decline of American power in the world. I cannot relish the rise of China as a competing great power. Its internal government is even less a model of liberal democracy in the traditional sense than the parody of it that America has become. But anything that weakens American hegemony is objectively an enemy of what actually prevails in America and its satellites.

In particular, I welcome Mr Biden’s apparent hatred of England. The worst state of affairs for my country is one in which the American and British ruling classes are on terms of close friendship. The cool relations we enjoyed under Mr Obama allowed for the beginning of our departure from the European Union. Even cooler relations now that Mr Biden is given to brooding over the Potato Famine may allow us to reform ourselves without continual and effective nagging from Washington.

And that is my only comment on Mr Trump and the mess he has left behind because of his inattention to the reality of political change. I will end by suggesting that, had he read my book Cultural Revolution, Culture War, Mr Trump might now still be in the White House. You can read it for free here: https://www.seangabb.co.uk/cultural-revolution-culture-war-whole-text/ If you want to buy a hard copy, there are adequate pointers on the relevant page of my web site.

© 2021, seangabb. Reprinted from the website of Sean Gabb.