"Trump’s triumph is likely to be fatal for Starmer’s socialistic vision of Britain"
Telegraph 7th November 2024: Allister Heath argues that this resounding triumph for Donald Trump is total repudiation of the Left’s brand of politics – and cataclysmic for Labour.
"America is now Trump country, at war with progressivism, open borders, international bureaucracies, net zero, Jihadism, military adventurism and the Left-wing media. The old order is dead, never to be resuscitated; for better or for worse, American politics has finally caught up with globalisation, deindustrialisation, the resurrection of history (contra Francis Fukuyama) and the internet’s explosive rise.
Donald Trump is 78, but he is a very modern politician with an intuitive grasp of how social fragmentation and the rise and fall of institutions can work for him. He has learnt to bypass network news and The New York Times. His brand of populist, multi-racial, working-class, highly online, Right-wing politics has captured the new centre-ground. It now looks as if 2016 was a mere dry run, derailed by Covid; 2024 is the real deal, a revolutionary moment, a reconstitution and realignment of American and Western politics around fresh principles, many excellent but some much more malign...
...Voters are crying out for a crackdown on crime. They don’t want mass illegal immigration, even if they are immigrants themselves. They hate inflation. They want higher wages. They believe in the American dream, and are sick of the Democratic party’s anti-Western self-loathing, its unwillingness to properly fight Islamism and absurd campus extremism, its hateful normalisation of anti-Semitism, its anti-meritocratic wokery, its rejection of biological reality when it comes to sex...
...For Keir Starmer, the EU and the West’s Left-wing elites more generally, the scale of Trump’s triumph, and the fact that his team is much more professional this time around, is an existential disaster, the greatest blow since Brexit..."