Make no mistake—behind their forced congratulations, most European leaders are in a state of shock and horror about Donald Trump’s historic election as the 47th president of the United States of America.
In private, many probably share the lunatic view of Britain’s Labour foreign secretary, David Lammy, who once called President Trump “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath.”
The current mood at the top of the European Union was captured by Politico, bible of the Brussels oligarchy, whose pre-election headline warned that the return of the populist ex-president would be “Europe’s Trumpian Nightmare.”
Yet the very fact that the EU’s left-liberal political and media elites are so horrified by Trump’s win should surely fill the rest of us with hope. Whatever those unrepresentative EU oligarchs think, Trump’s triumph is no nightmare for the peoples of Europe.
Indeed, outside the Brussels ‘bubble,’ there seem good reasons for millions of Europeans to share the genuine enthusiasm expressed by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who hailed Trump’s “beautiful” comeback victory over Democratic Party candidate Kamala Harris.
First and foremost, Trump’s election marked a victory for popular democracy against the anti-democratic forces of the U.S. establishment.
They demanded the courts bar Trump from even standing for election, to deny Americans the democratic choice to vote for him. They removed the doddery President Joe Biden from the Democratic Party ticket, in defiance of the 14 million Democrats who selected him in the primaries, and replaced him with Harris, who precisely nobody had voted for.
Throughout the campaign, they slandered Trump as a “fascist,” a “Nazi,” an “authoritarian populist” and a “threat to democracy itself.” All of these insults were really aimed at deriding and disciplining the disobedient voters who were threatening to support Trump.
In the through-the-looking-class world of contemporary politics, these elitists can even claim to be “defending democracy” by trying to contain and restrict it. They see the two classical elements of democracy, as defined by the ancient Athenians—demos, the people, and kratos, power—as in conflict, and aim to keep one as far away from the other as possible.
Democrats have tried to wave away President Biden’s instantly infamous declaration that Trump supporters are “garbage” as some sort of misquote. In fact it was entirely consistent with the establishment’s view of many American voters, going back to Hilary Clinton branding Trump voters as the “deplorables” in the 2016 election. You need not be an admirer of Trump to recognise that the real threat to democracy comes from above, not below.
Yet in the face of the hostility of the political establishment and the lies of the mainstream media, millions of ordinary Americans defiantly rallied to Trump’s cause. They did so, too, in defiance of the elites’ religion of identity politics.
Everybody from the Obamas downwards demanded that American minorities and women must all automatically vote for the mixed-race female Harris, regardless of her qualities as a politically vacuous technocrat. Instead, the surge of support for Trump among minority groups and young people demonstrated how a popular democratic movement—far wider than the old Republican Party—can unite people across such artificial sectional lines.
Trump’s victory against the power of the liberal establishment is the latest high point in the worldwide populist revolt. We have seen the wave of support for national sovereigntist parties in European elections. Now the U.S., which more than a century ago helped give birth to populism as a positive movement rather than an elitist insult, has fallen to the democratic populist impulse.
This is just the start. Across the West politics is being turned upside down as millions declare that enough is enough. It should inspire Europeans to go further in demanding change.
But there are fierce battles to come. Already we can see the embittered liberal elites issuing hysterical warnings about fascism in the White House, and trying to organise to overthrow the Trump administration before he even takes office.
Shortly before the election, two Harvard professors of government used the elitist platform of the New York Times effectively to call for corporate chief executives, religious leaders and other top Americans to lead a counter-revolt against a Trump presidency—a coup presented as “democracy’s last bastion of defence,” of course. To save U.S. democracy from itself, it appears the elites need to hold the will of the demos in check. Which might sound to some a bit like that U.S. army major in Vietnam reported by journalist Peter Arnett as explaining how “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.”
Of course, President-elect Trump will have to prove himself a worthy champion of the movement that elected him, for example by making good on his pledge to give wholehearted support to Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, in its war against Islamist barbarism.
But there can be no denying that the populist revolt which has put Trump back in the White House represents the great hope for the future of Western societies, by putting the demos back into democracy.
