Joe Biden gave the game away when he described Donald Trump’s supporters as “garbage” on 29 October, in the final days of Kamala Harris’s campaign. Presidential aides edited the transcript of his remarks by inserting apostrophes, suggesting they referred to a speaker at a pro-Trump Madison Square Garden rally rather than the majority of voters who have since given the former president a second term. Trump reacted by donning an orange safety vest and driving a garbage truck into a rally in Wisconsin, where he was greeted by followers in similar garb. Future historians may record the episode as a premonitory tremor of the landslide to come.
Even as he trashed Harris’s campaign, Biden voiced a sentiment felt by many progressive liberals. Dumbfounded by Trump’s indestructible popularity, they revile their fellow citizens who voted for him as ugly, irrational, unthinking creatures. Morally immaculate and blameless, the hyper-liberals that led the Democrats to devastating defeat are tragic victims of American racism and sexism.
No one questions the reality of these forces, but in the event the election turned on class. Despairing and dying in the urban wastelands, America’s industrial workers were abandoned as the useless casualties of progress. A new class of graduate “knowledge workers” marched joyfully to a radiant future. The seismic shifts of 2016 were a blip, and history was back on track.
Instead it was progressive rule that was the blip. Trump’s second coming marks a historic turning point, comparable in its geopolitical consequences with the Soviet collapse: the definitive end of a liberal world order. With regime change in the US, countries that relied on American protection face an unavoidable choice: arm and defend themselves, or else make peace with the rising authoritarian powers. There is no going back.
The domestic impact of Trump’s administration will be equally irreversible. When he first entered the White House he lacked a cadre – henchmen and women who shared his “America First” ideology. Today there are thousands of them, primed for government by the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think tanks. He may not implement the full programme set out in the 900-plus pages of the Heritage Project 2025, which he claims – no doubt accurately – not to have read. But he will certainly adopt its key recommendations for re-engineering the American state, which include turning the executive branch of federal government into an instrument of presidential power and controlling or abolishing a host of federal agencies. At the time of writing, he was a whisker away from controlling both houses of Congress. Having picked three conservative Supreme Court judges, he will aim to install more as liberal appointees retire. When he reaches the end of his term, the US will be another country. By then his vice-president, JD Vance, will be a seasoned political operator, strongly positioned to continue the remaking of government. America’s constitutional checks and balances were designed to prevent a single party or individual monopolising power – but constitutions come and go. The upshot will not be a short-lived rerun of interwar fascism, but more enduring: a systematically constructed and deeply embedded illiberal democracy.
The last best liberal hope is now “Europe” – not the Europe that actually exists, but a talismanic symbol clutched to block out a darkening continent. Parties of the right and ultra-right are gaining in power and influence nearly everywhere. After the presidential election scheduled in April 2027, France will likely be led by Marine Le Pen or her charismatic protégé Jordan Bardella. The sinister Alternative for Germany is becoming a deciding force. Anti-Semitic pogroms are returning, with King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands comparing the failure of the Dutch state to protect Israeli soccer fans – who were involved in sustained clashes with Ajax supporters in Amsterdam on 6 and 7 November – to his country’s failure to defend the Jewish community in the Second World War. The end of the European dream is shaping up to be more gruesome than anything that may happen in Trump’s America.
The Starmer government is out of its depth and visibly floundering. David Lammy and Angela Rayner may try to walk away from what they have said about him in the past, but the American president-elect knows Labour regards him with mistrust and disdain. Grovelling phone calls will not allay his suspicions, though he may be mollified if a humbled delegation makes a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kneel and kiss the ring of power. He will not forget the efforts of party activists to boost the campaign of his opponent, nor will he forgive the Prime Minister if he declines to invite him to address parliament. Elon Musk, whose social media company X was reportedly targeted by an anti-hate group linked with senior Labour figures, looks like he will be pivotal in the new administration. He will hardly be well disposed to the government.
Great upheavals are inevitable. Trump’s threat to withdraw from Nato may be a bargaining move meant to force Europe to bear more responsibility for its defence, but rearmament takes time. An abrupt end to the Ukraine war that allows Vladimir Putin to keep territory he seized during his invasion risks unravelling European security overnight. Coupled with colossal and rising levels of federal debt, American protectionism could trigger a catastrophic trade war and another financial crisis, a scenario particularly damaging for the UK. Sky-high tariffs mooted against China might not materialise, but they could be the prelude to a deal in which Taiwan is ceded to Xi Jinping. There will be no transition to net zero. The only lasting result of conferences like the Cop29 junket Ed Miliband is attending in Azerbaijan will be scores of deserted luxury hotels, abandoned as Trump once again withdraws the US from climate change treaties.
The collapse of the liberal order comes chiefly from overreach by American liberals. The charade in which Biden was ousted illustrates their fatal weakness. They believe their own legends. The Harris who campaigned for the presidency, less credible as a candidate than Biden, was a media simulacrum which evaporated on the night of the election. The Democrat insiders who invented the Harris facade, led by Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, sealed the fate of the regime they sought to renew.
Perpetual wars were a big part of liberal overreach. The campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq were fiascos that destroyed public support for overseas military intervention, probably for a generation. For many who voted for him, Trump was an anti-war candidate. If he sticks to a realist, transactional foreign policy, it will avoid ruinous neoconservative crusades, but may also generate further conflict. He will surely seek vengeance against Iran for its apparent involvement in a plot to assassinate him. With Putin emboldened by a dirty peace in Ukraine, a wider European war becomes more likely. The Baltic states and Poland are actively preparing for such an eventuality. Whatever happens in Europe, Trump may not much care.
The decisive overreach was in America itself. For enough of the electorate, revulsion against the excesses of hyper-liberalism prevailed over women’s fear of losing abortion rights and the prospect of Trumpian tyranny. Memories of a better economy were more compelling than prophecies of an imminent fascist takeover. No one concerned about the uncontrolled influx across the southern border believed a Harris administration would do anything effective to stem it.
At present, liberalism is not so much a political philosophy as a chronic form of cognitive dissonance. It seems progressives lack the capacity to learn from experience – which is the necessary precondition of progress. The psychological shock Trump’s triumphant return has inflicted on them will be profoundly dislocating – far more so than that of Brexit, which unhinged so many. Oscillating between paroxysms of grief at their injured virtue and unconvincing professions of invincible hope, they preserve their sanity by denying the mortifying truth. The world they made and thought they understood is irretrievable, and it was they who lost it.
Rather than acknowledging the origins of post-liberal America in the ravages of liberal globalisation, they dismissed the communities it destroyed as redoubts of white privilege. Adopting radical positions on transgender issues outraged traditionalist defenders of the family and confirmed the realignment of American workers and ethnic minorities with the Republican Party, while alienating classical feminists and defenders of gay equality. One reason Trump’s victory was so sweeping is that the liberalism on which he waged war is so relentlessly crankish. Hillary Clinton was almost conservative in comparison.
The reaction to the election has revealed progressive elites possessed by myths. For many who opted for him, their vote was a considered choice between conflicting interests, values and dangers. (The same is true of many who voted for Harris.) For hyper-liberals, the election was an apocalyptic struggle between darkness and light. In an age of scientism, it was predictable that they should turn to numbers for reassurance that the battle could be won. With all their high-tech mathematical models, the pollsters proved no better oracles than they were in 2016. The hosts of “knowledge workers” mass-produced by ideologically captured universities were exposed as knowing nothing. The future of this class is bleak.
Liberalism was not always the solipsistic orthodoxy it is today, but it is doubtful whether the current generation of liberals can recover the capacity for self-criticism. Still, something will be learned. As they rail against a cruel world, they will discover what it means to be dumped like rubbish on the wrong side of history.
[See also: The world according to Trump]
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This article appears in the 13 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump World