Thanksgiving Day 2024 offers a most appropriate occasion to express my relief at Donald Trump’s solid victory and the Republican capture of both houses of Congress. The Obama-inspired “leading from behind” in international affairs, coupled with its pro-Iranian bias and its promotion of the victimary extremes of Wokism, could not have continued for another presidential term without disastrous consequences. And so this year’s result turned out to be one more confirmation of Winston Churchill’s judgment of Western republican/democracy as “the worst system in the world except for all the others” (WSWEATO), operating just when we needed to shift our course before going over a cliff.
I had originally thought of Nikki Haley as the best candidate for 2024, and I’m sure she would have made a fine president, but particularly after his narrow escape from the poorly defended attempt on his life, it became obvious that Trump was the only appropriate candidate for the Republican Party. Charisma combines the three qualities of greatness in Shakespeare’s famous line from Twelfth Night: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” In Trump’s case, all three criteria were at work, but having one’s ear pierced by an assassin’s bullet does quite a bit of thrusting.
Indeed, perhaps the simplest way to understand the proliferation of démocratures in our era is its capture, not by charismatic leaders like Hitler or Mao, but by tyrannical political institutions, Communist or similar party apparatuses powerful enough to imprison and kill any charismatic opponents, such as the late Andrei Navalny.
In a truly democratic system, as the USA still is in a pinch, such institutional oppression, as we have been fortunate to discover, is still impossible in the long term. Reaffirming this proof, even more than electing Trump, was the greatest gift given us by his election; a country that could be influenced and/or cheated into electing his opponent in this critical time truly risked passing the point of no return.
Trump’s reversal of the Democrats’ century-long domination of the “working class” put an end to the increasingly false opposition between the Democratic “party of the people” and the Republican “party of the privileged” that the Roosevelt era had made credible, and of which Truman’s victory over Dewey in 1948 seemed the perfect demonstration. Today’s Democrats represent not only the federal bureaucracy (the Swamp) but the Wokeness-infested degree-holders and their corporate masters, for whom support for “intersectional” minorities from blacks to transgenders offers the opportunity to eat away from the safety of their gated homes at the traditionally self-policing fabric of daily life.
The surfeit of virtue-signaling and DEI-mongering that offers benefits to minorities at the price of defining them as victims had reached caricatural proportions; trans-men, almost always with their genitals intact, winning women’s swim meets, races, volleyball games, even boxing matches (at the price of injuries), are anything but a demonstration of true egalitarianism. Wokeness, as I have previously pointed out, is an extreme development of the epistemology of resentment in which one “takes the part” of the “oppressed” in order to reaffirm one’s own privileges through Tartuffian virtue-signaling.
But this is describing the past; what does Trump’s victory herald for the future?
What leftists hate about Trump is, one might say, his TRiUMPhalism, his refusal to pretend to mask his superior qualities in false humility. For in general, the left praises victimary self-affirmation in preference to the heroic performance of humanitarian deeds—making an example of a transgendered person for courageously “coming out” rather than of the fireman or soldier for saving lives at the risk of his own. Ultimately in the world of Wokeness, all rights belong to the victimary class and its defenders—whose own personal advantages thereby lose any need for justification.
The intensity of the barrage of publicity for this position, given the unanimity of the mass media—all the more sinister because not imposed from above—had seemed to equate it with common sense. Thus the fact that the “democratic process” was able to overcome this unanimous propaganda backed by billions of dollars and decades of public prestige offered a much-needed demonstration that “government by, for, and of the people” is still the WSWEATO—or more simply, that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
Whether or not he is really the world’s richest man, Elon Musk is clearly the unrivaled leader of tech entrepreneurs. Getting that rocket back in the tower on the launchpad was an achievement that had escaped NASA and its governmental competitors. However much the new DOGE headed by Musk and Ramaswamy will be able to thin out the Washington bureaucracy, the fact that private enterprise still shows itself to be more inventive than government agencies is one more demonstration that our “capitalist” system is superior to its various authoritarian competitors.
And Trump’s victory should serve to remind us that, aside from making life far more livable than any of these authoritarian systems, “capitalism,” and by extension, Western civilization, is still the WSWEATO on the economic and potentially the military front as well, provided we don’t allow ourselves to get soft and fancy that we can pusillanimously substitute words for actions.
At this point, concerning the election, no more need be said. One can speculate on future events, but the bottom line is that, having learned with relief that our system’s temporary corruption was not a permanent decadence, we can now let the political process continue on its way without burdening it with our words of wisdom. GA may explain better than before how language and the sacred came about, but it cannot predict the future, beyond expressing its confidence in our system and the administration it has voted into office.