To listen to some of my London friends, you would think that Donald Trumps re-election to a second term as president is the prelude to the Apocalypse.
Many in Britain seem almost absurdly fearful of him.
While in opposition, senior members of the Labour shadow cabinet – including the Foreign Secretary David Lammy – famously bad-mouthed Trump as a tyrant in a toupee, a racist and KKK/neo-Nazi sympathiser, and a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath among other things.
Now that Trump is back, an embarrassed Keir Starmer is doing his best to sweep these insults into the memory hole. But the truth is that a huge proportion of Britons still think these things – and worse – about Trump.
Kamala Harris concedes the election at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
If Britain were the 51st state, Kamala Harris would have won it 68 per cent to 32 per cent, according to poll aggregator Europe Elects – thats a bigger margin than she won in any of the blue states the Democrats held on Tuesday night.
Even in the Daily Mail – hardly Left-leaning – a fellow columnist was unenthused about Trumps victory.
Stephen Glover wrote on Thursday that he was profoundly depressed. There is good reason to believe that Trump will be bad for America, the world and Britain.
He called Trump a convicted felon who incited an insurrection, a liar, a cheat and a foul-mouthed braggart.
Well, as someone who has spent much of the past eight years living under Democratic Party rule in California (which ended with a vote share of 58 per cent for Harris and 40 per cent for Trump), I know how much better Trump will be for Britain than Harris would have been.
Donald Trumps more sophisticated American critics, including my old friend, the commentator and historian Anne Applebaum, link him to Autocracy Inc. – the title of her recent book on how autocracies around the world are conspiring to undermine democracy.
She argues he has a dangerous affinity with such authoritarian leaders as the Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Liberal political commentator and TV host Rachel Maddow took this line of argument to the next level on Wednesday night, calling on her fellow Democrats to actively resist the coming strongman, authoritarian overthrow of the Constitution.
According to Maddow, the incoming Trump administration intends to undermine the American way of government — to subordinate the military, Congress, the courts, the media and civil society to the will of the president.
She demanded formal assurances from all these bodies that they would not succumb to the pressures of the Dear Leader – equating Trump with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
Meanwhile, late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel, choking on his tears, declared: It was a terrible night for women, for children, for immigrants . . .for healthcare, for our climate, for science, for journalism, for justice, for free speech, for poor people, for the middle class, for seniors, for our allies in Ukraine, for NATO, for the truth, and democracy and decency. But let me offer a counterargument, based on observing how Kamala Harriss party has run California since it gained undivided control of that states executive and legislative branch.
They insist that they are the party that upholds democracy. But Im going to call what they represent Democraticy Inc. – a pseudo-democratic progressive version of Tammany Hall, the corrupt machine that ran New York politics from the mid-19th century until the 1920s.
Democraticy Inc. has almost nothing to do with true democracy. It is a political racket based on the institutionalised power of organisations such as the teachers unions, the divisive ideology of identity politics, and the cynical mobilisation of immigrants as voting fodder.
Democraticy destroys every state and city that it gets control of.
It has destroyed Illinois and turned Chicago into a vast crime scene by almost bankrupting the state government and pretending that gun violence is not primarily a problem of black communities.
It is in the process of destroying California and has already transformed downtown San Francisco into a scene from Zombie Apocalypse by essentially inviting every junkie in America to come to the city, live (and die) on the street, and shoplift with impunity.
Homelessness is on the rise in low-income areas of San Francisco
And, if the Harris campaign had duped enough voters with their hair-on-fire scaremongering, Democraticy would have had the chance to destroy America in its entirety. Democraticy doesnt just control the coastal states and big cities of America –especially Washington DC (where a staggering 92 per cent of the votes were for Harris). It also dominates academia, schools, the legacy media (newspapers, TV and radio), Hollywood, and much of corporate America.
We know this because information on party political donations is publicly available. To understand what Democraticy stands for, the following statements provide good illustrations.
Black people have been treated as less than human in America . . . Our country has never fully addressed the systemic racism that has plagued [it] since its earliest days. It is the duty of every American to fix. . . In times like this, silence is complicity.
It is status quo thinking to believe that putting more police on the streets creates more safety. Thats wrong. Its just wrong.
It is a serious mistake to conflate criminal justice policy with immigration policy as if they are the same thing. They are not. . . An undocumented immigrant is not a criminal.
Its time to end mass incarceration. This includes legalising of marijuana, sentencing reforms, and abolishing private prisons.
Federal prisoners and detainees [should be] able to obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care, while incarcerated or detained.
These are the widely held positions of progressive Democrats. They also happen to be statements made by Kamala Harris prior to her presidential run this year.
Even if I were tempted to agree with the propositions that there is no such thing as gravity or that humans can breathe underwater, I would soon discover that, in practice, I cannot fly and would drown if I tried inhaling while submerged.
The same principle applies to progressive slogans such as fight systemic racism by discriminating against white people or reduce crime by defunding the police.
California has been ruled by Democrats since the mid-1990s. There hasnt been a Republican governor since Arnold Schwarzeneggers term expired in January 2011. There hasnt been a Republican mayor of San Francisco since 1964. So the Dems have been able to run the experiment. And the results of one-party rule are stunning.
State taxes on the well-off are amongst the highest in the US, and set to rise higher, driving the wealthy away to low-tax states such as Florida and Texas. At the same time, the state has made itself a magnet for illegal immigrants by establishing no fewer than 20 sanctuary cities or counties that refuse to enforce immigration law.
And the results? California now has 12 per cent of the nations population, but over 30 per cent of its welfare recipients. According to a 2020 Census Bureau report, which took housing and other costs into account, the poverty rate in California is 17.2 per cent, the highest of any state.
Tent cities have sprouted up in San Francisco. Human excrement and syringe needles are the principal hazards on the streets
Theres a chronic housing shortage, mainly because a plethora of regulations make the construction of affordable housing well-nigh impossible. The states public schools rank 34th in the country overall and have the highest pupil-teacher ratio. Oh, and there are recurrent wildfires because of chronic management of public woodlands, and periodic droughts because of insufficient investment in reservoirs.
When I first visited San Francisco in 1981, it was still one of the loveliest cities I had ever beheld. Now its streets are so filthy – human excrement and syringe needles are the principal hazards – that I avoid it. The leaders of Democraticy Inc. – the Donorcrats who raised the billion dollars squandered by the Harris campaign since July – thought they could seize control of the whole of America, red states and all, and so perform the same reverse alchemy, turning gold into lead from coast to coast.
Thank God, they were wrong. That is why their candidate Kamala Harris has joined the sad list of sitting vice-presidents who failed to win the presidency, along with Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Al Gore.
What no one in Britain and Europe appears to understand is how lucky that makes us all. For the problem with the Democratic Party is that their myopic obsessions with diversity, equity and inclusion lead them — in foreign as much as in domestic policy — to decisions that are deeply harmful, often to precisely the people they are supposed to help.
Take the cases of Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Israel, three countries where we have seen Democraticy in action over the past three years and nine months.
In 2021, the Biden-Harris administration decided to pull all US forces out of Afghanistan, nearly 20 years after they had been sent there in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Joe Biden privately said it would be no worse than abandoning Vietnam in the mid-70s.
At a stroke, however, the not insignificant economic and social achievements of two decades were abandoned, leaving Afghan women and girls to the tender mercies of the Taliban. Americas allies were barely consulted about the decision, which was executed with reckless haste.
Putin drew the obvious conclusion from the chaotic fall of Kabul: these guys were weaklings. The Biden-Harris administration did nothing to discourage the invasion he was planning – instead in 2021 they reduced arms deliveries to Ukraine and lifted the sanctions on the Nordstream 2 pipeline to pump gas directly from Russia to Germany. When Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the US response was to offer the president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a plane ticket out!
Liberals have decried the victory of Donald Trump (pictured here with his family at an election night event in West Palm Beach, Florida)
When, undaunted, Zelensky and his people resolved to fight, the Biden-Harris administration delivered some fine speeches.
What they did not and have not delivered was sufficient firepower for Ukraine to prevail. Two and half years later, with about 100,000 Ukrainians dead and much of their country in ruins, Biden and Harris are leaving office – and leaving Kiev on the brink of a defeat that would be disastrous for European security.
Throughout the past three years, the Biden-Harris government has relaxed the sanctions on Iran in the naïve belief that Barack Obamas 2015 nuclear deal (dispensed with by Trump in 2018) could be resuscitated.
That deal merely postponed Irans acquisition of nuclear weapons in return for easing sanctions. Iran then used the money it could access to fund Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Houthis – terrorist organisations that serve as Tehrans proxies. On October 7 last year, terrorists from Gaza rampaged into Israel, killing about 1,200 people and kidnapping more than 250.
Once again, there were fine words from Washington.
But when Israel retaliated, as it was in every way entitled to, the American Left had a collective aneurysm and the Biden-Harris administration began arguing for a ceasefire – an argument that the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had the good sense to ignore.
And liberals in America, Britain and across the West wanted four more years of this? Four more years of people with degrees from Yale Law School talking about de-escalation, when what is most needed from the US government is deterrence?
I am not saying that Donald Trump is going to make his allies lives easy. He will not. And I dont want him to.
Its long overdue that Britain and Europe pay their fair share of the costs of transatlantic security, rather than free-riding on Uncle Sams coat tails.
Its long overdue that we grasp that the stakes are high in this Second Cold War, and that American allies cannot have it both ways, especially when it comes to transfers of critical technology to China.
And its long overdue that the major economies rethink their various ill-conceived green energy plans and deals.
A world that is consuming more energy with every passing year – not least to propel technological innovations such as artificial intelligence – cannot pretend it is going to rely exclusively on wind and solar power.
And yes, its long overdue that British and European politicians followed the lead given by American voters and bid a non-fond farewell to Democraticy Inc.s warped word salad of preferred pronouns, gender fluidity, safe spaces, trigger warnings and critical race theory – the woke Newspeak of the Ivy League campuses that has spread too far and wide.
That Donald Trump won bigly is not a cause of fear and loathing.
Take it from a former Californian: It should be a cause for general jubilation.
- Sir Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford