Until Trump’s arrival, there was increasingly no border at all. Fifty-million foreign-born resided, both legally and illegally, in the United States. Nearly a million annually walked northward across the border with ease and without legal sanction or invitation. To object to illegal immigration and decry its deleterious effects on the entry-level wages of our working poor, on the social safety net of the American needy, and on the sanctity of the law was to be smeared as racist, xenophobic, and nativist.
Against all the money and clout of America’s revolutionary forces, the counterrevolutionary Trump had only one asset, the proverbial people.
Victor Davis Hanson
Amgreatness.com
November 1, 2020
Until Donald Trump’s arrival, the globalist revolution was almost solidified and institutionalized—with the United States increasingly its greatest and most “woke” advocate. We know its bipartisan establishment contours.
China would inherit the world in 20 or 30 years. The self-appointed task of American elites—many of whom had already been enriched and compromised by Chinese partners and joint ventures—was to facilitate this all-in-the-family transition in the manner of the imperial British hand-off of hegemony to the United States in the late 1940s.
Our best and brightest like the Biden family, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg would enlighten us about the “real” China, so we yokels would not fall into Neanderthal bitterness as they managed our foreordained decline.
We would usher China into “the world community”—grimacing at, but overlooking the destruction it wrought on the global commercial order and the American interior.
We would politely forget about Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and the Uyghurs. Hollywood would nod as it put out more lucrative comic-book and cartoonish films for the Chinese markets, albeit with mandated lighter-skinned actors.
The NBA would nod twice and trash a democratic United States, while praising genocidal China—becoming richer and more esteemed abroad to make up for becoming boring and poorer at home. The universities would nod three times, and see a crime not in Chinese espionage and security breaches, but in the reporting of them as crimes.
So our revolutionary role would be to play stuffy and snooty Athenian philosophers to the new muscular Roman legions of China.
Given our elites’ superior morality, genius, and sense of self, we would gently chide and cajole our Chinese masters into becoming enlightened world overseers and democrats—all the easier, the richer and more affluent Chinese became.
For now, Trump has stopped that revolution.
Internal Counterrevolutions
Until Trump’s arrival, Big Tech was three-quarters home on the road to Nineteen Eighty-Four. Five or six companies monopolized most American—and indeed the world’s—access and use of the internet. In cynical fashion, Silicon Valley grandees patronized naïve conservatives that they were the supposed embodiment of Milton Friedman libertarianism and 19th century robber baron daring. Yet to their leftist kindred, the moguls of Menlo Park simultaneously whispered, “Don’t worry about such necessary disinformation: we will enrich only your candidates, only your agendas, only your foundations, only your universities—in exchange for your exemptions.”
Antitrust legislation was as much an anathema to good liberals as rigging searches, institutionalizing the cancel culture, and censoring thoughts and ideas were welcomed. For now Trump, almost alone, is battling that revolution.
