It is hard to describe the scale of the revolution that just took place in America

20241106

Trump was always an anomaly. He was the first American president never to have held elective office or served as an Army general. He had no organized political base – his support was always centered around ordinary working-class white men - his audience on “The Apprentice.” The others to whom he appealed were working class people of other races, women with families, and recently the top echelons of intellectuals – the ones intelligent enough to break free of the liberal groupthink within academia and to be appalled by the vicious attacks recently on our bodily freedom and freedom of speech.

He was opposed by just about every element of the government. They include the federal deep state, local governments everywhere, the education establishment, and almost all labor unions – especially those in the public sector such as teachers. Having no alternative, he appointed deep state figures to high office during his first term, only to have them undermine and betray him.

He was opposed by the leaders of companies that depend on the government for their business. Broadcasting owes its access to the airwaves to government licenses. The Internet was invented by government. It is the government that allows pharmaceutical companies to advertise to the public. Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet/Google and others are intimately tied to government as they provide cloud services and software such as Google Earth and Translate.

The media has had a leftward slant for my entire lifetime, becoming significantly more pronounced over the past three decades.

The United States military, which had been politically neutral since its beginning, was co-opted by the promotion of political general officers. Government forced the DEI agenda and the military. They forced white servicemen to confess to imaginary "white privilege." They forced military personnel to take dangerous vaccines, among them anthrax and Covid. At the same time the government allowed military healthcare, and especially veteran healthcare, to deteriorate.

So, simply put, the government compromised and bought off every interest group it could. At the same time, it vilified those that they could not buy off, calling them deplorables, racists, sexists, xenophobes, homophobes and every other imaginable name.

These outcasts collectively elected Trump in 2016. The establishment, controlling the tools of power, cheated egregiously to win the 2020 election. They spent four years persecuting their opponents, especially those who gathered on January 6, 2021, to express their displeasure at the election having been stolen.

The European establishment is similar to the American deep state. We saw the government of Keir Starmer in Great Britain send a squad of volunteers to the United States to wage a fear campaign against Trump, supporting Kamala Harris. The media here in Ukraine, and in most of Western Europe, was relentlessly anti-Trump.

I have been in correspondence with a couple of you Europeans among my readership as you attempted to convince me of the validity of the anti-Trump argument. I expect that today’s result finds you in shock.  We will now find out about Trump. I will repeat my invitation for you to watch Joe Rogan's three hour interviews with both Donald Trump and JD Vance. They make their positions quite clear. Their arguments appealed to me. You can tell me where you disagree with them.

The antiwar people are wrong to claim that nobody benefits from war. Putin benefits – he stays in power. The armaments manufacturers are benefiting. This war justifies NATO's existence.

Joe Biden has always been too compromised to resist the hidden powers that brought him to the presidency. He has as well been too raddled by dementia, probably dating back to his election. Donald Trump at least has a functioning mind and is beholden to nobody. He is in a position to deal strongly with both Zelinski and Putin. I expect he will be able to force a deal. I expect that the deal will be something that no Ukrainian politician could have afforded to advocate. Ukrainians will be disappointed, but it will at least bring a cease-fire.

What happens next is anybody's guess. There are a vast number of unknowns, among them the stability of the European Union in the face of the immigrant onslaught and impending financial collapse; the instability among Russia's regions; the impending collapse of the American economy; Russia's recovery from its massive losses of manpower due to immigration and wartime casualties; Russia's loss of dominance in the energy markets as alternatives have been developed, most recently nuclear. How a peace will play out is anybody's guess, but the way the war is going I think Ukraine will be better off giving it a shot.

Trump's election will not resolve America's most significant problems, starting with the birth dearth and the destruction of our education system, kindergarten through PhD. It would take a generation to undo the mess that liberals have made in the courts, the military and local government. The forces that made America powerful can simply not be reconstituted by Trump or anybody else.

If Trump were to have any success in making such profound changes, he would need the ongoing support of the common people in America. He is off to a good start, having rallied to his side most of the leading, formerly liberal intellectuals, and of course the working people. But we are fickle. Will the country have the stomach to send immigrants back home? Can they actually fire worthless and redundant civil servants? I have never seen a precedent for such.

The most likely scenario in my mind is that American conservatives will enjoy a bout of breast beating, congratulating themselves on the success in this election, and then let their attention wander as they fail to fix the underlying problems. Which leads me to evolutionary psychologist Edward Dutton. What we are watching is evolution in action. Or, as Stephen Jay Gould would have written, punctuated evolution. Trump's election will turn out to be a comma, a pause in the long sad story of the decline of a civilization.

With regard to the sweep of human events, I think yesterday’s book review of Hannahs Children has more to say about the future of humanity, and my own family, than what I have written today.

Meanwhile, things are good. We took delivery on a new refrigerator yesterday, after putting up for 10 years with one that would randomly, inexplicably freeze the groceries in the refrigerator. More than that, the niche in which it sat was too narrow to allow the doors to open all the way, which meant we had to slide it out into the kitchen in order to clean the drawers.

Oksana had an accident with her 2004 Mitsubishi Space Star, crunching the left headlight. It was the other guy’s fault and we should get some sort of settlement. The insurance people took extensive note of the other damage to the car, scrapes and such and most body panels, some that came with the car, some since we had it. My guess is that they will declare the car a total and offer us a few hundred dollars as a settlement.

I had been talking about our need for a bigger car. This one is uncomfortable for five people, impossible if her mother is with us. More than that it is rather insubstantial. I would rather have more metal around me if we get into an accident. I’ve been doing most of the research, with the VW Caddy, VW transporter, Mercedes Vito/Viana, Chrysler Pacifica, Honda Odyssey and Ford Tourneo looking most interesting for the moment. Although Oksana’s mechanic has jury rigged a headlight so she can drive at night, will need something new sooner rather than later.

Those are the reflections from Lake WeBeGone for today.  The kids are all enjoying school, to which at this time of year we come and go in semi-darkness.

Graham