Trump: the great global reset

The re-election of Donald Trump resets the world. Last time he came to power it was almost whimsical. He was a rank outsider with a very narrow path to victory, which he only just threaded.

He was also a naif. As he says himself, after election he had to make 10,000 appointments to various roles, and he knew no one in Washington. He’d never even “slept over” before becoming president.

So his first term started-off a little chaotically with staff streaming in and out of employment, some of them, like Whitehouse Director of Communications, Anthony Scaramucci, for only a few days.

Then there was the first impeachment and the Russia hoax – the latter based on a security dossier fabricated from false information and illegally funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign; the BLM riots making it feel like America was out of control; and then finally COVID hysteria.

It’s amazing he got anything done, but he did. He lowered corporate taxes and regulations leading to an economic boom; achieved a breakthrough in the Middle East with the Abrahamic accords; called China’s bluff and started a defensive trade war with them; bullied NATO countries into increasing defence expenditure; stemmed the flood of immigrants at the border; and appointed three black letter lawyers to the Supreme Court.

Now he is back with an historic win, taking the electoral college, the popular vote, and both houses of congress, despite a multiplicity of prosecutions in kangaroo courts and two assassination attempts.

A lot of people question Trump’s character. I don’t. He can be boorish, is certainly more than a little narcissistic, but in a dangerous world he’s just the sort of Henry VIII character you want at the head of the free world. He’s got character, and he’s got temperament, while a bit of inspired unpredictability doesn’t go astray.

His election was mainly due to the economy, and a little to do with border security. Then there was the political poverty of both Biden and Harris. It was also a lot to do with cultural issues.

We tend to split the political world into Left Wing and Right Wing, but I’ve started splitting it into Team Reality and Team Fantasy. I think it is more useful, and it provides a larger tent under which to pull together a political coalition together.

Many on the left are in Team Reality as are most on the right. When we share reality in common we can also work together.

Team Fantasy is the one that will promulgate truly bizarre theories, like that a man can just choose to identify as a woman and that makes him a real woman, as well as less-obviously bizarre theories, like catastrophic climate change; virus elimination theories of pandemic control; modern monetary theory; renewable-only electricity grids; defunding the police; whole-word in education; words being violence; cultural theory. Including DEI, intersectionality and anti-racism.

If you want to know why Team Fantasy is increasingly attracting people with a university education it is because there is a certain intellectual virtuosity in convincing yourself, and others, that any of these things have merit. It’s an intellectual highwire act, suspended above reality, and it is fun, and empowering, and elevating, to be able to thread the needle in ways “less-gifted” people can’t.

Not all of Team Reality lacks university degrees, they’re just less prone to be blown away by fashion.  Maybe they are too busy, or perhaps their success in life is measured by how well they do butting-up against reality.

If they are pure knowledge workers, then they’re likely to be dissident knowledge workers, but they’re more likely to be in the business of manifesting ideas in the real world. That could mean being an engineer, or a tradie, hairdresser, businessperson.

And then there are those of us who know wisdom isn’t actually found in mobs.

That so many rich people in the US fund Team Fantasy is a reflection of how rich you can get through technologies that scale up fantasies almost infinitely, like social media platforms, search engines, online marketplaces. Hollywood has bought into Team Fantasy in a big way, and where else would they buy in? Talking animals were only the beginning.

Trump’s win is like Reagan’s win in that it signals a change in the world. It’s not the cause of the change, but it provides an anchor point for negotiating change

While the result is being talked about as though it is all about Trump (Trump would like that) it is actually part of wider trends.

There was Brexit, then New Zealand turned decisively against Jacinda Ardern’s long winter. The UK may have seemed to have turned back, but in fact it was punishing the Conservatives for not being conservative (check Starmer’s popularity rating, it does not look like that of a man who actually won an election).

In Argentina, the most consistent poster child for economic profligacy in my whole lifetime, Javier Milei, a classical liberal economics professor, has won the presidency and is taking a metaphorical chainsaw to the fantasy fence separating the Argentinians from the wealthy inheritance that should be theirs in such a resource-rich country.

Then there is Canada, where Pierre Poilievre, an articulate culture warrior, seems poised to dethrone Justin Trudeau in elections next year.  And now another shoe appears to be falling in France.

Which puts our next Australian election in context. If I am correct, then both the NT election and the Queensland election are ringing in change and there are themes that Peter Dutton can exploit in his campaign and should look to implement in government.

These waves are there to be ridden to successive election victories, reshaping society for the better along the way. The proof is there in the swarms of prominent Democrats and supporters repositioning away from Biden, Obama and the excesses of the past. Sycophantic Morning Joe has bent the knee, and even Younger Turks are getting the “conservative” vibe: “Dems made a deal with the Devil”.

First lesson is national sovereignty is back, and internationalism is out; second, personal sovereignty is in, and the state is out; third bullshitting is out, and reality is back in.

Ironically, Trump, the biggest bullshitter in America since PT Barnum, and the biggest to be president, has called time on bullshit.

These three themes underlie just about all the new Team Reality victories around the world.

So, you don’t have sovereignty if you have unbounded immigration, legal or illegal. That’s a theme Dutton definitely needs to take up. It stands on its own, and it feeds into another major issue everywhere - cost of living.

People can see how bringing a Tasmania’s worth of new immigrants in each year pushes up house prices and rents.

Fantasy is really coming home to roost in the energy area, and people are starting to be realistic about climate change as a result.

We could dismantle our economy and go back to wherever we all came from (or our original Australian ancestor if we were born here) and leave the place as a monument to the first inhabitants, and it would make a couple of weeks difference to global CO2 emissions, and nothing to climate.

When it comes to bullshit, banning it through MAD legislation is just more BS, and in fact a manifestation of the regulation of all aspects of the country which is depressing our productivity, including sending us back to the days of cloth cap unionism.

In fact, banning “misinformation” means you restrict access to truth – today’s fact is often tomorrow’s mistake, and tussling with suspected misinformation is the best mind experiment you can perform to discover truth.

You also need a population that is educated, not trained or indoctrinated. That’s a theme already being picked up in Australia with the school system that went to basics (and the 70s) acing the latest NAPLAN tests.

Everyone is tired of the people who always know better, and always say “No”. And they take far too much tax from those who are productive, to spend increasingly on excess public servants and welfare transfers.

We all have needs, but the country also has physical limits. Both can’t be completely satisfied, and trade-offs need to be made. Personal sovereignty doesn’t just mean being able to say what you think, it means taking responsibility for yourself, and yes, there is a cost which you can’t expect the state to pick up.

Sovereignty also requires a decent defence force. When it comes to wealth transfers, we spend too little on defence, and what we do spend mostly isn’t spent wisely. I’m sure Trump would agree “You want those AUKUS subs? You might need to step up to 3% of GDP.”

And of course there is health. Not that we will all be as ripped as RFK Junior, but the entire medical enterprise looks increasingly built on the BS premise that if you just take this little pill or shot you will live for ever, and in a lot of cases that is doing much more harm than a bit of God-provided natural prophylaxis – you are what you eat; what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger; that sort of thing.

One thing Dutton shouldn’t give any thought to (and I know some of my friends think they are a good idea), is tariffs.

There are things that 300 pound gorillas, or at least countries with a population of 346 million who print the reserve currency of the world and consume vast amounts of its produce, can do that 26 pound poodles at the bottom end of the world can’t.

By all means, let’s fix up our infrastructure and economy so we can make things here again, but no country ever got wealthy and stayed that way in a cottage industry economy. We have things we do at scale, like mining and agriculture, that few others can do as successfully. And we have a well-educated workforce that can be competitive and innovative in their specialties, if we take the BS away from them and let them rip.

I’ve got a lot of faith that in this next election people will realise that for too long they’ve been dreaming. Reality is back, and while it can be hard graft, it’s also much more exciting and satisfying in a way that fantasies aren’t.