Trump: the great global reset

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.