So Joe Biden’s fresh ratings are worse than they have been in his entire presidency: 40 per cent of those polled like him today, with his key supporters – Democrats and the 18 to 34 year old generation – the most disappointed. There, approvers are at 31 per cent. So will Donald Trump make a comeback? That will be known in less than a year (the election is set for 5 November 2024). But at least his ratings are definitely higher than Biden’s.
And then the moaning, shrieking and howling begins, among which it is interesting to identify one poisonous idea – that the whole world, not just American Democrats, is horrified by this prospect.
Everything is clear about the Democrats. It’s very instructive fun to follow the regular appearance in their key media outlets of publications beyond hysteria: you think Trump can’t come back because it’s unthinkable? But he can, get that into your head at last. The unthinkable, the monstrous, the unreal – it’s real.
Our epoch in general can make particularly good material for psychologists, sociologists and others who study mankind. Marx was very wrong in tying the behaviour of large masses of people almost exclusively to their material interests. Unfortunately, ideological motives are often stronger than material ones. For the classical Western liberal, the first priority is to spread his new lifestyle ideas to the whole country and the world around him, and the rest is unthinkable and cut off: how can it be that half of your compatriots adhere to some other ideas?
Yes, but that’s their – American and Western – internal problems. What does this have to do with us? And back in 2016, when Trump won for the first time, it was explained to them (Americans) and to us that the world was terrified of such a president.
Now it’s happening again. Here’s how the quite Trumpist resource Breitbart deals with the problem: the British Economist, in an issue with its famous “mystery” cover, tells us that Trump’s arrival is a “shadow hanging over the world” and an urgent contingency plan is needed. And what, says Breitbart, does the world have no other problems than Trump? How about disease, mass migration, or the unwillingness of elites to find a diplomatic solution with a nuclear-armed Russia? Why does anyone think we are all, across the globe, sitting around shivering in anticipation of Trump’s second coming?
We are not trembling, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post joins the debate. It is the West that is afraid of this turn of events, but the rest of the world is not.
Because everyone knows that in the case of America, “a leopard does not change its spots.” There will be little difference in approach. It was Trump who started an open trade war with China, which ended in failure, but collapsed a lot of things in the world economy and brought misery to countries completely extraneous to the decision of the question – who is bigger, the US or the PRC. And Biden only “maximised” his predecessor’s approaches to industrial policy and competition with China. Biden “re-trampled” Trump by doing the same, but without the amateur improvisations. For example, the US just announced that it will continue to block the work of the World Trade Organisation’s appeals panel, and this was the supranational body that clearly said: the US trade war against China goes against all global trade rules.
Clearly, it’s not just the Chinese who think so. And since there is nothing left before a possible change of power in the US, let’s revive the discussion that we started in 2016: do we like Trump – and why. We like him because he and his kind have a chance to return the US and some of its allied countries to domestic normality. The ideology we call liberal destroys entirely human societies in these countries and makes such states dangerous to the rest of the world. At the same time, the contagion is actively spreading everywhere in the form of “new norms”. We don’t need it.
And we also like the fact that curing their societies will take a long time, during which it will be easier for us to mind our own business. The West will spread their contagion less and sit quietly more, agonising over their internal battles.
But if we are such risk takers that we want to stand by the agony of the West, then we don’t like Trump, but like the Democrats and other liberals. They – with their persistent “we’re doing fine, let’s get on with it” – will quickly bring their world to a complete collapse. The only problem here is their typical attempts to transfer their problems outwards, provoking wars anywhere. Which, in fact, we are already witnessing today. And Trump, we remind you, did not start any wars.
Dmitry Kosyrev, RIA