In light of J.D. Vance’s stirring speech last week to the Munich Security Conference, we’re republishing Ramesh Thakur’s Spectator Australia article from July, when Trump announced Vance as his VP pick – and thus spelled the long-overdue end of the neoconservative movement.
The phoenix-like rise of a bleeding Trump, with a fist-bumping chorus of “Fight! Fight! Fight!”, signalled the triumph of Trumpism over the remaining anti-Trumpers in the party. Every time that picture is seen – we will assuredly see it endlessly until the election and periodically thereafter – the world will be reminded of what strength and defiance look like. The positioning of the slain firefighter’s uniform on the stage during Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention and the poignant gesture of tenderly kissing his helmet offered a window into the human side that Trump rarely shows in public. So too, the cascade of security failures notwithstanding, Trump’s tribute to the Secret Service agents who rushed to smother him with their bodies as human shields in the chaotic moments when no one knew how many assassins had infiltrated the crowd. And also to the crowd which stayed orderly and burst into chants of ‘USA’ last witnessed in New York after 9/11.
Other potential picks for a running mate (who alone of the senior advisers cannot be fired) might have better helped Trump to win the election, but 39 year-old J.D. Vance offers the best chance to entrench the MAGA revolution in and beyond a second Trump administration. The selection caused a meltdown among those afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome. Three articles on Sunday sealed the deal for me. Mark Episkopos explained on Responsible Statecraft the choice is principally about US foreign policy. John Bolton, who has caused much lasting damage to US global interests, wrote in the UK Telegraph that the selection is “profoundly disturbing in its implications for American foreign policy in a Trump Presidency”. Of course, Bolton is a leading representative of the neoconservatives and, Paul du Quenoy explained in Newsweek, the nomination of Vance “spells the final and long-overdue end of the neoconservative movement”. Hallelujah!
Vance grew up an Appalachian hillbilly, overcame ‘white trash’ origins and a dysfunctional family, joined the Marines and leveraged military service into degrees from Ohio State and Yale. His social, economic and governing philosophies are the result of this hardscrabble back story. His business and political success offers a lesson in redemption that is the very essence of the American dream. Between Vance and Kamala Harris, he is the underprivileged kid from Middletown, Ohio who made good while she is a California child of privilege and, as an adult, the beneficiary of political patronage starting with San Francisco mayor Willie Brown. Usha Vance, his wife, represents another stream in the American dream, of immigrants who come to America as the land of opportunity where education, talent and hard work are rewarded. Indo-Americans have achieved success without victimhood and grievance.
Vance is exceptionally attuned to the ravages of American de-industrialisation, with US manufacturing hollowed out, jobs shipped overseas and swathes of the homeland turned into a wasteland along the rust belt. As Vance said in his acceptance speech, China built its middle class on the backs of growing numbers of unemployed Americans. The message of a second Trump administration to China will be: if you want to sell it here, you have to build it here. Vance similarly prioritises the health of the US economy above the health of the planet under the alleged threat from ‘global warming’. The commitment to reversing this destructive trend rests equally powerfully on the recognition of the importance of dignity conferred on human beings by productive work and living wages and the role of well-paying jobs in sustaining stable family life. He brought his compelling back story to life in his acceptance speech and the introduction of his previously drug-addled and serially partnered mother, clean and sober now for more than nine years, to the whole nation was a fitting culmination of his life story to date.
The media still don’t get the twin reality that Trump has no interest in appeasing them but speaks directly to his base, and the latter share his contempt for the press. His voters believe him when he says they are the real targets of the Blob, he is all that stands between them and the Blob and that he literally took a bullet for them. To grasp the need and urgency to drain the swamp in Washington, look across to the Starmer Government’s slew of proposals to expand the entrenched administrative state, reduce freedom and destroy productive work with the many distractions of social justice activism. A man who came within an inch of having his head blown off on national TV has earned the right to ramble in his first public speech since. To me it came across as more of a conversation with the American people by an unusually subdued and sombre leader.
Instead of apologising, retreating and compromising, Trump doubles down and counterpunches in the war against the administrative-legal-industrial complex. They have slandered him, undermined him at every turn, persecuted him, tried to bankrupt and imprison him, and now even shot him. But still he picks himself up, missing shoes and all, and shouts defiance in the face of mortal threats. Millions of Americans are exhilarated by Trump’s visceral show of raw and muscular patriotism. Vance’s instincts too are not to flinch but to go all-in to turn the American nightmare into the American dream once again. His youth will ensure a continuation of Trumpism after Trump by an articulate and thoughtful politician, who in foreign policy will shy away from military adventurism but punch hard if and when necessary to defend American interests and values, and in personal traits comes without the crude vulgarities of his boss that millions of Americans are unable to get past in order to appreciate his policies and achievements.
Vance is a champion of the post-liberal Right. To decry him as isolationist betrays wilful blindness. He represents realism and restraint alongside strength. He has remained steadfast in US support for Israel in its war with Hamas; questions why Europe, comparable in wealth and population to America, cannot deal with Ukraine on its own (its military under-spending is “an implied tax on the American people to allow for the security of Europe”, he wrote in the Financial Times); and holds Asia to be the key strategic battleground in the foreseeable future. Similarly, Vance is no more racist and anti-immigrant than Trump. Both welcome legal immigrants who share in and commit to core American values. Both oppose discrimination – positive and negative – based on faith and skin colour. Why wouldn’t Vance want equality of opportunity for his own children?
Trump’s appeal comes from being different from the run-of-the-mill political leader, backed by an unmatched ability to project grit and promise a better future – just what the nation craves and the world needs in these challenging times. Australian conservatives could do with a Trump-Vance combination whose focus is on the wellbeing of productive workers on the farms and in the factories.
Ramesh Thakur is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General and Emeritus Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, the Australian National University. This article was first published in Spectator Australia.
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The following should be there too:
Many more could be added. Leave your list below.
1984 certainly but I’ve always thought Brave New World to be closer to our current circumstance.
I think the one element from Brave New World that does transfer over to reality is the use of artificially induced content and happiness to control the population. In the book it’s Soma. In real life it’s media and entertainment.
But it seems to me that 1984 fits a bit better. The way the past is manipulated to control the present. How everyone is an informant. How different factions are supposedly in conflict, but in fact they work together. The need for a boogeyman so the crowds have someone to direct their hatred towards and blame for all their problems, rather than blaming the government. And lastly, the final lesson: “2+2=5”. The demand that we accept lies as reality.
And one more for the list could be “The Camp of the Saints” by Jean Raspail. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but it did a very good job of predicting the European migrant crisis.
In 2001, a boat with around 1500 migrants (one of the first) landed on the French Riviera, merely 50 meters from the house where Jean Raspail wrote “The Camp of the Saints”. An interesting coincidence.
Similar subject matter is ‘A State Of Denmark’, 1970 Derek Raymond.
I tried to share it with my socialist former girlfriend but she dismissed it as racist (actually the opposite, young lefties don’t do irony).
Attached is a surprisingly balanced Guardian part review from 2016.
// young lefties don’t do irony //
I’ve noticed. Grim zealots. Both unpleasant and unsettling, since their utopian solutions have become widely popular again.
Headline article: Collapse of Complex Societies. I’m not sure this is a generic explanation for the collapse of Roman or Ming Dynasty or Spanish or Austro-Hungarian empires. It seems that we are talking about a very specific impending collapse of what we used to call Western democracies.
The reason is that the destructive guardians push ever onwards for more public controls of private actions, at more cost. The media is asymmetric. They create a fuss, and politicians concede. The result is an accumulation of regulation and cost until some future theoretical tipping point when it all comes tumbling down. It is just a more complex variation of socialism.
More doctors should be speaking out about this Crime Against Humanity!
https://thephaser.com/2021/03/talk-about-covid-19-mrna-bioweapon-ivermectin-the-importance-of-vitamin-d-dr-ryan-cole/
Doctors were by far the biggest supporters and member group of the NSDAP and the SS. Half the doctors were party members, more than any other profession or affiliation.
I for one are not surprised about their endorsement and complicity.
It’s also highly profitable for them and increasing their status, so what’s not to like.
Resisting doctors on the other hand were and are the true heros and the most courageous.
Technocracy has replaced democracy. Those in charge of the techno, either IT, AI or Bio think they should call the shots. They are billionaires, they can afford to buy governments and/or international bodies. So they do.
Its not rocket science, its Darwinism.
The rest of us then live in a sham democracy, which is really a totalitarian state fusing corporations with the state, the very definition of fascism. We can do what we want as long as it ultimately serves our masters, which means increasing their wealth and power.
That didn’t need a book!
There are a billion of helpers of them who quite enjoy the show and their status and power increase within society as well.
My (former) doctor, IT and pharma industry middle managment friends all love lockdowns and vaxx passports.
Yes! A communal bibliography is a great idea.
I dont have a book to offer on the whys and wherefores of how we got here but I am currently reading How to Resist by Matthew Bolton. I would recommend it based on what I’ve read so far.
I think everyone will have their own list. My immediate addition is Catch-22. You can make your own parallels, with the overall shit-show of the USAF standing in for the western world and Milo Minderbinder being a good stand-in for SAGE and the sociopath scientists – bombing his own side for profit.
And remember where Orr was paddling to??
Long way from Italy to Sweden by sea!
But yes its the book is a great description of futility and counter-productive ‘rules’. Its also sad that the individualistic characters described are seemingly scarce nowadays.
“Long way from Italy to Sweden by sea!”
Indeed it is, peyrole :-). I reckon there’s a lesson there, too – as you hint.
On the characters – I agree. We could do with a few more Yossarians (see also Camus’s The Rebel – for which Catch-22 is a fictional gloss) – and fewer Major Majors.
The Crowd by Gustave Lebon (also my favourite book on financial markets, although they aren’t even mentioned in it…), and The 4th Turning.
The latter even forecasted the exact year of that crisis and shift towards communitarianism from individualism in 1997.
Sadly, it also makes clear that our resistance is doomed and that it will take more than a generation to bring about the start of another turning away from communitarianism.
I always suspected that millennials will be our downfall, but now I know why.
The Drowned And The Saved, Primo Levi except that I won’t be casting a tear for the drowned.
I read Tainter’s book many years ago. I’ve used a quote from it in my own work:
The image of lost civilizations is compelling: cities buried by drifting sands or tangled jungle, ruin and desolation where once there were people and abundance. Surely few persons can read such descriptions and not sense awe and mystery. Invariably we are spellbound, and want to know more. Who were these people and, particularly, what happened to them?
Is this where we are heading?
‘At one with Ninevah and Tyre’.
Had to look that one up. Frightening, as what we thought only just over a year ago was solid rock beneath our feet has turned out to be shifting sand.
My areas of expertise are petroleum engineering, and energy economics, in which I have Masters Degrees. My area of focus in the latter case is the implications of the accelerating collapse of unsubstitutable high density primary energy sources (“hydrocarbons”), specifically for the collapse of the global industrial civilisation that depends on it.
Tainter’s analysis is seminal and well worth reading. But John Michael Greer’s “How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse” (https://www.ecoshock.org/transcripts/greer_on_collapse.pdf) updates Tainter, employs ecological theory, and locates the causal mechanisms more explicitly in resource depletion, capital, production, recycling, and waste. This allows theory to move on from explaining historical collapses, to predicting the timescale and available paths that this next collapse is taking.
“How Civilizations Fall” does not consider the political systems that might arise under collapse conditions, but he writes extensively and very accessibly on it in some of his other books. See, for example, “Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse, and the Hard Future Ahead (2016)” and “The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (2019)”.
See also 1177 BC*, The Year Civilisation Collapsed, E H Cline.
Over a period of 40 or so years all 7 or 8 distinct but interconnected Bronze Age civilisations throughout the Eastern Mediterranean collapsed for all or some of a variety of reasons, from invasion by the Sea Peoples, mutual hostility, internal strife, famine, climate change, environmental degradation, religious turmoil or volcanic destruction.
Their very interconnectiveness led to a domino effect, Mycaenaic Greece suffered hundreds of years of Dark Ages, the Hittites forgotten to history until the last century. Only Egypt survived but as a shadow of its former self never to recover.
Also available on YouTube.
*1177 was the publishers idea they thought it a snappier title than ‘gradually faded away ‘.
Missed one. May I commend Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer (1951)” He, and it, are hard to characterise. He was a self-educated drifter, rather than a scholar. He was writing shortly after the events of the Second World War gave rise to an attempt to rationalise how otherwise educated and civilised people go insane. His writing is beautiful, pithy, accessible, and absolutely relevant to our times. I usually underline passages of interest when I read. I had to stop in this book because I was underlining every other sentence. Here’s an example, perfectly distilling curtain-twitching, neighbour-shopping life in the New Virocracy:
Chesterton’s Eugenics and Other Evils; interesting for both the time in which he wrote it (1922) and the notable lack of resistance among his peers to the rise of eugenics. It is prescient in that he was almost alone opposing something which grew into a monster in Nazi Germany, but most importantly, that he was confronting “Science” as the new state religion. Sadly it appears that, though it has taken a century, we are seeing this come to full fruition.
The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee – I read this in tandem with Chesterton’s book, personally I found the earlier chapters more interesting as they helped put a spotlight on some of the monomaniacs that Chesterton describes amongst these scientists. It was also interesting to read how worryingly cavalier some of the early attempts at splicing genetic code into contagious viruses were. Mukherjee also touches on subjects such as the development of PCR and the future of genetic engineering. Most striking of all is the religion of Science, as the media portrays it, you would be forgiven for believing it settled, yet depicted in this book, the priest class of scientists battle it out, rarely reaching consensus and often driven by overwhelming ego or greed.
Cloud Atlas – specifically the Orison of Sonmi-451; clearly it borrows from dystopian novels that came before it, though being more recent it adds a few ideas. You have the society of two classes, pure bloods and fabricants. The pure bloods have “souls”, microchips implanted in their fingers that allow them to access society, whilst also making them easily tracked and monitored. On face value, this part of the book looks at the fabricants and their role as the slave class, but I found the pure bloods society insightful; they live in a Corpocracy wherein their sole purpose is to consume. They are set an allowance or income that they must always fully spend, their identities are in flux; face-scapers and genetic engineering allow them to change appearance and sex at will. Language has been morphed and trademarks taken the place of common words – a coffee is a Starbuck, a shoe a Nike.
I wish this section of the book had been a standalone, larger story in its own right.
The Silver Chair and The Last Battle, C.S Lewis – I’ve been going through C.S Lewis’ books and these two from the Narnia series struck a chord. The Silver Chair for the depiction of the Prince trapped in the chair which dominates his mind, upon freeing him there is a great bit of dialogue from Puddleglum when they confront the Witch and her worldview.
The Last Battle for the nefarious Ape and his hoodwinking of the Narnian’s by dressing a donkey up in lions skin, quite obvious to draw a parallel in our own times with what appears to be a mass hoodwinking.
Aldous Huxley’s Brave new world revisited is excellent reading.
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/12/psychopathy-origins-totalitarianism/
this online blogpost is a half hour read, but it explains a lot!