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Global leadership opinion: MAGA-ultras’ blue-collar economic nationalism might survive market turmoil, but will it arrest the ‘unscrupulous optimism’ of runaway meritocracies in Britain and Europe?

In Uncategorized on May 21, 2025 at 7:38 am

THE TARIFF BLITZKRIEG has done its random act of violence. Like a B-17 dropping iron bombs over an open sight, one hit the runway, another Mr McGregor’s greenhouse, the rest slugged into the quagmire. But the message has been sent. Technical dashboard politics should give way to nation-state leadership. On the sidelines traditional conservatives remain hopeful that Al and Peg Bundy’s blue-collar MAGA-ultras’ raid on their policy-position will be temporary. MAGA being a reaction to the ‘unscrupulous optimism’ of Western meritocracies’ vision of the economic life, where Al and Peg attempted to ‘live their best lives’ but found themselves fallible.

Prognosticator of an Anglo-American New Republic, H. G. Wells warned last century that Americans suffer ‘nation-state blindness’. An inability by citizens to see how their local endeavour is part of national enterprise.

According to H. G., it was this failure to connect dots that resulted in America missing the opportunity to rule with its Anglo partner. As fanciful as that is now, there is truth in the notion of America today turning inwards to connect itself to itself. For a self, even a corporeal self, such as the nation-state, is a self that is connected to… itself!

Of course, the Western-world is Anglo-Americanised, having absorbed its main export, modern-liberal-democracy. FDR-Churchill, JFK-Macmillan, a shared constitutional outlook, kept the marriage bed warm, but less so Trump-Johnson/Starmer. Affinity generated by Brexit was fleeting.

Although America has a more complex history with free trade, what has often united is a liberal hawkishness, in the British sense of the word liberal, meaning laissez faire economics, rather than the US version, meaning centre left politics. But now the social conservative pendulum has swung illiberally (in British and US senses) on both sides of The Pond, the affair is over. Like Elyot and Sibyl in Noel Coward’s Private Lives, two big egos have blown hot then cold.

What about Britain, and the political rumble in the Shires?

In truth America does not like Britain. Its leaders love invitations to Buck House, applaud Churchill’s Anglo-Saxonese, plus eating out expensively on Neville Chamberlain’s censure, when justifying foreign adventure. The new country has often been suspicious of being suckered by the trappings and flummery of ‘Great British’ power-plays. Much of American leadership-style e.g. The Oval Office candour of late, is a Protestant-idealist language-battle to defeat doublespeak and flush out insecurities about who is big or small on the world stage.

Spurned, Britain shuffles uneasily, poking its canapés, mumbling about the vigour of the vulgar younger nation. A Greece to America’s Rome, Britain fancied steering its protégé with diplomatic ear-bending. This is the self-delusion of the defeated imperialist. Trump II’s realpolitik has finally closed Britain’s fantasy of being in a special relationship.

Culturally, America and Britain are thinly separated. Both tolerant. Americans quicker-witted, Britons wittier. But since America is now led by blue-collar Republicans, Britain is further in the doghouse. Trumpists’ contempt for Britain’s and Europe’s secular-liberal-progressive political elite is undisguised.

And having exited the EU, Britain is of little strategic value. Its technical-politics, which is fundamentally watch-and-wait market-monitoring incrementalism, observes helplessly the unfolding US psychodrama. Whilst simultaneously unable to counter far-right threats to its social equilibrium. For Britain has remarkably settled communities who doggedly weather decline. But there is a political rumble in the Shires which Trumpism is fuelling.

And what is the emergent US New World vision?

Amidst D-Day-style assaults on every policy beachhead, action being totemic stateside, the uncertain vision might be: re-shape the global trading model, revive the nation-state, arrest runaway debt. Then slow, and ultimately halt, the rise of Chinese power. Emotionally, heartland voters require the US administration to draw firmer physical and spiritual boundaries around a US that has been overextended economically and militarily since the Second World War.

Of course, orthodox economics is turning various shades, largely puce. The source of this exit from globocracy is rooted in red-raw inequalities caused by the US’s out-of-control meritocracy. One that originally admitted outsiders, and appeared equal, but has morphed, and created a new money-club aristocracy. Which is not distributing ‘dignity and status’ to middle-class American families. Those who doggedly punch the hours of study and work.

For in Britain, our working-class and middle-class = America’s middle-class. The American working-class aligns more closely with the UK’s notion of an underclass. Those who are struggling to both escape precarious minimum-wage zero-hour no-contract work and pass exams.

Add to this the nature of modern politics, which has invested governance within institutional systems, a deliberate throttling of charismatic ‘man’, and has become remote. In many minds a flawed and accessible charismatic nation-state leader is morally more accountable, by virtue of visibility, than cold unresponsive iron-cage bureaucracies. American modernity (liquefying the residuum of European social systems) has peaked.

Meritocratic overreach and Trump II re-set

In essence, the US meritocratic journey has transmogrified into greed. The post-war ‘We Generation’ moved rapidly in social terms, and understood a ‘good society’ requires extending opportunities to all. But by the late-Sixties, the new ‘Me Generation’, the meritocracy winners, started pulling up the draw-bridge behind what they perceived as their success.

The civic duty to acknowledge personal good fortune, has become my effort achieved my status. The humble serendipity of having a talent the market needed at the right time, has shifted towards a hard-faced cynicism, oft portrayed as ‘toughness’. The fear of the ‘We Generation’, the very real abyss at its heels, which they staved off with gritty stoicism, has emerged magnified in their children, who say ‘no way are we sailing near to that nightmare’.

As competition became fiercer, erosion of the ‘common good’ accelerated. Capital-rich citizens have fought tooth and nail to win, and purchase access to a hot-housed VIP lane of private school>good SATS>Ivy League university>profession. The talent+hardwork nexus has shifted to money+power that propels progeny through the narrowing door labelled ‘high-paid brain work’. Stagist theory said to societies ‘stay in history’s waiting room’ until you and your community are ready to evolve together, but new capital says buy access now.

Into this ineluctable globalised market biology, the Trump II administration signals a re-set. Even if they do not know they are the vehicle for change, they embody an apotheosis for political modernity. One which was predicated on a meritocracy distributing fairly. Instead, it has fomented an inheritocracy, where capital sloshes without the handrails of shared core values.

So how might strategic value be created from economic nationalism?

The immediate challenge is to maintain the confidence of the bond market, and attempt significant savings, whilst opening new sources of revenue. And to achieve this by rolling over tax cuts and rebalancing trade. The risks are considerable, as the tariff strategy may slow growth, increase inflation, and ultimately weaken the dollar’s supremacy in the decades to come. History may not be kind to the big re-set. But the trickiest section of the report card is execution. The manner of delivering these changes has created uncertainty.

So, for the sake of a more considered strategy, some of the good intent might simply founder on the lack of plan completeness. For example, when costs are slashed, such as regulatory control, this might suggest long-term savings, but in practice, if assumptions are not tested, they might trigger major political headaches down-the-line when out-of-the-blue crises emerge. But for the ha’p’orth of tar (a tested plan) the ship (strategic value) can still be lost.

And another sagely phrase: The seeds of your demise are often sown during periods of success. So, America sits at a critical moment, some of it historic, some introduced unnecessarily in its rush to force re-modelling. America is the land of genuinely excellent strategic management, and there will be seasoned management professionals whose skillset can still settle the ship of state.

Of course, this is the view from the hilltop called classical strategic management. Although on the surface it is a dull, plodding discipline, it can still deliver careful re-engineering for America Inc., and at the same time win approval from the markets.

The spectre of an Old World social order returning to haunt the New

In the run-up to the 2008 crash ‘orthodox economics was humiliated… sophisticated financial minds hopelessly miscalculated the value of assets’. Why should classical economics read the runes this time?

There are wider forces at work, and if disrupting the world order, including orthodox economics, is required for America to bring down its stratospheric and unsustainable deficit, then client-politics of old is unlikely to have the re-engineering force of character.

Many are familiar with fire-from-the-hip business leadership relying entirely on gut-angst to bring change. Readers of John Updike, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow will recognise quotidian American realities grate with its sunshine theology. America is searching for resolving its mile-wide social dualities (e.g. failing meritocracy), but the current US administration is like the preacher, who in the sermon notes writes: ‘point weak, shout loud’. We suspect, like the new right in Europe, the rocket fuel that gets it off the launch pad is greater than the load required for the second and third stages of nation-state development.

What we might be seeing is America’s long resistance to the shadow of an Old World. A world that is complex and intractable, with its ranked social strata offering sustainable modes of living, in contrast to America’s dominant and creaking social measures of income and wealth. America holds action as more sacred than reflection. As John Maynard Keynes said at the end of his General Theory (1936) this is a sign you are held to some form of dogma. Trumpism is about action, but concurrent critical reflection will need to emerge sooner than later. Tyranny is in the absence of the ability to nuance new political positions.

Does the end of political modernity mean sailing towards the shore of classical conservatism?

Although on the surface the DeLorean is headed back to 19th century mercantilism, many are asking are we also headed towards the morally manageable boundary of nation-statism. For this is as much about America’s moral agency, its sense of self. This suggests Britain and Europe, in their commitment to sublate their nationalistic agency post-war, are wedded still to political modernity as an unquestioned philosophy. Hence, across Europe, the new right is making Trumpist-style gains, largely to arrest a runaway modernity (bureaucratic governance) that has become deaf to its concerns.

And so, the argument is that America’s New World Order is a flaming out of a dying meritocratic social contract. A traumatic admission it wishes to establish a more workable social system.

Meritocracy was the fruit of post-Cold War globalisation. Globalisation is the spread of modernity. Modernity is the liquefying of all barriers, personal and geographic, and the creation of meritocratic social order. Meritocracy is the replacement of class/tribe distinctions for the promise of personal achievement and liberation.

The flaw in this utopianism is that social groups are naturally self-organising, and left to themselves can shake out quite sustainably. Artisans cheerfully graft, bourgeois entrepreneurs buy and sell, and aristos refine their sensibilities in well-stocked country house libraries, opening the odd school and fete to boot. All too utopian, and dewy-eyed, but this old social conservative order is resurfacing in the minds of the slogging metro-dwellers sinking £2,500 rent per month into their stuffy broom cupboard apartments.

Our wobbly meritocracy is also faltering as it is run by homo technicus, loyal not to vision or even mission, or healthy social order, but policy. Bureaucracies avoid volatile human fancy, and put oversight into the hands of bloodless policy wonks. This society will not excel, but it will be fairer to a greater number. Or so we thought.

So, what’s not to like?  Well, in the West the emergence of deep inequality. The Western ship has tilted so hard towards the top 1% of achievers, that the bottom 50% are dropping behind like the wheezy pupil on the annual school cross-country race. The few winners are winning hard, and the losers are massing in large numbers. Part of the tilt is capital accumulation has increased the power of money itself. Money + a decent brain = access to a fast-lane that no-one anticipated would create a new money aristocracy, one that does not have a country pile across from the village, so is unhitched from all communitarian moods.

On the back of these broken structures is the rise of new right parties. With Trumpism offering to collapse globalisation altogether, his challenge is to steer towards the shore of classical conservatism. And avoid the rocks of nihilistic mega-meritocracy. Economic nationalism and ethno-nationalism are in the mixer and the former should avoid the latter.  The detail however, may not be written yet. This gut angst may of course have a moral taproot.

The emotionally illiterate nature of globalisation

Property values have rocketed, and with it a new mass class of millionaires. Others who could not secure property are now the new precariat. Property is out of reach unless you graduate into a graduate career, or have parents who are ‘meritocracy winners’. After five to ten years following graduation some 30% of graduates are still in non-graduate jobs.

As the Blair-Brown government told us, we had better get on board the globalisation train. And we did. It did not know where the train was ultimately destined, but was sold as heading to the land of sexy new metro-liberal coolness. We now know it was pure undifferentiated rhetoric.

We also now realise the emotionally illiterate nature of this message. What many missed is that unfettered liberalisation was an ideology for the dipsy-brained. To which politics is meant to counter. Where the British parliament enjoyed and suffered long speeches, now, members have to ‘cut to the plot’ in short shrift. Debating time has been cut so parliamentarians can get home to their families. Admirable, but naïve, when complex issues demand the sort of exhaustive dialogue as found in a major Dostoyevsky novel. Where the fog starts to clear on page 372, but you are still asking ‘who are all these people?!’.

Under successive administrations politics was gradually jettisoned as an inconvenience to market measures. Rationalism in the shape of single-metric politics, however, does not do ‘good or evil’ assessments. No-one saw the 2008 crash coming. And if they did, they were thrown out the room for their apostasy.

Meritocracies play what Peter Turchin calls the ‘game of musical chairs’. They foster competition across the whole of society, and the resulting stampede towards the remaining number of hi-status chairs generates an ever-growing mass of losers.

Added to this mud wrestling, we allowed mass immigration from southern Europe to fill our skills gap, and catastrophically failed to invest in education, as short-termism is favoured by unworldly technocrats who lack strategic instincts. This liberal world order is now breaking up violently. In short, Trumpism is displaying a controversial and upsetting symptom: Leadership.

Globalisation finds leadership per se, expensive. Leadership points out to client-politics that ‘the language of economics’ is taking over in the open society. When people talk about ‘living their best life’, asking ‘are you investing enough in your education?’, ‘have you had a productive day?’, you know homo economicus is eclipsing humanity itself. Institutions have started to become bearers of this two-dimensional message. Self-actualisation (a terrifying term in itself, and Maslow’s other writing is far better than his oversold model), started at some point to become an economic calculus primarily.

Even if deeply unpopular, leadership remains a challenge to dashboard politics, which obeys market indicators, often mindlessly. As we found in 2008. Some will call it new right authoritarianism, and even see it as creating an uber-meritocracy, but either way it is based on a measure of righteous angst about those left behind.

Possible fruits of Trumpism’s correction?

We reached peak bureaucracy at the turn of the century. The Kafkaesque nightmare of call-centres, the institutionalised West, as an assemblage of disembodied rule followers, was bodied in an untrammelled globalisation. Commodified lean service delivery (as sages of Just-In-Time supply chains like to call it) meant policy enforced rule compliance. But, the revolt against global massification of experience had begun deep in heartland communities.

From the Blair-Brown-Clinton administrations onwards it was the role of technocrats to manage the poverty slaying capital markets that lifted all ships. £1 growth in UK/US, €10 growth in Poland. Yes, employers had a free lunch as young poorly paid East Europeans flooded the UK, and wondered what was the point of investing in training when this cheap and compliant workforce did the grafting.

Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish-British sociologist, who bravely rowed back on globalisation ahead of many, termed globalised modernity’s retraction, and the era of late-capitalism, as liquid modernity. We want the fruit of solid smokestack modernity e.g. undersea cables, WiFi, and freedom to roam, but not the horror of total annihilation of the dislocated self.

The rise and rise of non-spaces, like Junction 44 of the M6, which is not a great cultural addition, provided freedom from territoriality, but also the loss of heroic potential. London is increasingly a non-space. Its museums and history have been gloriously accessible, educating me as a boy, but the slippage is visible. London’s premier Christian house, in the heart of its financial district, St Paul’s Cathedral, is a snip at £26 entry fee. Winners this way, losers round the back? The vast majority of state churches are permanently open and accessible. Lovingly curated sanctuaries display indomitable welcomes come what may.

So, the future re-set might well be achieved from retaining the fruit of technological massification, but re-locating ourselves within a re-born nation-state, its settlements (both physical and philosophical) bearing the weight of life. We do not know if Trump II’s disruption will, in two or three iterations hence, invite civic virtues, a taste for ‘the good society’, and its supporting architecture. We fear it could still unleash meritocracy Mk II. Albeit a nationalised variant.

In Europe we have suppressed nationalism for obvious reasons, but have weakened settled communities that can support those on the margins. For the nation-state is really a collection of laws. If you have arrived yesterday as an immigrant, you can hold wildly different values, but, critically, if you abide by the law, we will all get on. It is this shared respect for laws born from natural reason and history which gradually foster working settlements through highlighting mutual obligations. If the Trump II re-set reasserts this Anglo-American reality, then the bumpy ride will achieve something.

A world-citizen, reacquainted with a relational ordering of society, via a reinvigorated public sphere, where the conversation is held open by the genuinely leaderful, is a curious prospect. A space where the human stands across the square and learns to interpret the micro gestures of their interlocutors, instead of repeating the script of an unworldly technocrat. A shoddy narrative passed down the chain from a political apparatchik. Someone, somewhere, was always going to respond to the Orwellian warning that a society of technocratic party slaves will do itself no good.

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Global leadership opinion: Searching for virtues in the US administration’s New World Order

In Uncategorized on March 24, 2025 at 12:52 pm

WHEN YOU DRIVE INTO CANADA from New York State, USA there is a sense of coming home for the English traveller. Food portions are saner, grass greener, and they say ‘sorry’ nearly as much. Despite the US government’s desire to despoil Canada, I could easily be an American. Half the English spirit is spent coping with the British Isles’ maritime climate, whereas huge bright US skies make Americans admirably engaged, leaning-in, sometimes where they should. As Martin Amis says of the English, ‘If their long-lost cousin became a world-famous author and held a book-signing event next door, the English will say: ‘I might pop my head round the door, but then again…’’

The Great Plains MAGA voter propelling the new US administration’s economic nationalism, has both a grasp of their country’s constitution, and of what might be ‘the good society’. These instincts have called time on what they perceive as an opaque global system. One that extracts value from honest-sweated-labour, and pours it into snake-oil-capital-markets that fail to produce much of tangible value.

The typical American family’s relative decline in income and wealth, against a multiplying super-rich, are structural inequalities stretching back to the 1970s, and these sit at the root of American discontents. With Peter Turchin offering that where serious political candidates have failed, those prepared to “channel… popular discontent” in the most outlandish way, succeed. It is a bonus to MAGA’s grassroots that the Trump-Vance team’s ascent to power appears free from ‘shadowy-conspiracy’ and the forces of a coercive corporate-lobby. The plutocratic nature of US power is somehow overlooked for the moment.

By contrast the heartland British provincial voter has no working knowledge of their constitution, nor can they spell out any version of ‘the good society’, largely through disinterest (a survival posture). Instead, they trust their instincts (as does everybody in the final analysis). And it was the gut-led-British voter who called time on the European Union. This supranational value system could not be weighed or measured in plain sight, and bog-standard-gut-ethics doomed it to history.

This societal battle between the nomadic-world-citizen’s blind trust of market-led client-politics, and the heartland settlers’ stay-and-build commitment, was no more visible than when President Zelenskyy, in barrack-room sans-culottes, met the New World Order in the Oval Office.

One target of this reality TV moment was the liberal progressive Euro-politician. Who is now awake, and talking. The message: your defence shield has expired. American presidents have been trying and failing for fifty years to get Europe to fund its own security. Overnight the Trump-Vance administration has EU leaders committing nearly a trillion Euros on infrastructure and defence. Some going.

American pragmatism has called out Europe, which, in its moral flummery, has not stood up to Russia. It has been buying Russian oil and back-door-exporting through Central Asian states. The MAGA farmer says ‘why should I fund Euro-duplicity?’. The American heartland voter does not believe in a globalised rules-based institutional leadership. Institutions are client-politicians’ agents also, they say.

It may of course still go extremely badly for Ukraine. That the Russian war-tractor will hit full-smoke-spewing-tilt and cannot be stopped, spluttering towards Kyiv in a re-run of Saigon in 1975. But for the Trump-Vance administration to, in the parlance, ‘monster’ Ukraine’s president in the Oval Office is a reversal of principled politics. As Dag Hammarskjöld, UN secretary-general from 1953-61, put it: “Apparently easy successes with the public are possible for a juggler, but lasting results are achieved only by the patient builder.”

But, after decades of the principled global statesman and woman, and their celebrated grand servanthood, many sense these globocrats were not alert to their own complicity in letting the West drift into shallow commercial interest. And to even let it sail its gunboats unwittingly up to the front door of a wounded Russia, whose natural sense of pride makes it recoil. America’s Monroe Doctrine has no truck with foreign threats near or far.  Soviet missiles lasted 25 days on Cuban soil, and left after the threat of global nuclear conflagration. Secretly, the US pulled its own missiles from Turkey and southern Italy as the deal clincher.

For our Nebraskan farmer, she does not wish for Zelenskyy to become another client-politician. The modernist Barbara Hepworth sculpture memorial to Dag Hammarskjöld would leave many heartland voters unmoved. A symbol of unreality that permeates notions of world government. Apostles of the Enlightenment are privately contemplating how an illiterate and know-nothing political-base might just, after all, possess acute wisdom, born of life, rather than the academy.

The turn against globalisation, and its beneficial aspects, is not dissimilar to the vehement rejection of the more enduring fruits of the British Empire. Those elements of pre-WWI British power which enabled for some an idyll, including those whose dedication was marked by love, are no longer remembered. What is recalled of British involvement today, are the parts which, as Anthony Nutting, senior Foreign Office official in Anthony Eden’s government, would term, the ‘sordid conspiracies and political insanities’, such as the Suez Crisis.

Britain and France lost their empires amidst turmoil. Nutting resigned over the Suez debacle. An act which guaranteed his isolation. Few resign today as they know it is the end of both friendships and careers, as Nutting found. Rather, many plod on with repeated resurrections, compounding a moribund politics.

What might serve as a brake on the US’s rush to economic nationalism, is their reliance on imports: semi-conductors, metals, pharmaceuticals, plus an international network of military bases, integrated supplier networks, transport infrastructure, storage, and banking links. All equate to a functioning Western model that an isolationist America might send back into a pre-war world of trade bottlenecks strangling global market activity.

If an emboldened EU does get its act together, the US’s new transactional foreign policy might unwittingly boost the Euro as an international currency. If Europe takes the lead in NATO, then Japan and South Korea might seek deeper partnership with it. And it might make sense for Britain’s nuclear deterrent to further link with France in a continent-wide defence policy.

In terms of statecraft, President Zelenskyy is wise to wear his Oval Office drubbing as a gift. Be true to your humiliation, to borrow from Albert Camus. Wear it well, like a suit. Machiavelli, largely misinterpreted, offers that virtù (virtue) sits at the heart of statecraft, and any senior leader can, with suitable patience, convert their scars. There is potential to win over doubters who are newly sympathetic to your wounds, if not pleased you have crashed to earth.

Humiliation is not far from humility, which is the ground zero of enduring symbolism. And symbols run on eternal fuel, travelling around the world on your behalf. Recent poll ratings show Ukrainians maintaining substantial support for their president, and his grizzled pursuit of this miserable war.

For the US team, impatience risks them being despised for no reason. High principle still matters and if the state’s survival is not threatened, do not burn voter capital if you can help it. Markets thought the threat of tariffs were purely a negotiation lever. Since pressing the button some growth forecasts have been cut. Some analysts predict recession.

But like the pupil brought up on facts in Dickens’ Hard Times who says to Mr Gradgrind, “But surely you must know that self-interest is the law of life”, the core of this debate is the question of whether America will forget that all life in truth is a ‘complete and unlimited dependence of each of us upon the other’. Its vaunted position is the result of its constant curiosity and collaboration.

This very public Oval Office spat steers the Trump-Vance doctrine into a form of realpolitik. And the West has not seen pragmatic realism like this since Margaret Thatcher, Willy Brandt, Charles de Gaulle, and Richard Milhous Nixon.

Trickier is a sense of nihilistic patrimonialism. Operating a royal household, me and my mates, can be a blunt petulant counterforce to the state’s overshadowing bureaucratic apparatus. And it involves firing the competent, and packing your court with sycophants who are pleased to be there.

Quixotic moods mean US policy appears referent on some days to pragmatism, and on others to significant unpredictably, and this further troubles the state’s stability. It is too early to tell. The damage to state architecture is unknown. It is better if the unpredictability operates like a carnival (rule disruptor), rolling through town, and at some point, heading out the other side, allowing the streets to be restored to working order.

The West is stuck in a mire of regulation. If the USA does not wish to destroy its moral authority, take the carnival float through town, make necessary adjustments, but retain the intellectual capital within its institutions. If you smash them, it might be some time before institutional learning is restored. Business leaders think in terms of excellence cultures, but bureaucracies are sub-optimal by design.

And social strata is regularly re-shaped, but not always for the long-term good. The English ruling-class decayed steadily, its idle-rich marrying the entrepreneurial arriviste, and slowly disappeared, taking with it some of the aesthetic values needed for political judgement. As odd as that sounds. Flat meritocratic societies lack the repositories of social capital that are needed to be passed on faithfully to the next generation. America took the keys of global power about two years into the WWII, stepping over Britain’s bankrupt and bombed-out corpse. It was always going to happen.

In the realm of hegemonic stability, it is assumed we have moved from the bi-polarity of a US-Soviet balance of power, onto an unassailable US unipolarity over the past 20 years. But post-Iraq administrations have preferred strategic drift. With a vague notion the West will glide into a materialist utopia by itself. That institutions will replicate their values automatically. It is possible that future notions of bi or multi-polar worlds no longer applies.

Under a non-polar world of inter-relating global institutions, there is a heartland fear that Washington will slide into just another former locus of power. A has-been, like London and Rome. American voters’ resistance to ceding dominance to liberal-progressive globocrats leaves the stage vacant for a world led by a handful of power-brokers. Visible strong-men and women, locatable, and channelling heartland emotions and intuitions. If the good society is the sum of its intuitions, they will not be embodied by the rootless transnational bureaucrat. Dislocated officialdom is undemocratic. 

In America’s fight with global communism, much turned out to be shadow boxing. Cold War I was fought via proxy hot wars. But much was hitting and missing. In Vietnam the communist insurgency in the north turned out to be Vietnamese nationalists, fighting for their homeland rather than international socialism. There was no grand communist alliance, but rather a chimera.

Such huge misreading is down to paranoia. But in Cold War II, there is a very real alliance: Russia, North Korea, China and Iran. The Ukraine war is a basis for hard military-industrial co-operation between this bloc of power, who are entirely locatable on the map, unlike McCarthy’s ‘Reds under the bed’. Will America’s emergent doctrine of realpolitik and its transactional methodology be emotionally capable of understanding this threat?

In the UK the Brexit-behemoth awoke from hibernation in reaction to the Blair-Cameron-governments’ globalised-city-finance-public-sector-model. Politics has descended into a stoogeocracy, where genuine leadership is a threat to in-group power. Britain’s drift, morally and intellectually, showed up no more cruelly than within its attempt to monetise its Post Office retail network. Local post offices in the UK are regarded by some as second only to the local parish church, and pub, for community cohesion. The UK government’s desire to modernise required a new computer system. When anomalies in branch account balancing emerged the Post Office ended up prosecuting over 900 postmasters, with a Public Inquiry hearing that at the root of discrepancies were software errors rather than skulduggery. Regarded by UK politicians as the ‘UK’s most widespread miscarriage of justice’, journalist Nick Wallis said this public sector run institution was “stuffed to the gills with lifers, plodders and gormless apparatchiks inexplicably promoted into positions way beyond their ability.”

This ugly injustice points to under-performing institutions led by weakened governments and weaker politicians. And globalised liberal democracy has been costly in the minds of Mr & Mrs Ordinary-Tax-Payer in the UK. £800bn in taxes to bail bankers, £49bn on Iraq-Afghan Wars of Enforced Democracy (on countries that did not want Starbucks on every corner), the all-hours-working-to-buy-a-box-plus-child-in-a-for-profit-sub-standard-nursery, capped off by the self-loathing anti-Britain-anti-Western-everything narratives, adding to perceptions in heartland communities in the UK that the EU was part of the malaise. How the Trump-Vance turn against supranationalism will bring new accountability to institutions is unknown as transformational change is deeply complex.

In the US, heartland voters may be ready to accept market turmoil as a price it wishes to pay for re-balancing. Many are enjoying DOGE’s chainsaw, even if it will in reality yield limited results in deficit shrinkage. Slashing overheads is the accountant’s soft target, but when plates start crashing much gets quietly reinstated at a later date. Some unfiring has already begun.

This shifting moral terrain shows up as particularly muddy with Europe letting Ukraine and Russia’s blood and treasure disappear into the bottom of Somme-like trench warfare. The generals say they prefer to go into battle with a 10-1 advantage, and certainly not less than 3-1. Since neither side in the war has any advantage, the ‘do something’ option becomes a moral necessity. Realpolitik means Zelenskyy’s blushes in The Oval Office are momentary when an ‘endless war’ eviscerates a generation of young, and not so young, Ukrainians and Russians for no purpose whatsoever.  

And Russia’s deaths in Ukraine are staggering. Unsustainable. So why let them off the hook. Well, America’s economy is also not as strong as it looks. The US debt pile reaches to the moon. They are spending more in interest than their defence budget. Slash America Inc.’s monster spending on any wasteful secondary entanglements or it will implode economically. America is a debtor nation historically, but now it is a long way into the red-zone.

Here in Britain, we are comfortable for the moment to let Canada take one for the team. The popcorn tub is being shared as Prime Minister Mark Carney returns serve to his neighbours. We might be next. Do not upset POTUS is the current mood. If we just look at Britain’s nuclear deterrent, although it is “operationally independent” it “[relies] on a 67-year-old agreement under which America shares its nuclear technology and infrastructure with Britain”, unlike France, which is a “wholly national endeavour”.

But this is early days for all analysts. Every morning a new eye-gouging headline contradicts the previous day’s fragile trend. Leadership strategists like me are currently scanning their history books, biographies and just about every genre, for meaningful context. Two obvious entities emerge, NATO’s birth, and the rehabilitated legacy of Richard Nixon.

It is cold comfort to recall that Britain after WWII split its factory production capacity in half to fund re-arming, and to play lead partner (second fiddle) in the newly formed NATO alliance. Britain was factory to the world, its order books full, but gradually customers drifted away frustrated, as we switched to rebuilding a huge army to protect a dying Empire’s trade routes. It took Britain some time, possibly 70 years, to accept it was a bit part actor in geo-politics. The peace dividend has meant successive governments have let the UK army shrink to half its Cold War complement, bringing into question home defence let alone projecting power into the far reaches of Europe. UK defence spend rising to 3% by 2030 is essential if we are serious about NATO’s Article 5, armed response.

Newly fragile due to America’s resurgent exceptionalism, NATO now needs Britain as its champion. NATO’s raison d’être was the Soviet Union’s glowering presence. If America rehabilitates Russia into the West’s good books, this further calls Article 5 into doubt. In fact, it calls into question the array of international agreements whose ligaments formed around a shared Western worldview.

The last time such a grand scale balance of hegemonic power needed a jolt from Western leadership, Richard Nixon jumped on a plane to meet Chairman Mao and invite China in from the cold after 25 years of diplomatic non-communication. If we think it is a lot to swallow for the West to rehabilitate Vladimir Putin, Mao’s Great Leap Forward took the lives of up to 45 million people. Isolation is logical but often ineffective. Nixon’s, and more so, Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik looked past ideology and values towards the potential of reduced global threats. China’s hybrid economy, the blending of state-planning and market apparatus was the result, with the West fully embedded industrially, if not politically. This appears as the escape path for Putin, as galling as that is to swallow.

Importantly, Britain is not as politically polarised as America. Our constitution might be haemorrhaging due to successive governments’ erosion of parliamentary accountability, but we are still talking to each other with sufficient respect. So, wheeling in Homeric cyclopes to bludgeon one side or the other is unnecessary. That the Trump II team has not dissembled one jot, might give some relief. What you see is what you get. Everything externalised and nothing hidden. A world governed by transactional pragmatics, realpolitik, is with us for some time.

We get the leaders we deserve. Once Trump II has achieved a rebalancing of American interests, what next? And, if MAGA’s instincts prove more consequential to history than the globocrats’, and Trump wins the Nobel Peace Prize, then let us all eat out in Canada before the Maple syrup gets renamed Trump treacle!

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TRUMP II’s existential politics: ‘MAGA’dom versus the university men and women’

In Uncategorized on February 24, 2025 at 9:34 am

THE TRUMP II administration is on its Gulliver’s Travels, re-sizing US international relations. A return to seignorial power politics. And to borrow from Norman Mailer, will ‘MAGA’dom’ bring the existential experience that ‘university men and women’ cannot? Many feel a generation’s progress is lost, and argue it is Buggins’ Turn carpetbaggers, the beige elite, who are at fault. The government time-servers, who when in power prefer grandmother’s steps, and only deliver what W. H. Auden termed accidie, by ‘accepting social values of the day’. Historian Harold James coined it as Late Soviet America. Where the Soviet peoples woke up one morning and said meh to communism, now the Western voter’s truck is unhitched from “bogus ideologies” dominating its institutions.

Like Sykes-Picot’s Middle East carve up, which was a settling of old scores between Britain and France, the US’s internal pathologies are spilling onto the world. If Congress had its way after WWII the US would have turned inwards and ‘gone to the movies and drank Cokes’. Instead, visionary minds ‘saved the possibilities of freedom’. The so-called ‘wise men’, Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman et al, also led with a “sense of selflessness” and “not playing to the galleries”.

For America Inc. to hedge the Pax Americana and lose Cold War II in a game of Russian roulette appears unconscionable, in the light of America’s sacrifices in WWII and their global fight against communism. Acheson said Britain had lost its role after WWII. With America’s overnight equivocation Britain has found its place. To double down on its support for Ukrainian sovereignty, and offer a stark alternative to Germany’s lurch to the right. But it should also recognise The Long Peace is over. The ‘university men and women’ in the legacy media and party elites have gone one way, the voter the other.

In the blur of early-action has a dossier on history’s cycle of ‘catastrophe and salvation’ reached the much-bandaged presidential ear? If the Oval Office’s recent Kremlin contact is the first hi-level encounter since the start of the Ukraine war in 2022, then maybe Trump II has read more historic precedent than the pedestrian Biden administration. But to what end? John F Kennedy, for example, was prepared, as is Trump II, to question received wisdom from the ‘wise men and women’ in government, but the difference being there was a generosity about America after the war, offering its ideals.

Seven US presidents served in WWII, and although not eliminating Richard Nixon’s paranoia, war experience resists myopia. The architects of The American Century, like Harriman, Robert Lovett, through to George Keenan, married business, law and diplomacy. Harriman’s Moscow meetings with the Soviets were tough, commercial, and pragmatic. I suspect Harriman and Trump might have had much in common.

When JFK’s granddaughter rang me a few years ago, I instinctively stood up. She had spotted the catastrophic regional flooding here in northern England, and could I, as a local community organiser, host her visit. The New York Times’s climate reporter’s presence in waterlogged Cumbria, was a boost to the community. But my reverence for America’s stylish dynasty is not misplaced. Britain looked to Jack and Jackie Kennedy with as much hope as did Americans.

Britain’s post-war leaders were desiccated, like the touring remains of Tutankhamun; especially when compared to JFK’s physiognomy. JFK was an American president who in summer ’63 crossed the mythical leadership credibility threshold early. Buoyed by soaring rhetoric he had gone toe-to-toe with Nikita Khrushchev abroad, and seen off terrifying nuclear hawks at home. The tragedy in Dallas in November that year was shattering news.

We here (in Britain) had no Norman Mailers, Gore Vidals or JFK’s to capture our mood for public consumption. France had Sartre and Camus. We had undoubted brilliance in Auden, Benjamin Britten, Stuart Hall, Iris Murdoch, Anthony Burgess, J. B. Priestley, even Kingsley Amis and The Angry Young Men, but they were eulogists at Britain’s funeral. Existentialism fizzed in Paris and visionary-pragmatism roared in growth-America. Our public-thought-mojo retreated inside the academy, and stayed there.

DOGE is supposedly ripping into the Pentagon’s procurement and federal spending programmes. We do not know yet whether the tech-bros have a world-picture on the wall, and a room of game-theorists fishbone-diagramming every move.  We suspect this is not three-dimensional chess, but flicking matches in the oil refinery to get our attention. We are certainly interested in their commercial nous doing the numbers on government spend. Who wouldn’t?

JFK, Boston Brahmin, Trump, New York businessman, are unlikely buddies, but their leadership shares a sceptical view of experts, the experienced, the so-called ‘brightest and best’ who laid the ground for Vietnam, Iraq, the 2008 recession, and the mindless withdrawal from Afghanistan.

But where JFK offered a transformational US-led West, an engaged America, Trump II is asserting greater power-distance with allies. An early-term tactic of rattling the cozy has its logics. We know there is much myth-making in the JFK-model of leadership which travelled well. The rhetoric went above the action. And the Trumpoos can pull on the strain of “self-criticism, wit, ideas, the vision of a civilised society” that fed JFK’s playbook.

If MAGA’s ‘street-wisdom’ asks clean-limbed politicos the right questions in the right order, it might impact the ponderous defence bureaucracy that cannot keep pace with Ukraine’s drone technology. And wake up an ineffective EU defence policy, with Germany continuing to fail in its leadership. It has to, as the EU lacks decisiveness without NATO leadership.

What we do know is MAGA ideology puts at risk the patchwork quilt of post-war institutions. Without better crafted language MAGA’s divide and rule unsettles global equilibrium. Here in Britain, we feel the quilt stifling innovation. Its major institutions from the Church of England to the BBC operate ‘pernicious neutrality’, simultaneously holding open a vital lacuna, often brilliantly, but then flattening what that space produces, for fear of the unknown. The risk averse careerists are in charge.

By unswerving coincidence my mother was in labour with me when the news of JFK’s assassination arrived onto the maternity ward. The nursing staff disappeared to gather round the transistor radio. The tears flowed. The Kennedys embodied the American Aesthetic like nobody before or after. Ample British babies like me were temporarily Winston, the Old Man, American baby boys, Jack, the New Man.

When criticising the current crop of cretins, incompetents and cry-babies, who fraudulently claim to be scions of Western freedom, especially the chancers on the new right, we can call some of them out for who they are, naïve ideologues and clueless reactionaries. But they are a symptom of iron-cage bureaucracies that have deadened the existential-politics of ordinary man and woman. The voter.

For this discussion is about ‘hostility to power’ among the ‘university men and women’, the career time-servers. Those who in the European Union have failed in the exercise of modern power. And we see the rise of grassroots anti-intellectualism in Europe. The CDU getting into bed with the Alternative for Germany should give all my generation a sick feeling, especially when bumped by the Trumpers’ support. I feel the pain of Americans, as Trump is not the first choice for many, including those who voted for him.

My parents were teenage volunteers in WWII. My father moved from Suffolk’s airfield defences during The Battle of Britain, to London during The Blitz, meeting my mother (an Auxiliary Territorial Service volunteer) whilst defending Portsmouth’s naval docks, then out to India, to halt the Japanese advance. The Greatest Generation did not have the luxury of deconstructing Western values via Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida, the celebrities of French Thought, who gulled British and American academies. And still do.

Their generation had ‘great intuition’, gifted from parents’ pre-welfare resilience. My father’s father ‘enjoyed’ four years in a German PoW camp during WWI, after being shot and captured at the Battle of Le Cateau (26th August 1914) after the British Expeditionary Force’s II Corp were ordered to ‘stand and fight’ to halt the German advance on the retreat from Mons. Here in Britain, the 2020s have more than a bit of the 1920s about it. The inter-war period saw Europe fail to spot the madmen. Failure of collective security was the brutal lesson.

For the Trumpites are a cod liver oil dose of anti-politics. Whether it is a tone-deaf and nihilistic backseat-bus-type revolt, we will see. But Trump II brings real world practice to kick the Western world in its orthodoxies. Shake the cage of a complacent West by all means, but do not give succour to the far-right wreckers who are simply desperate for attention. Sir Roderick Spode and the Black Shorts are best left in comical visions. And, over-regulation needs reform, but not overnight. Businesses are spending a fortune on mounds of paperwork. This has to change. And Trump II might well target this, but they need to take a step back and plan over the next year these moves. Less haste, more prep.

Life appearing short, like many, my parents married on a 48-hour pass, and at the height of Britain’s onslaught by the Luftwaffe. Once the battlefront shifted to mainland Europe, mother waved father off to India, back into the infantry, not expecting him to return. These women were supported by the church, and she found faith in the love of Christian community. Neither mother or father collected their medals after the war. Nor marched in its remembrance. Life was forwards and upwards for them. They saw Britain had opened up its doors to rebuilding, and their love was real.

They would see the new right for who they are, fakes and frauds, scapegoating the immigrant and paedophile. To wreckers, the outsider and outlaw is available for demonisation. Playground bullies pick on the nearest vulnerable frame. And the new right are a mix of the frightened and weak.

The notion of British values is deeply complex. You will not find these in a manifesto. We make them today and tomorrow. One thing for sure is, we are an island of immigrants, as much as Europe is an overflow continent. Its citizens originally escaped from somewhere. If Britain is to recover its moral authority, we take immigrants escaping persecution. We take them because that is our duty as a nation. As humans.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with asking young men and women who arrive can we equip you to eventually return to fight for your people. To bring change if you can. Our influence in the world quadruples when we lead by example. And, our ability to effect change through our immigrant population grows when we renounce isolationism and nationalism.

Britain is at its best when offering a model society. Multiculturism was a wheeze that carried many for three to four decades. In truth we are a successful multiracial nation. But there is no such thing as a multiculture nation. It is a contradiction in terms. We steadily come together to form a shared culture based on our traditions, values and institutions. It requires compromise and learning.

We should of course privilege our own citizens when it comes to jobs and training. Those that have stayed to build communities should say to immigrants: ‘Stay and build with us’ and become part of the “we”. But we should not make a trophy out of alienating our refugee community. What we do do is enable their integration, through opening our homes and feeding them, getting to know them and their needs.

When you hear their stories, you understand few leave home for selfish reasoning. One day you might need hospitality and a bed. Life takes funny turns. Now that is my belief, and this must rightly come into contact with other beliefs in the community. A collective reasoning process, where we seek mutual solutions towards integration of the alien. If I would like my neighbour to move their perspective I must be a reciprocal interlocutor.

I will say it is likely an immigrant will be a greater champion of Britishness than many. They know what living under fear is like! British Conservative politician Norman Tebbit’s ‘which cricket team do you support?’ test is specious. You can love your place of birth, and the place you now call home. We have multiple passions, and inviting love of place is a long journey of effective assimilation. You love your settlement over time only if it can form part of your personal story. Conversely, dishing out universal rights at no cost to the individual is unsustainable as it alienates rather than integrates. Rights have costs the community meets through their pot of social capital. An account that needs topping up regularly. The universalist and nowhere citizen who digs into local pots of somewhere people uninvited understandably causes another form of injustice.

It is for Britain to hold its nerve through the Trumpista’s early-term feverish rhetoric. You cannot build any society on a ‘deficit theology’, on what you are against. America is no longer a model-society and MAGA’dom’s ressentiment is a form of admission.

Britain’s industrial decline plus war threw this country into structural change. Some for the good. It is a horrible truism that war resolves as well as destroys. When my father made it back from India, mother pleaded with him to share her Christian faith. He capitulated after attending a tent mission. He got religion quite badly. The Father, Son and King James Bible. But mellowed eventually. The law gave way to grace.

This story will be typical for these islands. A country forcibly and strategically arranged by existential threats of invasion, a resilient island people, dogged, fending off. Not least seeing off Napoleon’s existential politics and huge army amassing across the water. Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar in 1805 was a breath-taking piece of seamanship. It allowed the south coast of England to breathe for the first time in a long time. Jane Austen’s Sanditon, based on my hometown of Worthing, West Sussex, where the author stayed in 1805, offers the rise of the seaside community, newly free from France’s aspirations.

As a young infantryman being shot up by German fighters on Suffolk airfields my father chatted to the RAF bomber crews as they returned from firebombing German invasion barges. Pilots said: “That has put a stop to their little game”. How serious Hitler was about risking the Royal Navy’s domination of The English Channel is debateable.

Napoleon was a poor naval strategist. He meddled with The Combined Fleet’s movements. As they sailed out of Cadiz harbour, their fate was sealed. Nelson, a leader not without his cry-baby moments, a worrier, also possessed personal courage, worthy of recognition. He was undoubtedly a tactician. His famous “England expects” final message to the British fleet came after he had told his ships’ captains to break the enemy’s line at right-angles, defying conventional line abreast cannonades.

He wanted a pell-mell battle, liberating his captains to interpret the battle as it unfolded. The battle was won in a nerve-wrenchingly slow 30 minutes as Nelson’s ships crawled – exposed, hammered by deadly cannon fire – on a gentle breeze into the enemy line, and to then finally open fire through the stern and bows of the enemy. As he strolled the deck of HMS Victory, symbolising fearlessness in the face of the enemy, his war shattered body succumbed.

Such courage, patience, delegation and trust is unlikely to emerge initially in Trump II if all the arrows of power point into POTUS. This will gradually throttle American ingenuity and its global institutions. This is leadership-poor. Nelson, prior to appointment as overall fleet commander, was assessed for his wider consciousness. In spite of storied tactical successes his journals were studied by superiors for strategic capability beyond operational prowess.

As of now, Trump II remains an unknown. We suspect revanchism, but maybe dogmatism, pragmatism or even idealism is present. Britain’s role, shrunken as it is, is to attempt to use its long history of fending off ideologues and shaping spheres of influence. Especially when it can see some cruelties are just unnecessary to maintaining its legacy in meeting existential threats. Building a complex society like Britain is a work of continual attentiveness. America’s attention span is getting shorter. Its citizens drifting quietly from their previous wholehearted commitment to ‘America as project’. Its elite and media increasingly living in another world from ‘the voter’. JFK’s contribution was not unlike Churchill’s, rhetorical. It offered language and meaning that others could adopt. It appeared to gather more than it divided.