An odd thing has happened since last week. I’ve started warming to Donald Trump. Maybe it was his gracious acceptance speech or some of his appointments. Maybe it’s that I want the best for America. But mainly, if I’m honest, it’s the gibbering, drooling, pant-hooting rage of the other side.
It started a few hours after the polls closed when I read an article by the editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, which contained, without irony, the following sentence: “Fascism is not our future — it cannot be; we cannot allow it to be so — but this is surely the way fascism can begin.”
I can’t believe this needs saying, but America is a pluralist democracy. It has just conducted a free and peaceful election, as a result of which power will be transferred in an orderly manner, without anyone being exiled or shot.
The winner reached out to those who hadn’t voted for him, asking for their help and guidance; the loser made a fine concession speech; the outgoing president put his staff at his successor’s disposal to ensure a smooth transition. Fascism?
The hysteria of the American Left is exceeded across the Atlantic. Several European leaders could not even bring themselves to offer the perfunctory congratulations that protocol demands on these occasions.
Here, for example, is the German Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier: “During his campaign Donald Trump has spoken critically not just about Europe, but particularly about Germany. I think we have to prepare for the fact that American foreign policy will be less predictable for us in the future.”
Those no longer in office felt able to express themselves more freely. The former Swedish prime minister, Carl Bildt, supposedly a Rightist, Tweeted: “At least Richard Nixon had a solid understanding of world affairs.” “I’m not happy,” said the president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz.
Germany’s Spiegel called him “the most dangerous man in the world,” France’s Liberation “a nightmare.” On social media, the filters came off, and the election became an excuse for an orgy of anti-Americanism.
Any nation that could elect such a man, Euro-sophists assured one another, was plainly made up of rednecks, racists and retards. Barack Obama had been a blip. Americans were back to their swaggering, unilateralist, know-nothing bigotry.
You can read only so much of this stuff before your sympathy begins to swing. I said some hard things about both main candidates during the campaign. It struck me as extraordinary, and slightly shameful, that a nation built on the ideals of self-reliance, meritocracy and public-spiritedness should nominate two self-absorbed dynasts who evidently regarded themselves as bigger than the office they were seeking.
When Hillary Clinton made her direct appeal to “any little girls watching,” my 14-year-old daughter happened to be watching TV. “Yeah, right,” she said. “Margaret Thatcher got to be prime minister on her own. And Theresa May. But Clinton was running because she was the last chap’s wife. Isn’t that slightly, you know, banana republic?”
It was Clinton, ultimately, who lost the election. Trump got slightly fewer votes than Mitt Romney had. But millions of Democrats stayed home. That explanation, though, will never satisfy Lefties. They have to have someone to hate.
In this regard, if in few others, Donald Trump’s parallels with Brexit are justified. The sheer viciousness of some of the people who like to think of themselves as fair-minded liberals tends to boost support for the other side. Just as some Britons voted to leave the EU because they were sick of being patronized and insulted, so some Americans backed the Donald on similar grounds.
The liberal response, in both cases, was to double down: to howl about racism and misogyny and every kind of vice, not knowing or not caring how it came across.
Anyone outside that little virtue-signaling clique is bound to be pushed the other way. Plenty of moderate British conservatives, who until last week detested Trump, will find that their sympathy has been pricked. Stare long enough into the vortex of Twitter and you start to hear the Battle Hymn of the Republic swelling in your mind.
There is going to be a great deal of America-bashing over the next four years; but it will prompt a pro-American backlash. If that means overlooking Donald Trump’s more egregious character flaws, so be it. At least, unlike his predecessor, he seems to like us Brits. The least we can do is to hope for the success of our chief ally.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
