The primarily don’t like Trump because he’s calling them idiots. Sometimes, because he’s Trump, directly, but even when he’s on his best behavior, his every action exposes them for the idiots they are. And it is infuriating to them.
You have to think about their world for a minute: they grew up in the system and the system taught them certain things as unquestionable dogma. This is how the world works and thus it ever shall be. Things like NATO, the UN, foreign aid, mass immigration, free trade…all dogmas defended as stoutly as any Christian will defend the Trinity…but with the difference that the Christian is defending a Mystery while the secular Establishmentarian is defending…merest opinion.
That is the thing, of course: what these people hold to be established fact which no educated person may question are just opinions. Often opinions which weren’t supported by the facts at their creation. But all rigidly enforced. William Manchester, liberal to the core, recognized what was happening in the 1970’s – that the age was becoming one of Liberal Bigotry…no thought, no questioning…just endless repetitions of received dogmas with the only change allowed being carrying it to the conclusion: that is, the bad idea morphs into the insane idea so lets have a 200 pound man compete against a 120 pound woman.
And the reason Liberal Bigotry has been sustained for so long is that for a very long time, it seemed to work. Heck, almost all of us on the Right were taken in by it. I used to defend NATO! I thought the FBI was a first-rate crime fighting outfit. I thought the schools were trying to educate. I figured our senior military officers were apolitical patriots only concerned with the defense of the nation. On and on like that…and it was all based, ultimately, on the fact that the Liberal order had won World War Two. Can’t emphasize enough how much that built up credibility for Liberalism. That plus the apparent cure of the Great Depression. Essentially, the Liberal order has been cruising on that since 1945.
But it never was what it seemed. As I’ve explained before, the Great Depression was the inevitable result of things that happened ten years previously: the massive destruction of global markets represented by the twin events of the First World War and the Spanish flu. Every economy was living on borrowed time starting in 1919…and the British economy slumped into de-facto depression by 1926: it was so bad by then that the British working class – especially the coal miners (then Britain’s basic industry) – called a general strike. The global economic contraction was ongoing…it hit America’s agricultural sector as early as 1921. The crash of the Stock Market in 1929 was merely a belated exposure of the underlying weakness…but even that wasn’t all of it. For instance, France didn’t tumble into Depression until 1931. But it was going to hit everywhere eventually. Nothing anyone did would either stop it or lessen its effects. The only thing anyone could do is make it worse – which is precisely what the governments of the world, including ours, started to do.
And it wasn’t the tariffs! In fact, what Britain should have done when their economy slumped in the mid-20’s was impose tariffs. As noted, their basic industry back then was coal…but the British Empire was being overrun by cheap coal from Germany, Poland and the United States. Think about it: the British controlled 1/4th of the world’s land mass and population. Coal was the basic motivator of industry at the time. If you wanted something to be done mechanically, coal had to be used – even if merely to generate the electricity you need for electrical machines. How could Britain’s coal industry slump when 1/4 of the world was their market? Because they were free traders! They allowed their basic industry – their working class – to be squeezed into poverty on the theory that India and Canada should be able to buy their coal from Germany. Insane! And Britain, like the rest of the world, opted to use government spending to cure the economic malaise.
Think about this for a moment: you’ve got an economy that has crashed. Poverty is spreading. The money is all gone. So, your solution is to take money from this crashed, impoverished economy and give it to the government. And call the resultant government spending “growth”. This is what deepened and extended the Depression. Not tariffs. The money which was supposed to be used by the people to rebuild their economic lives was spent by government…sure, some of it useful spending (like the Brits subsidizing their shipbuilding industry which was to prove crucial for British victory in WWII) but the main thing is that it couldn’t be “growth” … it was just moving money around. Some bright guy out there might have had some new product or innovation ready to go but he couldn’t get financing because the money had been taxed or borrowed away to build a CCC camp in Nevada.
And then World War Two happened. Kinda interesting aspect of this has not been explored. Probably because exploring it would expose some weaknesses in the Liberal Narrative. German rearmament started before the ink was dry on the Treaty of Versailles. First covertly and ad-hoc, it was eventually taken over by the government and as early as 1927 the Germans had a plan to create a large, modern army. But they also knew it would take time. Years and years. The program was put into overdrive when Hitler came to power in 1933 and all sorts of financial trickery were used to provide the money for the buildup. But it was still going to take time. The German Navy – the Kriegsmarine – put their program under the title of Plan Z which envisioned a Germany Navy strong enough to fight the UK by 1948. In a pinch, they felt they could at least fight it out by 1942. The Army also felt that they could present Hitler with a reliable military instrument in a pinch by 1942, though they more envisioned 1945 as the time when the German army would be ready. But as we all know, the war started in 1939. What gives?
The German staffs – Army and Navy – were among the best in the world. Arguably for the Army the very best in the world and maybe in all time. They knew what Germany needed to have a fair shot at winning. These were deeply educated, highly intelligent men. The official Narrative is that Hitler was just too impatient and so flew off the handle, as it were, and invaded Poland in 1939 before Germany was ready but then the slight quality edge the Germans had in 1939 and 1940 allowed to stupendous success. There is some truth in that but the firing of Hjalmar Schacht as President of the Reichsbank was more imporant – Schacht had been sacked because he kept on telling Hitler that he had to stop the arms buildup as it was bankrupting Germany. To outsiders, Germany in the 1930’s looked like an economic miracle…pretty much full employment, everyone prosperous and great public works being done at the same time Germany’s military grew more imposing by the year. It looked as though State planning and spending were the magic talisman. But it was all a false front: the money was fake (MEFO bills – enormously funny thing which I’m sure our current Rulers would love to have – forcing businesses to take promissory notes which will be redeemed when the government says so and don’t appear on the government books as debts), the truth concealed by economic sleight of hand…and it was all about to come crashing down into renewed Depression once the world figured out just how much debt the German government was carrying. There were two ways out for Hitler’s regime: allow a Depression or start a war. Guess which option was taken?
The main thing here is that the Nazi regime, aside from its other sins, shows that State planning and spending don’t actually do anything. They don’t create growth. They might give you a hot house and very temporary prosperity, but they are all on borrowed time and something has to give. This is why, I believe, this aspect hasn’t been looked into. Nor has the real effect of the New Deal been looked into. There’s been some criticism around the edges of it, but nobody points out that it didn’t do anything positive – and very likely made things worse in the long term. The industrial power which armed the world against Nazism wasn’t made by the New Deal. And while the Hoover Dam is quite impressive and useful, it wasn’t as useful as the ability to make aluminum and steel. In fact, we rather lucked out on aluminum which was to be crucial for aircraft production…totally outside government, a new facility was built in the late 1930’s for aluminum production for the Japanese market. Outside that stroke of luck, building those 50,000 planes FDR ordered would have been tricky. You’d think if our Ruling Class was super smart and figuring things out that the things we needed the most would have got priority in government spending. But, it wasn’t like that at all. In fact, some particularly needful things – like food production – were hobbled in the 1930’s in an attempt to keep food prices artificially high.
But it all seemed to work on that glad day in September of 1945 when the Japanese affixed their signature to the surrender document. The war was won. The Depression was over (though it is forgotten that right after the war there was a recession and a spike in inflation as the economy readjusted itself). The Smarty Pants Experts had fixed everything! And since then, their successors have continued to run things all based on the assumption that Smarty Pants Experts know what they’re doing. Don’t you know that General Massive Decorations is the successor of such geniuses as George Marshall!??!? How dare you question! And Professor Gimme A. Sinecure is the successor of Rexford Tugwell of FDR’s Brain Trust! How can you know more than him?!?!?!
Guys, they have no clue what they’re doing. Heck, even old Rexford didn’t know. He was a Columbia University economics graduate who figured he knew better than the farmers how agriculture should work. Because who better than an upper class academic to tell you how to plow a field? They’re just people who happen to be in positions of power when things happen…and if good things coincide with their tenure, they get awards and reputations for being geniuses. For the Liberal order, being in charge while American industry (they did nothing to create) arms a military (they also did nothing to create) which then goes on to win a global war was the grandest stroke of luck in history. And, my friends, the people in charge actually made even winning worse than it should have been. You think about the bone headed strategic decisions taken which prolonged the war unnecessarily, the diplomacy which awarded half of Europe to Stalin and China to Mao…the post war Cold War and fruitless wars in Vietnam and Korea…the slow destruction of the American industrial and agricultural sectors which had awarded them victory in the first place…the importation of millions of foreigners, the destruction of all public decency…on and on and on they went just totally lousing everything up but keeping in power on the after glow of a document signing on the USS Missouri.
And here we are. It is 2025. Eighty years later and its all come apart at the seams and Trump is trying to sew it back together again. It is simple logic that the illegals have to go home. That we use tariff pressure to force acceptable trade deals. That we revive American manufacturing as much as we can. That we prosecute violent criminals. That we let girls compete with girls. And they hate Trump for doing it – because it shows them up as the totally clueless buffoons they’ve always been. The mask it off. The Emperor not only has no clothes but he’s fat, bald, covered in pimples and he’s swinging something a chipmunk would be ashamed to carry.
And I do believe it is going to work – mostly because sensible things do work. It won’t be the appearance of success, but actual success. Not a higher mythical GDP number, but an increase in actual wealth. Not a higher defense budget, but an actually effective military force. On and on like that…and that will put an end to the Liberal Order.
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