Straight to the point

The Progressive Authoritarian Tide Retreats
by Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone Institute

Two months ago in the UK, a 17-year old girl with autism took the field in her all-women team for a match in a single-sex soccer league. She noticed that one of the players in the opposing trans-inclusive club was a bearded man in his twenties. She asked: ‘Are you a man?’ The opposing captain’s formal complaint about the remark was taken up for hearing by the Football Association. The girl was charged with two counts of ‘improper conduct,’ pleaded not guilty, and was tried before a three-person tribunal that met for several hours. It found her guilty on both counts and sentenced her to a six-game ban.

Just ponder that for a moment. In order to assuage the sensitivities of a grown transgender biological man whose self-ID belies his physical appearance, an autistic teenage girl who had asked an innocuous and not unreasonable question was left distraught after a traumatising trial that could leave a lifelong mark on her. 

Dare we hope that the forces of reason, common sense, and decency are reoccupying the public square as we come out of what Rod Dreher calls the age of ‘endarkenment?’ That the proliferation of human rights commissions, administrative tribunals, and DEI apparatchiks that celebrate diversity by enforcing conformity can now begin to be dismantled? That, under the growing influence of a new band of political leaders best described as creative disruptors, progressive authoritarians are on the retreat, and minorities-sacralising woke has peaked? 

Wokism is a cultural malaise yet woke politics is an election loser because voters just don’t prioritise identity in the privacy of the polling booth. Neetu Arnold’s analysis of precinct-level US voting data in selected urban areas shows that exit polls understated the rightward shift between 2020 and 2024: from 17-20 points in Dallas and Fort Bend in Texas to 23 in Chicago and 31 in New York City. The major reasons for the shift that voters cite are the economy, public safety, and obsession with racial equity. That is, of their top three concerns, the first was in response to failing economic policies, the second in relation to woke-influenced policies (e.g. BLM and defund the police) that don’t work in practice, and the third against woke policies in principle.

A Revolution in Real Time 

In July I examined the rise of the new right with the masses in revolt against the political establishment and inner city elites. Yet still Western leaders struggle to grasp their people’s underlying rage against the rotting state of even supposedly stable advanced democracies like the UK, France, and Germany as they defect en masse to populist parties and leaders. The success of centre-right parties led by outsider disruptors will be crowned with the emphatic return of Donald Trump to the White House in January, backed by Republican Party control of the Senate and House and a conservative majority on the Supreme Court. While Trump’s current 54 percent approval rating is among his highest ever, President Joe Biden’s 36 percent is the lowest of his tenure, and this before he pardoned Hunter Biden for any and all crimes committed between 1 January 2014 and 1 December 2024 despite repeated promises to the contrary and the insistence that no one is above the law.

Julie Ponesse notes that for millions, the madness of Covid policies marked their last moment of innocence as trust in the major public institutions shrank under inchoate and then conscious worries about a potential civilisational collapse. Progressives, who proved to be no better than astrology aficionados, immediately embraced the most draconian Covid diktats from secular prophets in elective office, silenced and cancelled opposing voices that have been proven right, and demanded that Covid-deniers be rounded up, locked up, shunned, and driven from employment and participation in civic affairs.

We may be experiencing a revolution in real time. Authoritarian progressives are frustrated because they seemingly cannot translate cultural power (in schools, universities, Hollywood, and the media) into political power. The edifice of hyper-liberalism constructed by the West’s self-loathing cultural elites over two-three decades, with majority preferences subordinated to the rights of ever-tinier protected minorities, is being pulled down around us one scaffolding at a time.

While progressives obsess over gender parity to be achieved through equity quotas, the conservative values of women such as Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France, Beata Szydło in Poland, and Kemi Badenoch in the UK confound identity politics and drive the left nuts. If Badenoch becomes UK prime minister (PM) after the next election, gender will intersect with race and she will become a double traitor. For some, she already is, as in Labour MP Dawn Butler’s offensive reference to her as representing ‘white supremacy in blackface.’ It’s long been clear that the main interest of social justice warriors in ethnic minorities is to use them as a tool to fight the right.

The common thread running through the rise of parties and leaders, including Trump, that are centre-right in more than name only, is that they embody not just popular aspirations but also popular fury against the failures and deceptions of political insider parties on either side of the ideological centre to address falling standards of living caused by red and green tape that, backed by aggressive lawfare, kill risk-taking, investment, and innovation; mass immigration; colonisation of the public square by cancel culture’s speech police and two-tier policing and justice; and breakdown of social cohesion and civic virtue. Remarkably, governments have managed simultaneously to be increasingly out of touch with people’s real concerns and meddlesome busybodies interfering in people’s daily lives. The result is that the liberal democratic order is being stress-tested domestically just like the liberal international order.

Exit polls confirm that one of Trump’s major attractions for voters is that he says what he thinks and cares not a whit about offended people’s reactions. Contrast this with the already settled belief of British voters that Keir Starmer said whatever he needed to win and has since then moved rapidly to break promise after promise to impose a hard-left suite of economic and social policies. The result is the fastest and steepest fall in post-election popularity and a viral petition with three million signatures demanding fresh elections owing to a false bill of sale that has caused such bitter buyer’s remorse.

By contrast, momentum is all with Nigel Farage’s Reform party which has crossed the psychologically important threshold of 100,000 members and jumped into second place in a public opinion poll at 24 percent, behind the Tories at 26 but ahead of Labour at 23. That is, more than half the country is now positioned to the right of centre and less than a quarter is to the left. Reform’s performance in the local council and mayoral elections in May will be closely watched by all political parties and pundits.

In addition, though, we have also witnessed disenchantment and buyer’s remorse with climate change alarmism and Net Zero and with institutions of global governance like the World Court, International Criminal Court (ICC), and the World Health Organisation (WHO).

True centre-right parties don’t generally apply identitarian loyalty tests to female leaders. Sex and race matter less to a conservative than competence. ‘Can s/he do the job?’ is the typical first question, not a candidate’s sex and race. This might explain why Tories in the UK have had three female PMs and could have a fourth, to zero for Labour. The great betrayal of women by centre-left liberals is to render them less resilient. Progressives frame their appeal in the language of victimhood and grievance, perhaps explaining why conservative women are happier in life than their liberal peers. Labor in Australia, like Labour in the UK and the Democrats in the US, has been reduced to a party of, by, and for les misérables.

Trump’s America at Home and Abroad from 20 January 2025

The US still exerts unrivalled geopolitical, economic, and cultural heft in world affairs. Consequently the importance of Trump’s election cannot be overstated for reinfusing people with a sense of hope and optimism by confronting this multifront challenge to everything that brought peace, prosperity, education, good health, equality of citizenship, equality of opportunity, the rule of law, universal human rights, and expanding freedoms to Western societies and also spread them outwards to many other countries.

Of course, Trump may yet take us to disaster. But it is also just possible that in time, his return to power could prove historically consequential for setting the direction in which the world travels. When the establishment is bloated, incompetent, and corrupt, only creative disruptors can reset the institutional balance. Trump Administration 2.0 will provide an anchor point for managing change. Successful change management by Team Trump 2.0 will produce new social, cultural, educational, economic, environmental, and political normative settling points for Western civilisation.

Internationally, some of the worst features of the equivalent of the world administrative state were created by the powerful Western countries when they controlled the agenda and institutions of the various branches of the UN system. Lawfare targets people based on their identity and not the alleged crime. Charges are framed and evidence is fixed to take out the opponent: show me the man and I will find you the crime.

Americans witnessed and rebelled against politically weaponised justice to target Trump; Le Pen is benefitting politically, just like Trump, from the establishment’s lawfare against her, notes the Spectator’s former editor Fraser Nelson; and Starmer is experiencing a similar loss of legitimacy with perceptions of two-tier policing and justice in the UK. The British police experienced a viral backlash against their effort to intimidate the popular Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson. The investigation was quickly cancelled but not before it had forced a public debate on police complicity in enforcing tightening free speech restrictions in the guise of Orwellian non-crime hate incidents.

Westerners cheered at the weaponisation of international lawfare against the likes of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic and now they reap the whirlwind with blowback. This is the equivalent of breeding deadly snakes in one’s backyard whose venom can be directed at those inside the house. And indeed lawfare was weaponised by the Democrats against Trump only to backfire spectacularly. 

Now that the US and the West are losing their dominance of the UN system, international legal weapons are being trained on targets that previously were shielded by the West, most notably Israel. The ICC has become entangled in a messy and protracted conflict that’s not reducible to simplistic moralising-by-slogans. Or consider another, more serious international example. Sir Michael Ellis, a former Attorney General for England and Wales, writing in the Telegraph on 30 November, criticised the ICC’s ‘extra-jurisdictional’ investigation of Israel: ‘Any country which is not a member of the court is simply not bound by it.’ He asked rhetorically: ‘What next? The UK being bound by a treaty it too hasn’t signed?’

In the 1990s, the UK was among the leading group of countries trying to compel India to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty that was adopted by the UN General Assembly directly because India vetoed its coercive clauses at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. Because of a uniquely self-sabotaging entry-into-force formula – it must be signed and ratified by all 44 listed countries in Annex 2 of the treaty relevant to achieving the treaty’s goal – the CTBT is yet to legally enter into force even though, for all practical purpose, it is fully operational. Then in 1998, India and Pakistan were censured by the UN Security Council, with the UK being one of its five permanent members, for testing nuclear weapons in defiance of the CTBT-centric ‘global norm’ and in violation of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), which both countries had explicitly rejected. I wonder if Sir Michael is even aware of this inconsistency? I would respectfully suggest that my opposition to jurisdictional creep of international treaty regimes to non-signatories is more consistent.

Warnings at the time of a global power transition already underway were casually dismissed as Western governments were captured by the progressives. Thus Charles Moore, a former editor of the paper, noted in the Telegraph recently that Starmer’s ideological belief is that human rights should be the UK’s state religion with lawyers as its high priests. PM Justin Trudeau might have stated it most explicitly in an interview with the New York Times nine years ago that Canada is the world’s ‘first postnational state.’ Many others among the West’s governing elites share his belief in that post-national state and prioritise the noble call of global governance over the pursuit of their own national interests.

In the process the liberal international order is being corrupted into a rules-violating (Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) and rules-abusing (weaponisation of lawfare against Israel) illiberal international disorder. Time to pause and step off it. We must halt and reverse the march through the international institutions of cute and cuddly authoritarianism camouflaged in the language of compassionate safetyism, from health authoritarianism led by the WHO during Covid and the new pandemic accords, to the ICC and the Net Zero rush to deindustrialise the West owing to hyperbolic climate alarmism according to which we have left global warming behind and are already into global boiling.

DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) is being cremated and meritocracy is back in vogue. Walmart, Boeing, Microsoft, Meta, and Google are among giants of the corporate sector to have soured on diversity initiatives and are cutting and dismantling DEI departments. Recalcitrant universities are likely to find themselves in the crosshairs of the second Trump administration. Yet, woke is far from dead, the DEI nonsense may be leaving private enterprise but still thrives in public bodies other than in some Republican-controlled US states, and HR tentacles have insinuated themselves into the deepest interstices of the West’s institutional structures. DEI could return in a new guise if we drop our guard. Still, demonstrable progress on Trump’s ambitious economic, social, educational, and foreign policy agendas in the first half of his second term will shift the global Overton window dramatically rightwards.

For thirty years I’ve heard predictions of disappearing glaciers, polar bears, reefs, coasts, islands, and rainfall; warnings that the world only has a 3-5 year window to cut emissions before global warming crosses the tipping point; and assurances that energy from renewables will give us plentiful, reliable, and cheap power. The reality is that we are starting to experience more frequent power blackouts, government urgings to reduce energy consumption during peak hours, and continually rising power supply charges and subsidies to green energy (one calculation shows a total £328 billion in subsidies in pursuit of Net Zero in the UK).

As in Monty Python’s dead parrot skit, that bird ‘is not pining, it’s passed on! This parrot is no more! It has ceased to be! It’s expired and gone to see its maker! This is a late parrot! It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed it to the perch it would be pushing up the daisies! It’s run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!’

As the twin reality of steeply rising costs of non-fossil fuel energy sources and unreliable power supply when most needed hits consumers, public resistance is rapidly building. The Australian columnist Chris Kenny succinctly sums up the current situation here: ‘For decades now, taxpayers have forked out tens of billions of dollars in renewables subsidies designed to drive coal-fired power out of the market, but now so much coal generation has been closed that we do not have enough reliable energy, so taxpayers also are subsidising coal-fired generation in Victoria and NSW to keep it online.’ Similarly, on 3 December the Australian Workers Union demanded that the government put the interests of workers in Tasmania’s fishing industry ahead of the ‘exaggerated concerns of inner-city activists.’

Electric vehicle mandates, under which dealers are set targets for percentage of new car sales to be EVs by benchmarked dates (remind you of centrally planned communist regimes until the 1980s?) under pain of hefty financial penalties, are not just authoritarian. They also reveal science illiteracy in that they focus solely on tailpipes for measuring emission and powerpoint charging for calculating running costs. The life-cycle emissions from EV should also include mining, manufacturing, transportation, transmission, storage, wear and tear on the infrastructure, and final disposal. The costs to the consumer of operating EVs include prorated costs of the public goods in the above list like transmission and storage infrastructure, plus insurance, depreciation, battery, and tire replacements, and life expectancy of vehicles. And there is a cost to national security with the transfer of industrial capacity, wealth, and supply-chain dependency to China.

Worker Versus Woke Parties

President Trump’s top second-term goal will be ‘to disrupt and dismantle Washington’s inbred status quo,’ says the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger. Godspeed, say I. His cabinet picks – Pete Hegseth (Defense), Tulsi Gabbard (Director of National Intelligence), Robert F Kennedy, Jr (Health and Human Services), Kash Patel (FBI) – are winding up all the right people in politics, media, and the world of celebrities. For example, not knowing much about him, I was ambivalent about Patel until John Bolton criticised the pick. Bolton’s attack validated the selection for me and, going by the top-ranked of 2,300 comments (e.g. ‘Bolton’s disapproval is a powerful endorsement’, Scott Lorinsky), I am in good company.

Democratic Senator John Fetterman called it ‘god tier level trolling.’ Trump has the mandate to rattle and shake DC and tear up the Washington playbook. The Democrats’ biggest fear is not that Trump will fail but that he just might succeed with his out-of-the-box cabinet choices. Meanwhile a Morning Consult poll regarding 25 Trump nominees showed all 25 above water, with Marco Rubio for State the highest on 11 points net favourability. One reason might be that it’s an impressively diverse group of people, in multiple senses of the word: of thought, belief, and ideology in governing economic and foreign policies, the first female White House chief of staff, the highest ranking openly gay person in the order of presidential succession, two Hispanics, and three Hindus. The collection of intelligent, fearless, independent-minded, and articulate aides should reduce the risk of groupthink.

Trump’s Republicans are the party of work, in two senses: the party that, compared to the Democrats today, better reflects, represents, and promotes the interests of workers and chooses pragmatic policies that work over ideological pieties and foreign policy naïveté. The entrenched and ever-growing administrative, top-down command-and-control state has become an existential threat to liberal democracy. Existing institutions and leaderships are not fit for purpose. It’s imperative to bring in creative disruptors from the outside. The Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will ‘pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions, and cost savings.’

The peculiar yet growing appeal of populist tribunes around the democratic world is that in addition to their fiercely loyal base, they’ve grown their brand appeal because of who their opponents are. This is because rather than crave recognition from their opponents by tickling their tummies, they punch back harder. This is the secret to Trump’s success in the US, Meloni’s in Italy, Javier Milei’s in Argentina, Pierre Poilievre’s in Canada, and Farage’s in the UK. They too mostly project common sense, mainstream values, and the determination to take on wokeness, without backing off and retreating at the first whiff of the grapeshot.

In constructing a cabinet for his second administration, Trump rejected the option of taking the path of least resistance. Instead, he has chosen one of the finest cabinets in modern American history. His second administration will be led from the top by strong-willed, smart, and diverse individuals with demonstrated success in the real world, not career politicians, all striving for a better America with the determination to succeed. The choice of Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research ($48 billion), is a compelling testament to this and also to karmic justice for Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins.

In the Brownstone community and, judging by several comments in the online media in particular, also more widely, there’s much respect for his scholarship as a researcher, integrity as a scientist, and courage as a public intellectual, plus affection for his engaging personality, calm demeanour, and affable character. In the last eleven days (26 November–7 December), just the Wall Street Journal has had six feature/opinion articles on his nomination to lead NIH. A rare beacon of sanity during the time of Covid, he is among the best exemplars of the Serenity Prayer (and yes, he is a Christian): Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. 

The appointments of multiple lockdown sceptics into positions of power and great impact, including but not limited to Jay, are a game-changer. Australia and Britain embarrassed themselves by holding an unserious and a soap opera-length double hundred million pounds whitewash of an inquiry into their handling of the pandemic. Expect the Trump team to reopen the debate about Covid, shake up the medical and pharmaceutical establishment, expose the manifold and lasting harms inflicted on societies by the Church of Fauci and WHO, improve national preparedness so America can cope with another outbreak without shutting society down, and restore integrity to medical research and trust in public health institutions.

Trump is also being urged to reverse Biden’s ‘radical’ electric vehicle policies within the first 100 days of taking office. Chris Wright, Energy Secretary-designate, is a member of the ‘Drill baby drill’ club. He refutes claims of a climate crisis and dismisses Net Zero activists as alarmists. ‘Nut zero’ may be more apt. The Treasury department has been led by a revolving door of Goldman Sachs executives. Energy secretaries have typically been climate change devotees with a bias against traditional sources of energy and no expertise in the sector. No one before Wright, founder and chief executive of the oilfield services company Liberty Energy, had drilled an oil well, mined coal, or built a power plant.

Gabbard is an outsider who has railed against the failures of the Washington insiders. The 2003 Iraq war was the worst US foreign policy disaster of all time. Gabbard and Hegseth, if confirmed, will with JD Vance form the triumvirate of Iraq veterans in the new administration disillusioned with the interventionist impulse as the organising principle of US foreign policy whose costliest price is paid by the soldiers.

The war’s biggest strategic victor was, you guessed it, Iran. [In history’s rhyming irony, the biggest strategic loser of 7 October 2023 is turning out to be Iran.] The biggest victors of the Ukraine war have been China, North Korea, and Iran; the biggest losers are the people of Ukraine as Russia grinds its way to wresting larger chunks of territory while wiping out a generation of young Ukrainian men and laying waste to its industrial and energy infrastructure. The pullout from Afghanistan was an absolute shambles, Syria’s murderous dictator has been toppled from power with dramatic suddenness but a jihadist regime may replace him and Syria could be trapped in post-Gaddafi Libya-style violent instability, and an amateurish assassin almost felled Trump. But hey, US generals want you to know their preferred pronouns..

Consider Kennedy’s nomination as a parable of the times. The stranglehold of Big Pharma on US lawmakers, health bureaucrats, medical profession, hospital system, and regulators has long been Kennedy’s bête noir, with agribusiness a close second. Far from being solutions, Kennedy insists, both sectors have contributed to America’s acute health crisis. Their financial muscle has enabled capture of the levers of political power. The online rage directed at US healthcare insurers after the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is another bit of evidence pointing to the deep-seated anger in the populace that the different components of the ruling elites have colluded to rig the system to their own profit at the expense of the battlers doing it tough.

If Senators who’ve raked in millions from Big Pharma lobbyists were to be excluded from voting on Kennedy’s nomination, the hearings might well lack a quorum. That, in a nutshell, is the scale of the challenge confronting Trump in implementing his priority agenda come January. The political, corporate, media, and celebrity elites wield cultural power. In response, the deplorables are fighting to take back political power. In Trump, they’ve found a fierce champion. The more he drives the cultural elites crazy, the more his followers cheer him.

Consider the firming perceptions of media bias. Post-election polling for the League of American Workers by TIPP Insights at the end of November is quite extraordinary. By a 34-point margin (rising to 41 points among 18–24-year-olds), voters said the media favoured Kamala Harris over Trump during the campaign. Even 45 percent of Harris voters agreed that the media was biased towards her. Remarkably, by a 19-point margin (including 40 percent of Democrats), voters said that the bias backfired and harmed Harris. This helps explain why media frenzy by offence archaeologists on past statements and behaviour by Trump nominees is failing to move the needle of public acceptability of his picks, including Gabbard and Kennedy.

Kennedy is a fitness fanatic who has seen the nation’s suffering from illness caused by profiteering agribusiness and pharmaceutical multinationals with armies of lobbyists to capture lawmakers and regulators. He wants to heal the people through healthy living and eating: make Americans healthy again (MAHA, which coincidentally means great in Hindi as in maharajah). The pandemic made everyone realise how powerful a role health agencies play in our lives, how arrogant the health bureaucrats are regarding their own expertise and dismissive of people’s concerns and questions. By contrast, Kennedy points out that millions of Americans suffer from chronic diseases and obesity, despite vast sums spent on healthcare.

According to the Petersen and Kaiser Family foundations, US per capita healthcare costs ($12,742) are almost double the average of 13 comparable industrialised countries ($6,850), yet deliver among the worst health outcomes on life expectancy, childbirths, infant mortality, diabetes, and heart attacks. Trusting the experts to be benign and get it right is a feature neither of science nor of democracy.  Scientists do need to do more to understand the role of forever chemicals in food and water. Governments must conduct and publish cost-benefit analyses of alternative public health measures and treatment options. They must lift the liability exemption from vaccine manufacturers and require rigorous and transparent trials of new products including vaccines.

It’s hard to overstate the impact of made-on-the-fly Covid policies in destroying public trust in the medical profession and health experts and elevating the profile and credibility of Kennedy and Children’s Health Defense (disclosure: I am a director of CHD Australia). In peddling false promises on the need for and benefits of lockdowns, masks, and vaccines, authorities opted for the Goebbels strategy that a big lie repeated often enough becomes the accepted truth.

Instead, it turns out that the more relevant story is the boy who cried wolf to hide his own failure on the job and was duly eaten by a real wolf. Former NIH Director Collins conceded last year that, focused solely on ways to stop the disease, they failed to consider how gravely their interventions disrupted peoples’ lives, ruined the economy, and kept kids out of school needlessly and to their lasting detriment. This is a confession we are yet to hear from the even more authoritarian Australian health know-it-all scolds. 

This essay builds on two articles published in the Spectator Australia magazine on 30 November and 14 December

The Progressive Authoritarian Tide Retreats
by Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society

Source: Brownstone Institute Read the original article here: https://brownstone.org/