The Real Lesson Trump Teaches

Why the end of the West was inevitable and what needs to be learned

Image credit: iStockPhoto

For anyone with more than zero neurons functioning in their prefrontal cortex, Donald Trump’s infantile petulant destruction of the West is the metaphorical straw that broke the camel’s back. Qualification-free democracy, which arose by accident out of a series of short-term expedients with no one ever bothering to consider the inevitable consequences, is a system in which ignorant foolish people are permitted to vote for blustering cynical incompetents. It’s always produced low-quality outcomes but we’ve persisted in chanting a fantasy about democracy being better than all available alternatives.

So we’ve reached the end of the fantasy as democracy elevates bloated mental cripples like Trump and Orban, promotes acts of national suicide like Brexit, and ensures feeble-minded dictators like Putin can do whatever they want because hundreds of millions of self-obsessed complacent know-nothing voters will always favor appeasement over meaningful action — and the non-entities who sit atop the crumbling power structure know this very well. Windy speeches to make people feel good combined with near-total inaction is a winning formula.

Until you’re attacked.

And as we now get to see very clearly, attacks can come from two opposite directions. They can come from outside, as per Putin’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 (which the West ignored) and Putin’s twin invasions of Ukraine in 2014 (which the West ignored) and Putin’s third invasion of Ukraine commencing 2022 (which the West wanted to ignore but Ukraine inconveniently fought back). Attacks can also come from within, as per Orban’s conversion of Hungary into an autocratic regime, PiS almost managing the same trick in Poland (and may yet succeed in the years ahead), Le Pen about to become France’s first female and first ultra-far-right Presidente, and of course the bloated mental cripple Trump’s total destruction not only of the USA but of the entire Western world order.

Unfortunately, although European “leaders” have been applying the usual old formula of windy speeches followed by no meaningful action (because voters love speeches but hate the consequences that follow from actually trying to do something) we see how…