Why do people support Trump?
I promised myself I wouldn’t write about politics — this is my first political post since Brexit. The topic feels important though.
The first section is a summary of an excellent post from Noahpinion about the ideology behind the Trump administration’s hostility towards Europe. I have some thoughts of my own to add at the end.
The New Right
Noah describes an ideology that he calls the New Right. At the heart of this ideology is a reverence for Western Civilisation. Western Civilisation is a thousand years of art, literature, architecture and music. It’s going to the bar on Saturday night and to church on Sunday. This cultural inheritance started with the Greeks and Romans and was handed down through the centuries.
The New Right feels that Europe has betrayed its cultural inheritance with policies that undermine this civilisation — policies like multiculturalism and hostility to Christianity. In recent years, Muslim immigrants have brought over their women in burkas and replaced our churches with mosques. Transwomen blur the lines between men and women and blue-haired genderqueers protest the West’s colonial history. No one reads books any more.
These political trends must be opposed in America, but Europe is already lost and America must end its support for their decaying culture.
The New Right’s nationalism is like the nationalism of the 1920s and 30s in Italy and Germany. It’s not fascism exactly, but it shares the ambition of recovering old ideas of what it means to be American. It’s not hostile to other civilisations — only to countries that are willing to surrender their civilisation the way that Europe has. It’s not racist exactly — but it resents immigrants who threaten our culture.
“All the other civilizations are basically hard-asses who forbid immigration in order to keep Muslim lands for the Muslims, China for the Chinese, and so on. Western Civilization, they believe, is uniquely nice (“empathetic”), and this niceness is a form of weakness, and so Western Civilization is unique in allowing itself to be overrun by outsiders.”
In America, progressive groups undermine what America stands for with their support for terrorists and immigration. These groups no longer believe in Western Civilisation and, instead, give license to weak people and to people who want to replace what is good and strong and holy with social studies and men in dresses.
Make America Great Again
I don’t agree with the New Right’s ideology but I understand it better now. However, I believe Trump’s MAGA and the New Right’s restoration of Western Civilisation are entirely different things and this is the key to understanding this government.
President Trump does not care about restoring Western Civilisation. He does not even believe in civilisation. He does not really believe in anything at all. When he is holding a Trump Bible or kissing an American flag, he is doing this because his supporters want him to do it. He is just as happy with porn stars and drag queens as he is with pastors and priests. He has probably never even read The Bible or a work of literature.
It's an accident of fate that President Trump is even a Republican. The Republican Party just happened to be weak in the 2010s and Trump hijacked it. It could just as easily have been the Democrats that he captured.
President Trump is vindictive like a mafia don; he’s more Tony Soprano than Charles Lindberg. He has contempt for weakness and all he wants is power and reverence for Donald Trump. If making America great again helps him achieve those objectives, he’ll make America great again. If casinos and porn stars would make him rich and powerful, he’d do that instead.
So why do people vote for him?
I think Trump is smart enough to have identified the elements of New Right ideology that appeal to populists. After a couple of decades of illegal immigration, identity politics and allowing men into women’s sports, Trump was just the man who could reverse the decline. He does not need to be respectable or honest or trustworthy; he just has to restore the culture that made America great.
When progressives give priority to minority and nonbinary students, they are showing disrespect for Western Civilisation. Vote Trump to restore respect.
"Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you"
I think the New Right have hitched their wagon to Trump to manoeuvre themselves into power. I expect they hold Trump in as much contempt as the rest of us do but they only have to endure him for four more years and then JD Vance will be President and they can get down to the serious business of restoring Western Civilisation. Maybe they won’t even have to wait four years.
☕️ Buy me a coffee? ☕️
It won’t make me rich but it’ll make me happy.
I promise I won’t spend it on beer!
There are elements of this New Right ideology that appeal to Europeans too. Populist European parties such as Reform, Rassemblement National and AfD make a big noise about cultural issues, but I think the main drivers, for the Reform Party at least, are economic issues, immigration and rising crime.
I am a fan of Trump because of what he does. I'm not interested in his personality or motivations, only his actions as President. Mainly, he's anti-war. If nothing else, that would get my vote. I wish we had a MAGA equivalent in Britain. Do you not think the tanking economy, insane levels of immigration and rising crime are problems?