Delaying the inevitable

By Pete North - November 7, 2020

The voter fraud narrative has been in the works for months. It is now a feature of politics that the losers seek to delegitimise a victory and stigmatise it as the result of a shadowy conspiracy. The left did it when Trump won and remainers did it when we voted to leave the EU. It’s always easier to blame external factors and throw up a screen of innuendo than it is to examine your own failings.

In this instance Trump has an easy target. Vote fraud is a feature of American politics and the Democrats have always had a ruthlessly effective voter registration programme which allows them to employ some deeply unethical tactics. Everyone knows it so if you fan the embers you can build a political insurgency that believes to their core that the forces of globalism through their Biden puppet stole the election from Trump; a man they can’t control.

This ensures that Trumpism lives beyond Trump and a people versus a corrupt establishment narrative lives on to fight another day under a different demagogue.

The tactic also serves a secondary function. A prolonged and tedious count sucks all the momentum out of a Biden victory. Election fatigue has already set in and by the time it’s confirmed we’ll simply get a muted acknowledgement of a known factor rather than wild jubilation. Trump is very much operating a scorched earth policy, seeking to maintain the division.

Notwithstanding a credible case for widespread vote fraud it still looks like Biden has won in his own right but not by a margin that suggests a comfortable time in office. Trump’s footsoldiers will more than likely make trouble just as the far left have over the last four years. Trump has evangelical devotion among his supporters and they’re quite capable of waging a propaganda war from the outside.

I don’t see American politics detoxifying any time soon. A lot will depend on how Biden consolidates his victory. If he is uncautious, boldly implementing a leftist social agenda then he merely exacerbates the cultural divisions. That’s the real question. Will it be a tribal winner takes all administration or will it attempt to heal the national rift?

I don’t know the answer to that one. If we see a resumption of liberal internationalism, further diluting national sovereignty then it plays into the hands of the nationalist right who believe, with some justification, that western leaders are serve a higher agenda than the direct national interest (ie climate change as a pretext for global government). This is roughly what motivates the ultra Brexiteers.

I am not unsympathetic to that worldview. Liberal internationalism is a pseudonym for global technocracy and eco austerity that would have us all eating insects and living in converted shipping containers while modes of speech are regulated, credit score based on social media algorithms and men using the women’s loos. A world in which Twitter decides what you can say, and where expressing an unorthodox opinion is considered a hate crime. All the while, governments have no authority over trade and Amazon owns everything. “Smart growth communism”.

In that regard, Trump, having pulled out of the Paris accords and continuing to obstruct the WTO (a proto-EU), was positioning the USA against global government, and himself as the last line of defence against Davos elites and their globalist corporate dystopia.

What has Trumpists particularly animated is a fear of a Covid inspired “great reset”. This is at the root of all the current conspiracy theories driving the right. As it happens, the great reset is just a marketing name for a relaunch of UN sustainable development goals which drive the agenda of all the global regulatory agencies including UNECE, WHO, Codex and the WTO.

So in fact it isn’t a conspiracy theory as such. It exists, it is at the forefront of the regulatory agenda at all levels and it is largely dominated by a particular set of policy wonks, diplomats, hustlers, entrepreneurs and CEOs who are all devoted to the idea of a world without borders or barriers to trade. Free movement of goods and capital the world over.

This of course marks the end of national sovereignty and democracy, but the theory is that if you keep a steady flow of cheap goods and services underpinned by low wage immigration then electorates will be sufficiently sated and mollified so as not to put up any meaningful opposition. If they complain you just call them stupid and racist and have them banned from social media for extremism. This is why we constantly see the definition of hatespeech expanded to include moderately conservative views.

As it happens, Trump never was a saviour in that regard. For starters he’s not the brains of the operation and with term limits, there was no chance of unravelling thirty years of global governance especially with the entire corporate media against him along with the rest of the liberal establishment.

As it happens, though, the threat of the globalist agenda is overstated. Governments sign treaties and international accords but in most instances they pay only lip service to them and certainly don’t finance their treaty obligations. More likely they simply reclassify normal spending as counting towards implementing the global goals. It’s all baloney.

In reality it means an abundance of wind turbines and local councils closing roads and turning them into cycle lanes, closing car parks and other such nuisance gestures, and the Covid lockdowns have created an opportunity to accelerate the abolition of fossil fuel cars and encourage home working.

Course, they haven’t thought any of this through. It’s going to drive up the cost of energy, reduce mobility for the working classes and more than likely lead to regular power cuts. It’s all great in theory but in practice, it’s not at all sustainable. It’s the middle class utopianism of the late twentieth century which didn’t anticipate the 2008 banking crisis or a hard Brexit. Pretty soon we’ll be a broke ass country and scrambling for any growth we can get.

The UK government will naturally have to learn the hard way that all this eco inspired dogma is not economically sustainable and eventually we will see a right wing party willing to go the whole hog and scrap the sustainable development agenda, but until then we’re just going to get poorer as we watch successive virtue signalling governments attempting to kick-start a “green revolution”. We’ll put up with it for a while longer but when we start having rolling blackouts in the dead of winter, we’ll then see an actual revolution.

As for America, they have their own battles to fight. A Biden administration may breathe life into the liberal internationalist agenda for a while but it isn’t going to deliver prosperity to the people who voted for Trump so we will be back here again until the day comes when there’s an outright winner. If the left wins then democracy in the west dies a slow and unremarked death. But if the only opposition the right can muster is blustering oafs like Trump and Johnson, we’ll have dug our own graves.