Complaints about Donald Trump’s “divisiveness” strike Paul Gottfried as disingenuous, and it is easy to see why. After all, Mr. Trump may have exploited the deep divisions which run through America and the West, but he has hardly created them. Rather, his movement has given a voice, however blunt and inarticulate, to people who have long been marginalized by the liberal order. As Mr. Gottfried explains, the real division between right and left cuts not between finance capitalists and welfare statists, but “between those who wish to preserve inherited communities and their sources of authority and those who wish to ‘reform’ or abolish these arrangements.”
For some time now those of us who oppose globalism as a matter of principle have been effectively muzzled out of sight in the attic, but if Mr. Gottfried’s essay “Explaining Trump” is any indication, the days of cozy establishmentarian consensus are over. Whatever the Trump Administration does or does not achieve, Mr. Trump has been the catalyst for a West-wide “populist insurgency,” a revolt pitting defenders of “historical community and/or organic national ties against the advocates of globalization, fluid human identities, and human rights rhetoric.”
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