President Donald Trump’s inaugural speech which he delivered to Congress was as revolutionary as the speech delivered by US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth in Brussels or the one given by JD Vance in Munich. It was revolutionary or – better put – counterrevolutionary. President Donald Trump’s second-term presidency reminds one of the rule by Napoleon Bonaparte or Joseph Stalin, with no malicious hint being meant in either of the two adduced cases. Both Napoleon Bonaparte and Joseph Stalin took power after a period of revolutionary changes – in France and in Russia – changes that had sought to turn everything upside down in terms of morals, in terms of societal norms, changes that had declared war on commonsense. Indeed, both Napoleon and Stalin stopped the pernicious process and reverted it to a greater degree. Prior to the emergence of these two historical figures France commencing from 1789 and Russia starting from 1917 were on a suicidal course. The likes of Maximilien Robespierre in France and Leo Trotsky in Russia were hellbent on reconstructing and de-constructing society and, indeed, the whole world. Nothing was regarded as sacred, as sacrosanct. Everything was subjected to change while opponents were severely punished.
Much the same has been happening in the United States for the last three or so decades and especially during the presidential office of Joe Biden. The only – and indeed significant – difference between the events in France and Russia was that – as yet – the revolutionary changes were not bloody. All the rest is very much alike. What President Donald Trump is attempting to do is best expressed in the term commonsense revolution, a term that he himself employed in his inaugural address. In a nutshell: no more sexes (or genders) than two, no more wokeism, no more diversity-equity-inclusion madness, no more rampant crime, no more impunity on the part of illegal immigrants, no more craze of gender reassignment, and so on, and so forth. Napoleon and Stalin took similar measures in that they reversed lots of pernicious processes and resumed the pre-revolutionary normalcy to a greater extent. Yes, the latter has very bad press in the world, but the alternative to Stalin – the said Trotsky – was much, much worse.
Americans, just as the French and the Russians of the periods mentioned above, are a split nation. One part of them clings to commonsense, to traditional values, while the other despises everything that has created and shaped America and, indeed, the Western civilization. Why do we get such two opposing sectors of society? God only knows. Sociologists, historians, and economists will readily come up with varied explanations of the phenomenon and they all may be partly right. The most probable cause is – as it seems – a psychological i.e. biological phenomenon concerning the human psyche. Man can choose to dress neatly or to defile his skin with tattoos. As it is, social standing, profession, level of education have little or nothing to do with such personal choices. The divide runs across families, runs among siblings, hence it must be something biological, something we might say – genetic. Now, if such an unfavourable phenomenon afflicts and infects a sufficient number of individuals, and consequently if such individuals manage to attain power – it matters little if they attain power by peaceful or by violent means – then a revolution in morals is set in motion. It is as a rule a minority that is capable of violating the morals of the majority of society. Be it the Russian Bolsheviks or French Jacobins, the German National-Socialists or the Chinese followers of Mao Zedong, the numbers of the political seducers and ultimately ruthless tyrants were always relatively very small. It is not the numbers that decide the course of history: it is the decisiveness, determination, fanaticism and ruthlessness on the part of the social annihilators, accompanied by the meekness, submission, self-effacement, and docility on the part of the vast majority of the rest of society.
The revolution of common sense. These are apt words with which one can describe what is happening now in the United States. The Trotskyites of all epochs and latitudes create secular religions out of thin air (though many a time they claim to have science or God on their part) and seek to rebuild reality. Since they usually appeal to moral values of justice, equality, inclusion, aid, charity, and the like, they can always attract relatively many people, especially young, impressionable, especially intellectually weak (though with university degrees) and inexperienced. In the seventies of the previous century, many people who lived in affluent Western nations adored Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Lenin and Castro but – and this is a big but – they never ever thought of relocating and living in a political system created by those heroes of theirs or a country run by them or their followers! More to it, the admirers of Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Lenin and Castro did not even notice that people – common people i.e. workers mean peasants – from the countries under the rule of those Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Lenin and Castro types would regularly leave their social paradise and preferred to be exploited by the system of capitalism, patriarchy, racism and what not which the impressionable Western minds used to criticize so much. So let us say it one more time to bring it home: the idolizers of all those seemingly wonderful social solutions wanted neither to experience them first hand nor did they notice that common people kept fleeing from the likes of Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Lenin and Castro in flocks. Were the adorers and admirers of social experimentation feeble minded en bloc?
Much the same is observable nowadays. The activists who want to import people from the Third World hardly ever mingle with the immigrants, hardly ever live among them or close to the neighbourhoods settled by Third World individuals. The activists who try to intimidate the rest of society into accepting gimmegrants and who accuse the societies they live in of racism and capitalist exploitation do not seem to notice that millions of Third World people flock to allegedly racist and exploitative nations of the Western world. The activists who are oh so fond of demolishing traditional morality do not seem to notice that the people from the Third World despise the ideas of having the many sexes or genders and, what follows, of surgical gender reassignment operations, or irreligiousness of the Western world. The activists who act against commonsense and seek to destroy masculinity (necessarily with the adjective toxic) do not seem to notice that the Third World males are very much masculine and hardly likely to be turned into effeminate pseudo-males of the Western type.
The activists who pursue a revolution in morals do not seem to have the powers of observation. They import people from other countries and claim that by doing it they enrich the West (as if the West were not regarded as the richest part of the globe!) and cannot for the lives of them notice that by enriching their societies they necessarily impoverish the societies from which the enrichment is derived! Indeed, commonsense is not what the Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Lenin and Castro types have. They accuse their own nations of being exploitative towards the third world countries and in the same breath they… praise the exploitation of those third world countries by depriving them of the human resources with which those countries or nations could enrich themselves.
In his inaugural speech President Donald Trump enumerated a long (by no means exhaustive) list of the financial expenditures of the previous administration, millions and millions of dollars spent on improving democracy or enabling gender reassignment or similar things in all corners of the world. This procedure shows the craziness of the Trotskyist type that took hold of the Western world. This procedure also enabled a couple of millions of political and social activists to enrich themselves. Political and social activists are as a rule individuals who do not have skills or knowledge that is in demand. These are individuals who have a degree in critical race theory or gender inequality or climate change or, or, or, so participation in government-paid projects such as bringing about or supporting women empowerment somewhere in Africa is the only way for them to assert themselves socially and to have subsistence. Being engaged in such projects one does not need to have any skills or any knowledge: one simply gets money and travels the world with the blessing of a charitable or governmental organization, and can claim to have gained moral high ground.
Because apart from money grants – huge money grants – moral high ground is something that social and political activists of all shades are also very much after. Such is human psyche. A human desperately needs to be regarded as ‘good’. Being ‘good’ is the easiest thing there is in the world. If you cannot master a skill or a branch of knowledge, if you cannot be a good sportsman or artists, you can always gain esteem and achieve a kind of dominance in society by the pretense of being morally good, morally superior. It is especially easy when you do not give away a penny from your own pocket to prove your goodness. The pennies and the pounds come from other sources. It is the others that pay for “women empowerment” somewhere in Africa, and it is the others who pay for your travel there and for your remuneration. It is the tax payers, the people who have skills or that kind of knowledge that is in demand. It is such others who work long hours and pay taxes with which the activity of social do-gooders is paid for, with which the do-gooders can be good.
For we are all driven by the drive of dominance. Dominance is not reducible to material riches or political power. If you cannot assert yourself in either, you can always opt for dominance in the realm of (perceived) morality, you can always strive to become a Gandhi or a Mandela type. This kind of societal dominance can prove better, way better, than material riches or political power. This kind of dominance carries with itself admiration and recognizability, and makes the world adore you. A powerful incentive.
The French revolutionaries and the revolutionaries in Russia, the Chinese Red Guards or the followers of Che Guevara, the followers of John Calvin or Girolamo Savonarola, they all acted for the good of the people. They had no skills nor did they dispose of sound knowledge, but they were spurred on by the dominance drive in that they all wanted to improve society, to improve reality itself, and to present themselves as good men, as good women. What is comforting in all this is the fact that after a period of madness of social engineering there always followed a period of a comeback to commonsense led by the likes of Napoleon in post-Robespierre France, Stalin in post-Trotsky Russia, Deng Xiaoping in post Mao-Zedong China, Konrad Adenauer in post-Hitler Germany, Donald Trump in post-Biden United States, and so on, and so forth. The discomforting element in all this is that periods of societal madness – like this in France or Germany, like those in Russia or China, like those elsewhere in the world throughout history – sadly, keep recurring. Humanity moves along the sinusoidal wave, hitting now troughs, now peaks. Fortunately, we are experiencing a period of relief as the Biden trough is now being counterbalanced by the Trump peak. Sooner or later another trough will come, though. Inevitably.
