Brexit, then Trump: Welcome to the counter-revolution

Brexit 2: Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue. Of course a United States presidential election is obviously an American event, but this one is much more. It is part of an anti-liberal, anti-elitist global counter-revolution.

Any liberal, internationalist, politically correct, climate alarmist progressive who thought Brexit was a bizarre fluke that would never be repeated and could be suppressed by the establishment should waken up to the reality of being, in the ludicrous phrase coined by the lame duck president now vacating the Oval Office, on the wrong side of history.

President Elect Trump promised to build a wall, but he began by smashing one down: the so-called Blue Wall of Democrat states in America’s north-east that was supposed to be Hillary Clinton’s electoral firewall. The rural states of the US will be hard pressed to furnish enough eggs to cover the faces of all the pollsters, commentators, electoral strategists and assorted charlatans who got everything wrong that they conceivably could. They represented the invincible Democrat election machine as the equivalent of the Wehrmacht in 1940; by the end of the night it resembled the Wehrmacht in 1945.

Yet again the “experts” have been exposed as buffoons, but the establishment continues to repose a simple peasant faith in these discredited witch doctors, whether they call themselves psephologists, economists or climate scientists. The reality is that nobody takes them seriously any more and those who do lend them their credulity court disaster.

The media were stunned by Trump’s victory, which many ordinary mortals expected, because they listen only to one another and talk down to the public. How dare Joe Public want his country back? The liberal ascendancy has imposed its will on the public for so long, it cannot believe that public is rising up to overthrow it.

Why did Hillary Clinton lose? Because she represented everything the no-longer-silent majority hates: liberalism, political correctness, corruption, crony capitalism, arrogance and a lust to re-order other people’s lives. She and her rebarbative husband had been around like a nasty smell for most people’s adult lives; they were like the guests who won’t leave, even after you have put on your pyjamas as a strong hint.

The buzz word of election night for commentators and analysts was that Hillary “underperformed”. Why had they not noticed she had been doing that all her life? She did not have the grace to present herself to her own supporters, leaving it to John Podesta to hustle them out into the night (“Move along now, please, nothing to see here.”)

Barack Obama trashed his own dubious legacy by campaigning for her relentlessly, while Obamacare was further unravelling Clinton’s campaign. The Democrats are in trouble: not only do they lack such basic tools of political control as the presidency, the Senate and the House, but the divisive consequence of this election is the Bernie Sanders tendency splitting their party. The GOP remains in similar trouble unless it comes to terms with reality and embraces its grassroots support.

But the chief significance of this election remains global rather than domestic. In a Europe enraged by mass immigration created by Angela Merkel and other EU leaders, the sequence, within a few months, of Brexit and Trump will energise anti-liberal, anti-establishment forces in Europe. This is the embryonic beginning of a new political order; the old liberal playbook has been torn up. Welcome to the Counter-Revolution.