Whatever the result of the US election, Trump has changed history

Everyone interested in the political process in the developed world needs to think long and deeply about the phenomenon represented by Donald Trump. For it is important to realize that Trump does not have to become President of the United States on Tuesday to make a legitimate claim to have created a revolution, the significance of which reaches far beyond America.

Consider the extraordinary career of Trump. When he first announced himself as a contender for the Presidency the liberal establishment and its media fellow travellers were amused. There were 17 major candidates for the Republican nomination when the presidential race began on 23 March 2015. They included such household names as Jeb Bush, aspiring third incumbent from a presidential dynasty, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

Before the primaries started five candidates dropped out, discouraged by poor polling. That was the stage at which the establishment reckoned Trump should have made his excuses and left. Opinion polling suggested otherwise. Shoulders were shrugged around Ivy League, Beltway dinner tables. Imagine the conceit of Trump fancying his chances.

When the first shots were fired on 1 February this year in the Iowa caucuses, the nay-sayers were superficially vindicated when Trump came second in a state where polling had suggested he could win. In fact, though, he had performed well. Then, eight days later, he topped the polls in the New Hampshire primary, gaining 35 per cent of the vote and more than 1000,000 votes. Three more candidates dropped out; Trump marched on. By 3 May he had formally been declared the presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party.

From then until the eve of the Republican convention the GOP establishment indulged in its favourite recreation of self-harm. Fantasies of rejecting the voters’ choice by procedural hocus-pocus exposed the naked contempt for the public will entertained by Republican grandees as much as Democrats. Across the aisle the twin party establishments were united in disdaining the Deplorables. When its bluster finally petered out at the convention, all the GOP establishment had achieved was the further alienation of the party grassroots while exposing itself as a confederacy of political eunuchs.

The early orthodoxy had been that Trump could never secure the nomination; the succeeding orthodoxy was that he would lose by a landslide to Hillary Clinton. Trump’s candidacy has been a switchback ride, at one point trailing Clinton by 12 points. Now, after more than 18 months of gruelling electoral warfare, with less than a week to go before the election, Donald Trump is neck-and-neck with Hillary Clinton. She cannot shake the Old Man of the Sea off her shoulders.

Regardless of what happens next Tuesday, even if Trump drops back down 12 points after some scandal, or the electorate opts for the devil it knows, or the polling turns out to have been wildly erroneous – no last-minute electoral reprieve for the Clinton camp could ever erase the massive significance of what has happened. Do not ask speculatively if Donald Trump will change history next Tuesday: the reality is that he has already done so.

Hillary Clinton is the embodiment of entitlement. Her supporters regarded her terms as First Lady and Secretary of State as an apprenticeship for the Oval Office. When Barack Obama frustrated her expectations it was seen as a postponement not an abdication of her self-regarding ambition. She was destined to be the first woman President, the liberal establishment, from Hollywood to Wall Street, was behind her – she was widely seen as Hillary the Inevitable.

Now here she is. The outcome of the presidential race is too close to call. All those hundreds of millions of dollars, the torrents of lies – all may have been expended in vain. Is this Clinton’s own fault? Partly, yes; but her mendacity and effortless anti-charisma could be seen as offset by Trump’s vulgarity, inarticulacy and the failure of the GOP establishment to support the Republican candidate (if it had done so, where might the polls stand now?).

The vital lesson to be learned (though it almost certainly will not be) from Trump’s epic rampage through the establishment china shop is not what he has done, but what he represents: an insurgency. It is a global insurgency, as we saw with Brexit. A globalist liberal establishment has arrogated to itself the right to deprive ordinary citizens of their national and cultural identities, jobs, moral convictions, power over their daily lives and the right to express their attachment to conservative institutions.

If Trump wins on Tuesday, an alien worldview will be pushed back in America. If he loses, the insurgency will not go away. Its political consciousness, nurtured by the Tea Party and further awakened by the Trump campaign, will increasingly challenge the liberalism that is neutering America and the rest of the developed world. For conservatives, what happens next Tuesday will be about the timetable for regime change, not about its necessity.