Dickson Igwe. Photo: VINO

The Free World and its values of tolerance, civility, and rule of law, is under severe threat from the “rabid” forces driven by the “ominous” rhetoric of Mr Trump, and other populists such as Nigel Farage of the UK, and Marine Le Pen of France. These are leaders who appeal to our very “worst instincts.”

Trump’s divisive rhetoric and eventual election triumph of November 8 was part of the rise of extreme nationalism in the west. This was first evidenced by Brexit. And now “Trumpism” has released the genie of racist intolerance out of its proverbial lamp, in the USA.

It is no longer taboo being a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the USA, and a bevy of National Front associations in Europe. Racism is once again “cool.” Anti-Semitism is becoming increasingly palatable. Social media has exploded with hateful and angry rhetoric. The streets of the west once more hold the “stench” of racial and religious intolerance.

Now, Donald J. Trump has become the new King of the white working classes. He has successfully ridden a white working class charger named “anger and resentment” through the US establishment. White anger on November 8 pummeled America’s politically correct elites and placed Donald J. Trump into the White House. That was despite increased turnout by Latina voters. Trump got 29% of the Latina vote, higher than Mitt Romney received in 2012. The Latina’s were the biggest losers on November 8, according to the pundits. They had the most to lose from a Trump Presidency, according to what Trump spewed from the pulpit.

Trump, like Nigel Farage in Britain, and Marine le Pen in France, is leader of a populist movement that came out of white working, and lower middle class anger. This was an anger directed at the decline in living standards of blue collar types, from Manchester to Michigan, and from Calais to Detroit. Toxic white populism and nationalism was triggered by globalisation. It is a non ideological politics driven mainly by hatred of foreigners and resentment against an elite establishment of financiers and billionaires who drive the globalised process.

OK. Globalisation and outsourcing has left white working class communities in many western developed countries in social and economic distress. However, the populist reaction to this working class trauma is especially strong in Britain and the USA, both countries that share similar values and social subsets.

On the opposite side of the equation, globalisation has created a powerful billionaire class of mostly digital and technology entrepreneurs. It is a super wealthy class supported and advised by a motley subset. These are the academics, media pundits, and varying professional types, who enable the globalist system: the intelligentsia.

They are the men and women that are the critical cog in the wheel of a world order driven by digital technology, and the swift movement of finance and capital around the globe. They are known as the global elite. Their most revered place of meeting together is Davos: a pristine ski resort in the Swiss Alps.

White working men and women in the USA and Western Europe, are rejecting globalisation, easy migration, and open trade. The world is reverting back to an earlier time: the world of the early 1900s. A New World is evolving that is a throwback to a time of world empires: Russian, British, Japanese, German, and Austro-Hungarian. This was a time when national power based on military might alone, determined the international order, not international cooperation, and international law.

Populism in 2016 is a resurrection of the bloody and volatile forces of ethnic and national hatred of the early 1900s. These were the core tensions that led to World War 1: a meat grinder that caused the deaths of millions of Europe’s finest, brightest, and bravest. World War 2 was a continuation of World War 1: it was a continuation of the narrative.

Trumpism is an isolationist form of that self same populism that led to the deaths of over 60 million people in two world wars. It fits perfectly with an evolving multi polar world. It is an international political order based on balance of power metrics, where regions are controlled by a superpower which imposes its strategic will in its own geographical sphere of interest. Hence, Trump’s dismissal of NATO, and his “cozying” with the Tyrant Vladimir Putin.

However, with balance of power politics, just like in 1914, one incident or miscalculation could lead to World War Three.

Now this Writer spent much time and energy, over many years, warning about the dangers of social and economic inequality. Globalisation brought great wealth and opportunity to the peoples of emerging nations, especially China. However, globalisation created unsustainable social inequality in the west. Social inequality is always a problem for a stable democracy.

Globalisation created a super class of billionaires who owned the world’s most dominant and most ubiquitous multinationals. These were super wealthy men and women termed the 1%.

After World War 2 ended in 1945, America beat its swords into ploughshares. Post World War 2 the west was driven by an American industrial machine equal to none. 1945 saw the start of American branding of the globe through manufacturing. This was the beginning of a middle class that was blue collar and prosperous.

US prosperity at the end of the War crossed the North Atlantic, and entered and then spread throughout Western Europe. The middle class, the overwhelming larger of the three social classes- working, middle, and upper- was the dominant class after WW2. Middle Class prosperity was driven primarily by industrialisation and manufacturing.

However, the dawn of monetarism, and the supply side austere economics of the 1980s, led to a technological world order driven by the micro chip, and the programmers who wrote the digital narratives that turned computers into intelligent machines, smart devices, smart appliances, and robots.    

Globalisation was grabbed by enterprising technology and computer types who inhabited Silicon Valley in California. It was a computer culture that expanded the number of plutocrats who controlled global wealth. There were just 10 billionaires in the early 1900s. Globalisation has created a few hundred billionaires today. The 1% represents about 300 families who control global wealth and power.

The 1% in the west is at the pinnacle of a class structure that is based on wealth. It is also the driving force of an elitism that has as its creed a politically correct liberalism that has forced enormous social change on a reluctant Jack and Jill Average: gay rights, same sex marriage, abortion rights, banning prayer from schools, tolerance for non Judean Christian religions, and the full acceptance of non western values from foreign soil.

This is the world of left wing political correctness. But here is the great paradox. The leftism of 2016 is not the leftism of the 1970s and 1980s that placed egalitarianism and equality at its core.

Naomi Klein stated in the Guardian of November 9, that globalisation has brought pain to the working and middle classes of the developed west. Through deregulation, privatisation, austerity, and corporate trade, men and women everywhere have lost jobs, pensions, safety nets, and see their children unable to obtain a quality higher education.

At the same time something else has happened: the rise of the Davos class. This is a hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cozy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous.

Success is a party to which the working people of the world are not invited, and Jack and Jill Average know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected to their growing debts and powerlessness.

Consequently the rise of a Donald Trump promising to fix what he truly cannot.

The world is in the middle of an ideological war: nationalist populism versus globalisation. That is the central narrative. The rise of hate and intolerance especially in Britain and the USA is a bye product of this war. The stench of intolerance and anti Semitism once more pervades the streets of Europe. It is backed by the new intolerance in working class areas of the USA signified by the rise of Donald Trump and his populist revolution.

However, the men and women behind globalisation are the super wealthy. They are already coming together to protect their interests. The US Democratic Party will become the space where they will rearm and get ready for the next phase of battle.

Interestingly, one name being mentioned as having perfect demographic credentials if she decides to run in the coming years is MICHELLE LAVAUGHN ROBINSON OBAMA.

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