To understand what the USA is, we must first understand ourselves. But Western Europe is unable to understand American patriots. Western European socialists hate the freedom-loving USA. The United States was founded on the opposite of socialism: individualism and “One Nation under God”.

Never in modern times have the contradictions in the West been greater.

In Scandinavia people do not understand how profound the contradictions are, and how dangerous they are becoming. Every single day we are fed with Trump-hatred.

The mainstream media have been doing this for ten years, and it has transformed people’s picture of reality and predisposed them to a totalitarian development.

None of them will document what is happening to us; they effectively ensure that self-awareness and self-criticism are blocked, which is the precondition for any living society. Therefore people do not notice that we are moving in a totalitarian direction.

Document tries to be the counterforce.

Age has become a value they cannot take from us. He who has lived and experienced possesses something irreplaceable: We remember how it was. We can compare. The answer fills many with despondency. The development is going the wrong way, and they see little hope. The media ensure that the bright spots that do exist are obscured or distorted.

Instead of “throughput” we have a policy based on the notion that birds of a feather flock together. The media operate with an extremely friend-enemy picture. They recommend politicians at home and abroad and threaten citizens that things will go badly for them if the presumptively right people do not win.

We saw it in the last election in Norway. Something deeply undemocratic has entered politics. The media and the left create a narrative that is about moral superiority. If you do not vote for them, you are a bad person.

They have a deck that consists of trump cards: racism and Islamophobia. They are self-explanatory and absolute.

But if one side in politics has definitional power and the other is powerless, we no longer have a democracy.

Trump has had this function in Western Europe for the last ten years. He has been the chopping block.

Tell me what you think of Trump, and I will tell you who you are.

The danger for Europe is that the elite has mismanaged the continent to such an extent that people do not understand that the USA is pulling ahead. People are told that Europe represents the superior culture vis-à-vis the vulgar Americans. But in reality it is we who are sinking.

Thanks to Trump and MAGA, Americans have rejected woke ideology. They saw the madness and the abuse of power under Obama. They saw that a once liberal medium like the New York Times stiffened ideologically. The NYT became standard-bearers for an ideology with strong Marxist elements. Woke sees the world through ideological glasses and insists on making everything equal.

It is the hallmark of communism: the key word is equity: It means equality of outcome. The answer to the multicultural society is to level everything down to the lowest common denominator. Socialists hate quality and competence. We know this meaning of equality from both the French and the Russian Revolution. It always ends in violence.

The Democrats have moved to the left. Now candidates who are openly anti-American and anti-capitalist win.

Trump says that the USA has never faced a greater danger.

In the big cities governed by Democrats, population replacement and the economy have created fertile ground for a radicalism that America has scarcely ever seen the like of.

The European elite falls victim to its own preconceptions and is drawn towards New York Mayor Mamdani. They fail to see who stands behind him and what Mamdani stands for: Jew-hatred and hatred of the rich. Instead they tempt with freebies: free public transport, free kindergartens, subsidised rent. “Eat the rich!”

And the resourceful and wealthy flee.

The same is happening all over the USA. People are moving from blue states to red ones. We hear nothing about this either, because it is the “wrong” direction.

During the Cold War this was one of the unbeatable arguments against the left: Why do people only flee in one direction – from east to west?

The wall through Germany was proof of socialism’s defeat.

But this time the European elite does not want to know why Americans are fleeing from Democrat-governed states. If their ideology and social model were as superior as they themselves claim, there should at least be a small stream in the other direction. But there is not.

People vote “with their feet”.

The progressive wing reacts with an internal radicalisation to the fact that reality contradicts them: When a candidate with SS tattoos can be elected in Maine, with support from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, something is seriously wrong. By all accounts Graham Platner was a candidate from hell. But he was elected.

Jack Schlossberg stood in New York. He is a Kennedy, son of Caroline Kennedy – beautiful, well-educated, rich, and has everything. But he did not make it. He did not dare howl with the wolves. He could have said one word, and thereby won: Palestine.

Others have no problem with that. A dam burst after 7 October 2023, and it began before the Israelis started their counter-action. Since then it has only escalated.

Scandinavians are part of this current, and because politics has become a moral certification test, we do not understand what is happening. We have passed, after all! We Europeans are the highest level of civilisation! Far above villains like Trump, JD Vance and Elon Musk.

Narcissism is not a good starting point for politics.

That is how it was in Germany in the interwar period, and in the Soviet Union. If politics only flows in one direction, it changes character. Only the virtue and civil courage of citizens can prevent it.

In the USA the madness became so great that the wind turned.

It was because the Democrats’ and the deep state’s attempt to stop Trump became too obvious. If you are to succeed with a lie, it must have a semblance of credibility. In the USA there were too many events that tore it to shreds. Not least the media’s own predictions: They promised that Trump was a Russian influencer, that he won thanks to Putin in 2016. The attempt to expose him continued after he was inaugurated. A representative like Adam Schiff (CA) said that he had seen the evidence behind closed doors. That it was only a matter of time before it would become known. But when special counsel Bob Mueller presented his report after 22 months and with unlimited resources, and had found nothing at all, people began to wonder. The bow was stretched so high that people heard it break.

On top of everything else it turned out that Mueller had been beginning to suffer from dementia already when he received the assignment. His appearance in Congress was embarrassing.

This dynamic became even clearer when Biden stood. First there was the question of whether the result was rigged. Who could believe that this shadow of a failed politician could have received far more votes than Obama and Trump? But the orchestra, i.e. the media, continued to play – and drowned out all the embarrassments that happened in full public view: that there was stumbling both with legs and tongue. Only at the debate against Trump on 28 June 2024 did the mask fall, and the truth in all its glaring horror became apparent to the whole world.

It was a moment of truth, not only for the Democrats, but for the Washington establishment and for the part of the world press that had kept Biden afloat.

Then came the story of the autopen president: It was not Biden who had signed the executive orders and all the pardons. The signing had been done with an autopen.
That was the final straw. Everything had been play-acting!

The American people had been deceived.

They remembered and understood: Some people had colluded and installed a senile man in the world’s most powerful office, who immediately began a radical policy: opening the borders and actively transporting illegal migrants deep into the USA, with night-time flights.

This destruction from above built on one year of lockdown during the pandemic and subsequent forced vaccination. The revelations about Anthony Fauci’s collaboration with the Chinese on the development of the covid-19 virus continue to emerge. The same applies to the censorship and persecution of those who opposed the infection regime. It has just come to light that the CIA hunted “vaccine refusers”.

All the revelations about the mobilisation of state power against citizens provoke reactions. Americans do not want to live in a dictatorship. All the violence in the summer of 2020 was a wake-up call.

Power vs. Strength

The Democrats, the media and the intelligence services have power, but they do not have strength. Politicians get strength from the people, and it was this strength that laid the foundation for Trump’s greatest comeback in history.

Looking at the vote numbers for 2020, it is clear that there was something seriously wrong with that election.

It is tempting to quote Martin Luther King Jr.: The arc of history bends toward justice.
This has been the conviction of socialists at all times, and they are to deliver justice. They feel called. This was Obama’s task: to transform America.

But the most important component in the equation is missing: God.

If people believe that they can create a just world on their own, the result is the opposite.

This has to do with human nature. Socialists do not want to hear about it. They stand in a tradition from Jean-Jacques Rousseau that says people are born free and without guilt.

But the Founding Fathers knew something else: Man is “flawed” from conception: a sinful being. If the legislator assumes that man can regulate himself if given the chance, the result is anarchy.

The slogans Defund the police and Abolish ICE symbolise this utopian thinking. Americans see what they see: people robbed and killed on open streets.

European media will of course not write about it, for the same thing is happening here, and on an even larger scale.

Resilience

The differences between the USA and Europe run deep, and it is these that are now manifesting themselves:

Societies are exposed to a great stress test that reveals whether there is any resilience left. Americans showed that they had it when Trump stepped forward.

He is reviving what was the Founding Fathers’ brilliant idea: that freedom plays out in society. Therefore society must be regulated so that the strong do not abuse their power, and so that the fundamental rights – property rights, freedom of religion, freedom of speech and the right to self-defence – are respected. This happens through the separation of powers – the legislative and appropriating, the judicial and the executive power. With the press as the fourth power, but it must be independent.

Despite this fine-meshed net, freedom has been undermined from within.

The American Supreme Court recently issued a ruling upholding newborns’ right to become American citizens regardless of how temporary and loose their connection to the USA might be. Citizenship gives certain rights, and one of them is the right to vote. China deliberately speculates in “producing” Chinese people who have American citizenship. A rich Chinese has a hundred surrogate children who are “Americans”. China can decide elections with its “Americans”. Nevertheless the Supreme Court closed its eyes and rejected Trump’s proposal to abolish the automatic right to citizenship. Two judges who are considered conservative – John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett – joined with the progressives.

In Europe they are for the liberals and paint Trump’s USA in the darkest colours.

They need only cast a glance out of the window to see who is right.

But the progressives go around with ideological glasses and prefer to propagate for the introduction of conformity by means of censorship and surveillance.

Tom Wolfe once said that fascism is something that arises in the USA and strikes down in Europe. We are now seeing signs of this reactivation of the darkest sides of European history.

According to Nietzsche: If you stare into the abyss, the abyss will sooner or later stare back at you.
That is where we are, and in Europe the danger of civil war is greater than in the USA.

Donald Rumsfeld called it “Old Europe”. The USA is the New World.

At the 250th anniversary the USA has much to celebrate. There are serious threats and dangers lurking within the walls, but no country comes close to having the civic spirit, civic culture and enlightenment that exists in the USA.

Victor Davis Hanson is a whole university in himself.