http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/05/trump-dumped-business-usual-asia/
Despite the best hopes of the liberal-minded West, the globalisation and modernisation of China have made its communist rulers less democratic at home and, on the international stage, more belligerent. Trump is prepared to accept this reality and acts accordingly.
In his seminal book Why I Am Not a Conservative (1960), F.A. Hayek contended that conservatism—at least the British and European version of conservative politics at that time—did not “offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving”. While the British Tory party, for example, might “succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments”, it “could not prevent their continuance” since it failed to “indicate another direction”. The populist-nationalism of President Trump, I suggest, is emancipatory to its core, not the least reason being that he has clearly articulated and is now pursuing “another direction” in Asia.
The “current tendencies” and “undesirable developments” in America—and we could extrapolate to most Western nations—have to do with a dynamic and mutually fortifying relationship between politically-correct ideology and the development of a new power elite. Today’s ruling class, to borrow from James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution, is not the old-time family entrepreneur in league with a national parliament, but a managerial elite of “operating executives, superintendents, administrative engineers, supervisory technicians … administrators, commissioners, bureau heads, and so on”. This evolving ruling class, warned Burnham, would not necessarily be committed to economic freedom, personal liberty, parliamentary sovereignty and patriotism, their interests being monopolistic rather than market competitive, oligarchic rather than parliamentary, transnational rather than local, global rather than patriotic.
The America First creed is in obvious conflict with the globalist worldview. President Trump’s nationalist insurgency exists on a number of fronts, with each serving the same populist goal: to push back against the “insiders” or power elite who have hijacked the nation to serve their own agenda; an agenda which is at odds not only with the interests of the “outsiders” but also with the long-term viability of American self-determination. Take Trump’s tariff initiatives, for instance. His argument was not advanced simply on economic grounds but also in terms of national security. Tariff announcements on steel and aluminium imports have made Wall Street jittery, and yet President Trump expressed the obvious in one of his tweets: “When our country can’t make aluminum and steel … you almost don’t have a country. We need great steel makers.”
