As Donald Trump plumbs new depths, we must defend post-war values that have served us so well

Within days, though, it became apparent that rather than seeking to realise King’s dream, Trump and his administration were intent on tearing down every attempt to realise that vision, and on sending American history into full reverse gear. What King actually said, after all – in his famous “I Have A Dream” speech of 1963, quoting the preamble to the US Constitution – was, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the meaning of its creed: we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men were created equal”.

Yet for Trump and his Maga clan, it’s clear that the very idea of a state that tries to foster that equality, and to end the centuries of discrimination and exclusion experienced by some groups in society, has become anathema. Of course, there has always been an element of gleeful destructiveness in the new right politics of the last 50 years; a visceral urge, more emotional than rational, to tear down the “cosy” postwar consensus that gave us the British welfare state, and a whole raft of well-meaning new international institutions.

Toxic masculinity

With the coming of the second Trump administration, though, all the layers of economic theory, conventional patriotism and social liberalism that once moderated those impulses seem to have been stripped away; and In a firestorm of bitterly destructive executive orders, programme after programme aimed at achieving diversity and inclusion has been ended, and the very words banned, in dealing with the US government.

It goes without saying that this reactionary impulse also involves an ugly bromance with all the toxic forms of masculinity that decades of feminist campaigning have tried to challenge, from the Maga movement’s general attacks on women’s rights and bodily autonomy, to Trump’s attempts to pressurise the Romanian government into releasing convicted sex trafficker and misogynistic social media influencer Andrew Tait.

And the administration’s attack on government agencies which try to promote equality and inclusion is only part of a much wider assault, orchestrated by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Expenditure, on every benign or well-intentioned aspect of government, from the management of national parks and nature protection, through attempts to tackle climate change, to public health staff engaged in the monitoring of health statistics and the spread of infectious diseases.

Where this wrecking-ball episode of destruction will end for the United States is anyone’s guess; and it must be hoped that at least some of the checks and balances written into the US Constitution will survive the Trump assault.

A heroic battle for freedom

Meanwhile though, the Trump administration’s reactionary bile against liberal democracy is beginning to reverberate across the globe. While the Trump administration makes shameful concessions to the Putin regime in Moscow, the President spits fury against allies including Justin Trudeau’s Canada, which he says should become the 51st US state, and the government of Denmark, which he now requires to hand over the fast-melting territory of Greenland.

And in the last few days, Trump has unleashed the full force of his venom against Ukraine and its President Volodymyr Zelensky, who have for the past three years been fighting a heroic battle to defend their future as a European democracy more successfully than many observers thought possible, when Russia invaded in 2022.

Preposterously attacked for “starting” what is in fact an entirely defensive war, and described by Trump as a “dictator”, Zelensky has maintained his usual grace under pressure; and it’s difficult not to see Trump’s attempts to bully and belittle younger and more vigorous progressive leaders like Zelensky and Trudeau as another display of that petty, spiteful and dysfunctional machismo that is such a strong characteristic of his whole political movement.

Neoliberal revolution

Yet the truth is that there is now barely a country in the West where politics is not seriously influenced by the raging mood of reaction represented in the United States by Trump and his followers; a movement backed by formidable levels of financial and media power, and increasingly successful in turning the rage of those “left behind” in the neoliberal revolution of the last 45 years not against those who fomented that revolution and benefited from it, but against assorted vulnerable minorities, notably, at the moment, migrants and trans people.

And so far, no party or movement of the left or centre has discovered an effective way of challenging or shifting the false beliefs on which this movement is based, or providing a serious emotional counterweight to the sheer mean-spirited, shock-jock venom that fuels it. For opponents of far-right politics, perhaps the best hope – given the sheer destructive grotesquery of the second Trump presidency – is that it will finally shock people into recognising the value of at least some of what has been achieved in our Western democracies, over the last 80 years, and beginning to mount a more vigorous defence of those values and achievements, however imperfect.

In the words of Joni Mitchell, though, “don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”. In the days of the new Trump presidency, the postwar world we have known is disappearing at speed. And unless we now take a leaf from Ukraine’s book, and step up to defend its best aspects with grit, courage and some flair, then we could be on a fast track to learning just how fortunate we were, these last 80 years; and how much we had to lose, when too many of us decided to drink the far-right Kool-Aid, and throw it all away.