Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The new normal

He gets how the world has changed. So does Theresa May. Do you?

-What was your favourite response from the liberals to Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election? Actress Emma Watson handing out copies of a Maya Angelou book to bewildered commuters in New York? Cher announcing that she wasn’t simply leaving the USA, ‘but Planet Earth too’ — a move some of us assumed she had made at least 40 years ago? The hysterical protestors who set fire to their own shoes because they thought the said shoes were pro-Trump? The hyperbolic hatred spewed out towards those who voted for the Donald, or Matthew Parris suggesting that maybe this democracy caper has gone too far, or the teachers telling tearful children that we’re all going to die?

There’s just too many to choose from, a cornucopia of riches, of wailing and fury and outrage. And yet they still don’t quite get it, the liberals — don’t get the full import of what Trump’s victory, and this tumultuous year 2016 in general, means for us all. It presages an enormous paradigm shift to a post-liberal future. They are weighty, cumber-some things, paradigms, and take a lot of shifting. This one has been at least 20 years in the making. But once they turn, the course is set, and you can set fire to as many shoes as you like — it will do no good. In a sense, 2016 is 1968 in reverse.

Theresa May clearly gets this. Gets the change, the momentum behind the change. Even before Trump’s astonishing and deserved victory she had grasped, post–Brexit, that patriotism, long considered a bit long in the tooth, had made a rather remarkable comeback: ‘If you are a citizen of the world, then you are a citizen of nowhere,’ she said, to derision from the Guardian. Patriotism, a sense of historic pride in one’s nation state, persuaded a good few Americans to vote for Trump; it persuaded most of Scotland to vote SNP last year.

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