Not disappearing under a rock

Dear Editor: 

Normally I would not respond to Bill Stroud (December 30, 2020) because his scurrilous and libelous name-calling refuted none of my argument. But this gives me an opportunity to explain why neither I nor the millions of Americans who agree with me are going to crawl under a rock and disappear. The reason is that we are on the right side of history. 

First of all, I agree that President Trump has a lot of flaws and the sooner he leaves politics the better. But aspects of Trumpism will survive Trump. That’s because Trump, like Brexit and certain European politicians and political parties, are part of the wave of National Populism that has hit the West in the last two decades. 

National Populism is the product of four deep social and political trends: the breakdown of popular trust in political elites; the breakdown of voter identification with dominant political parties; the erosion of First World middle-class and working-class living standards due to globalization and neoliberalism; and the destruction of identity, i.e., the destruction of peoples and cultures by immigration and multiculturalism. 

These trends are pervasive and deep-seated in the West. Not only are they going to continue on into the future, they are likely to grow stronger. National Populism is, therefore, the wave of the future. See the 2018 book on National Populism by Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin. 

Because Trump recognized these trends and promised to correct some of them and thus “make America great again,” he was elected president in 2016. Unlike many politicians, Trump fulfilled or tried to fulfill many of his promises, earning the deep loyalty of millions and the vote of over 74 million Americans during his re-election bid. 

Despite Trump’s loss, the Republican Party made significant electoral gains at the national and state levels. This inconsistency indicates that Trump lost primarily because of his personality and not his policies. If Republicans continue to advocate national populist policies, they will continue to win elections. 

Populism suggests that the interests of the people are opposed to the interests and projects of the financial, media, and political elites. National Populism, more specifically, signifies the popular rejection of the elite-driven, ideological projects of replacement-level mass immigration, outsourcing, and globalization which harm the native peoples of the entire West. 

As I explained in my last letter, one of the harms of mass immigration is election tampering. Contrary to Mr. Stroud’s claim, it is not “bigoted racism” to explain how immigration affects elections. Many Democrats and liberal journalists have done the same thing but they brag about it because immigration favors the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, we now live in a country where people making the same objective observation are either good or bad depending on their views about it. 

It’s the same with the so-called “Great Replacement” – the systematic dispossession of white Americans and Europeans by Third World immigrants. It’s either a “conspiracy theory” or a self-evident good depending on who is talking about it. 

But if it’s “just” a conspiracy theory, then why does the United Nations advocate for it in its 2001 report “Replacement Migration: Is It a Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations?” and implement it in its 2018 international agreements called the “Global Compact for Migration” and “Global Compact on Refugees”? Just asking. 

Henry Fowler 

Stevensville