You can tell me 100 reasons why you do not like the United States, and they can all be legitimate. But then I will tell you that, in the past 30 years, most if not all democracy and human rights advocates whom the CCP jailed and then was pressured to free — the pressure came from the US, and they were given asylum in the US.
With all her controversies and impurities — she supported the Shah of Iran, the dictator and murderer Pinochet, and many other brutal regimes across Latin America, Asia, and Africa — it is still not a far stretch to say that the US was often viewed by the rest of the world as a model of governmental moral standards, due process, tolerance of dissent, and hope for the oppressed.
The intent of the US in those days was different from today. She was facing off against a gigantic opponent, the Soviet Union; she could not afford to alienate every country that was not democratic — she would lose that fight, and the end result would be 100 times worse than her compromise. By gaining as many allies as possible via the compromises, her intent was first to protect democracy within her borders, then to advance it in the rest of the world. She fell short of those ideals constantly, but she held them as ideals — and that was no small thing.
What I see today is a country in a downward spiral so steep and so visible that it is impossible to dismiss as cyclical politics.
Internally, the administration shoots dead innocent protesters then claims they are terrorists, conducts raids that resemble organised cruelty more than law enforcement, and treats criticism — including from longtime allies — as personal insult to be revenged at all costs. The president and his family do not even hide the fact that they are raking in billions in all kinds of shady power-money deals. The Fed, which had remained independent for more than a hundred years, is being brutally and shamelessly attacked. The institutions that protected tolerance and dissent are being deliberately weakened.
Externally, the country that once at least pretended to champion liberal values now openly murders alleged drug traffickers on the high seas, without trial and without evidence. The goal is no longer to advance democracy and human rights, but pure transactional and selfish power wielded via coercion in zero-sum games.
In the past, the US fell short of the lofty ideals constantly, but she was trying. What is different now is that the ideals themselves have been abandoned.
This is not the mask slipping. This is the mask being thrown away.
What broke
The deeper question is why. And here I think the answer is structural, not personal. Trump is a symptom, not a cause. The root cause is that social media wrestled control of the narrative away from the elite class and gave it to the masses.
Before social media, the elite — through mainstream media, universities, publishing, broadcast journalism — owned the narration of public life. They decided what was discussed, what the moral standard was, what direction the country was heading. The masses had votes, but the framing of choices, the boundaries of acceptable discourse, the slow shaping of public opinion — those were elite functions.
But now, the angry mob controls the narrative, and they put a destructive demagogue in office.
I am not naive about who the elite were. They were self-interested. They made decisions that benefited themselves disproportionately. The financial deregulation that hollowed out working-class stability, the trade policies that accelerated deindustrialisation, the regulatory capture that protected incumbents — all of that was elite work, and the cost was carried by people far below them. Elites were never saints. That much I take as given.
But here is the comparative point that matters. The self-interested elites know that
- Their interest is maximized in the long term if their country is strong and prosperous.
- Their country is strong internationally when its allies trust it.
- Seeking common ground and mutual benefits in a respectful manner wins trust and achieves bigger long-term self-interest.
- Domestically, democracy, equality, and tolerance of dissent produce the most vibrant economy.
In other words, a well-educated and less angry elite class understand that, to a large extent, the nation’s interest is aligned with their own, that killing the chicken that lay gold eggs is not how they advance their own interest.
So, the elites are not perfect, but they kept the US the leader of the free world in the last hundred years.
Compare that to what happens when the angry mob takes the wheel. The masses, given control of the narrative, do not patiently work through long-term solutions. They are angry, often legitimately so, but anger does not produce policy. It produces scapegoating. It produces the search for someone to blame and punish. And it produces demagogues — figures who say anything to ride the anger to power, who do not give a damn about the people whose pain elected them.
Trump is the textbook example. He does not care about the working class – he just openly admitted that. He never has. He weaponises their grievances, but his actual policies — tariffs, immigration crackdowns, attacks on institutions — do nothing to address the underlying economic dislocation his voters are experiencing. He is more selfish than the elites, but more fatally, he is more shortsighted than the elites he displaced. That makes him hundred times more destructive.
This is the comparative judgement at the core of my view: a self-interested elite class controlling the narrative is the lesser evil — by a wide margin — compared to an angry mob being led by destructive demagogues. The former is imperfect and frustrating. The latter is catastrophic.
The algorithm amplifies the worst voices
Social media did not merely give ordinary people a voice. That framing is too generous. Social media gave the angriest voices the loudest megaphone, because algorithmic engagement is driven by rage, fear, and outrage. The system does not surface the thoughtful or the moderate. It surfaces what provokes reaction. So what we see when “the masses speak" is not the average citizen. It is the most enraged tail of the distribution, amplified far beyond its actual share of public opinion, and then mistaken for the public itself.
This matters because it means the populist energy driving Western politics today is not a clean signal of democratic preference. It is a distorted signal — real grievances filtered through an outrage machine that rewards extremity and punishes nuance. The elite did not lose the narrative to “the people" in any romantic democratic sense. The elite lost the narrative to an algorithmic amplification of the angriest fraction of the people.
Democrats failed, but they did not cause this
The economic pain underlying populism is real, and it is not the fault of any particular administration. The US is going through a transition comparable to the industrial revolution. Low-tech manufacturing — clothing, steel, washing machines — built the American middle class in the twentieth century. That manufacturing no longer makes money in the US. This is not a political choice. It is a structural reality, and it has produced enormous pain in the communities that depended on it.
So I do not blame Democrats for the underlying transition. That would be like blaming the weather. What I do blame them for is failing in their duty to acknowledge and manage that pain. They governed as if the economy were fine because the parts of it they inhabited were fine. They offered technocratic optimism to people whose lives were materially worse than their parents’ lives, and they wondered why those people stopped trusting them.
Trump did not solve the problem. His policies make it worse. But he at least validated the pain — and validation matters in politics in a way the educated class consistently underestimates. People will tolerate being lied to about solutions before they will tolerate being told their suffering is imaginary.
That failure created the opening. Once a populist movement finds a leader who acknowledges the pain — even falsely — the establishment cannot easily win those voters back, because the trust is broken.
What real conservatism looks like
I call myself a conservative, and I want to be precise about what I mean by that, because Trump and the Republican Party today are not conservative in any meaningful sense. They are radicals dressed in conservative clothing.
A conservative, in the proper sense, believes that society should not be forced into a particular shape by brute force. Society is like a body. When a constraint is warping it — like the Corn Laws in nineteenth-century Britain, which originally had a good purpose but had become a painful distortion — the right response is to remove the constraint and let the society adjust naturally. Repealing the Corn Laws was a conservative change in the proper sense: identifying that a law was bending the spine and removing it, so the body could straighten itself.
Trump’s tariffs are the opposite. They are a hammer. They are an attempt to use brute political force to bend the American economy back into a shape it has already grown out of. That is not conservatism. That is radicalism. Forcing a spine to bend by external pressure does not heal it. It breaks it.
A genuinely conservative response to the deindustrialisation of America would not be tariffs and scapegoating. It would be the patient work of removing the constraints that prevent people and communities from adapting: dismantling regulatory capture that protects incumbent industries at the expense of new ones, opening up education and labour mobility, investing in the kind of infrastructure that lets struggling regions retool. That is slow and undramatic work. It does not win elections, because it offers no enemy to blame and no quick fix to promise. But it is the only response that actually addresses the problem without doing more damage.
Neither major American party is currently doing this work. The Republicans are imposing tariffs. The Democrats are protecting incumbent regulatory structures and offering identity-driven messaging instead of structural reform. Both are choosing to impose solutions rather than remove constraints. That is why I see almost no genuine conservatism in mainstream American politics today.
The threshold
Here is the part that worries me most. Once the downward spiral passes a certain threshold, the cycle becomes self-reinforcing and very difficult to reverse:
- The angry mob tends to adore strong man and despise weak-looking politicians that chase democratic ballots.
- They do not understand that the opposition party and free media criticism exist to keep the system healthy; instead, they view them as enemies.
- They do not understand that their leader first has to have basic integrity and conviction. Otherwise, no matter how smart and capable he is, as soon as he is in power, he will pursue his own interest at the expense of the people. Instead, the mob always want “their man” to be a strong man without opposition, and they can tolerate him to commit fraud, rape, and coup against legitimate election result.
- Thus, their strongman will work with their blessing to remove the checks and balances, first from individual endeavors, then from the institution.
- He will also immediately work, again with the mob’s blessing, on suppression of the “fake news”, so that his mob can be fed with what he wants to feed them, and there is no more independent media which tells the truth.
Once the last step is achieved, there is no going back.
I do not think the US or the United Kingdom have crossed it. But I think both are uncomfortably going down that path, and that is the heart of my worry.
Hungary gives me some hope. Under Orbán, Hungarian democracy backslid significantly. I assumed at the time that Hungary had passed the threshold and entered the self-reinforcing phase. I was wrong. The Hungarian people retained enough capacity to push back, and the democratic correction came. So the threshold is real, but it is further away than I sometimes fear, and democratic resilience is robust enough.
Still, resilience is not invincibility. Hungary’s institutions were younger and shallower than America’s or Britain’s. That cuts both ways: it took less to damage them, but perhaps also less to restore. The American case may be different — once broken – it is already in a very bad shape – it may be more difficult to revert.
America may wake up. Britain worries me more.
Looking at the current moment, I see America bleeding support for Trumpism across nearly every demographic that previously sustained it. His coalition is fraying. There is a real chance the midterm elections deliver a serious rebuke and that the country begins the slow work of pulling back from the edge. I am not blindly optimistic — Trump’s support has been more durable than pundits keep expecting, and even if he personally is rejected, the conditions that produced him are still there.
But the possibility of correction in the US is real.
The United Kingdom worries me more. Britain has watched the American experience unfold in real time. The damage Trump has done to American institutions, the moral degradation of American foreign policy, the alienation of allies, the assault on basic democratic norms — none of this has been hidden from British observers. And yet, against this backdrop, Britain has elevated Nigel Farage’s Reform UK to arguably the most powerful political force in the country.
This is the part that genuinely frightens me. The fact that Britain is choosing its own Trump suggests that the populist dynamic is not Trump-specific. It is structural. The same forces — economic dislocation, elite dismissal of working-class pain, algorithmic amplification of anger, the failure of mainstream parties to offer genuine conservative correction — are producing the same outcome in country after country, regardless of whether the previous example ended well.
If this is right, then “wait for America to course-correct and the wave will pass" is the wrong frame.
The tide is not American. America was simply the first wave. Britain is the next. There will be others. And each country that crosses the threshold makes the international order more dangerous for the ones that have not.
What I am, in the end
I am a conservative who believes in democracy, in due process, in patient organic adjustment, in the removal of distortions rather than the imposition of solutions. I am not optimistic about the next decade in the West, but I am not yet despairing. Hungary taught me that democratic resilience is real. America still has functioning courts, a free if fragmented press, and electoral competition that has not yet been captured. Britain has even deeper institutions. The threshold is real, but neither country has crossed it.
What I want, more than anything, is for the elite classes of these countries to relearn the basic lesson Democrats failed: that you cannot govern a country by dismissing the pain of the people you govern. The economic transition is real and largely unavoidable. The pain it produces is real and demands acknowledgement. A genuine conservatism — patient, structural, focused on removing the constraints that prevent adaptation — is the only honest response. Tariffs are not it. Scapegoats are not it. Demagogues are not it. And dismissive technocracy is not it either.
I am hopeful and worried at the same time.
做个明白人 