This is a mandate.. for getting the economy working again for millions of working-class Americans, fix immigration, try to get crime under control, try to reduce the chaos in the world — this is a mandate from the American people to do that. I’m interpreting the results tonight as the revenge of the regular old working-class American, the anonymous American who has been crushed, insulted, condescended to; they’re not “garbage”, they’re not “Nazis”, they’re just regular people who just get up and go to work every day trying to make a better life for their kids, and they feel like they have been told to just shut up when they have complained about the things that are hurting them in their own lives.

Well before this year, at least by 2022 the working class volcano was finally erupting, and in more forms than the Canadian truckers:

The French elections reflect the essential political conflict of our time. On one side, there is a powerful alliance between the corporate oligarchy and the regulatory clerisy. On the other, there are two beleaguered and angry classes – the small-business owners and artisans, and the vast, largely unorganised service class.
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[The elections] have already revealed the comparative irrelevance of many elite concerns, from genderfluidity and racial injustice to the ever-present ‘climate catastrophe’. Instead, most voters in France and elsewhere are more concerned about soaring energy, food and housing costs. Many suspect that the cognitive elites, epitomised by President Emmanuel Macron, lack even the ambition to improve their living conditions.

The same stuff is emerging in other nations, with rates of home ownership for even the the middle class young being stagnant or plummeting in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia – and New Zealand. How many kids in their twenties do you know living at home with their parents?

In 2017, the Pew Research Center found that poll respondents in France, Britain, Spain, Italy and Germany are even more pessimistic about the next generation than those in the United States. Such sentiments are shared in countries like Japan and India, where many new college graduates fail to find decent employment. 

It’s a global super-volcano, as the article goes on to detail. Even in China it’s not good with their Gini coefficient, a key measurement of income inequality, tripling since 1978 as the society has stratified. That’s appropriate, because global Centre-Left parties were already becoming dominated by highly educated professionals, with welfare recipients hanging to them in terror that their meager scraps will be taken away. A feudal system.

As it was during the Industrial Revolution, today there are key divisions within society – between what economist Thomas Piketty refers to as the ‘merchant right’, largely in the analogue economy, and the ‘Brahmin left’ of large corporations and investors. In the US, this latter group generally backs the Democrats and the environmental and cultural agenda of the progressive left. 

Those large corporations did well during the Covid lockdowns, a fact that did not escape the notice of small business owners and the young, especially those in the service worker sector. Same with inflation and globalism:

In the UK, where incomes have dropped more than at any time in at least 30 years, ‘non-essential shops’ faced long periods of closure during the pandemic. With the ascendancy of online retailers, many have since closed their doors permanently. In Germany, the self-employed were four times more likely to suffer income losses than their wage-earning counterparts during the pandemic. In the US, roughly 110,000 restaurants shut down during the lockdowns, and some 200,000 more businesses overall disappeared compared to the usual erosion.
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Most people these days are working harder and faster – and often with less job security. Epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff has summarised the impact of all this: ‘Lockdowns have protected the laptop class of young, low-risk journalists, scientists, teachers, politicians and lawyers, while throwing children, the working class and high-risk older people under the bus.’

By 2023 the volcano was also erupting against other aspects of elite rule, like their Net Zero plans:

Whose side should you take? It’s a no-brainer. This is a clash between the luxury doom-mongering of an upper-middle class more concerned with its own self-importance than with the self-sufficiency of society, and the common sense of working people who understand that farming, food production, energy creation and transportation are essential to the survival of our species. 

I wouldn’t say that it’s a “no-brainer” when you look at all the Big Brains of the National party here in NZ who, like their centre-left and centre-right colleagues across the West, are still pushing hard on Net Zero.

Denmark has plans to introduce a GHG-emissions tax on cows by 2030, which is already causing economic problems, but in 2023 something similar caused massive protests by truckers:

‘Road havoc’ in Denmark. They parked their huge hauliers side by side on key roads. Sections of the border with Germany were affected, as were the M11 and M16 around Copenhagen. Roads towards the ferry docks at Helsingor – ‘one of the most important ports in Denmark’ – were also briefly clogged by angry truckers.

Their beef? The government’s plan to introduce a ‘truck tax’ in 2025. As part of its devotion to the cult of Net Zero, the Danish ruling class wants to slash carbon emissions by 70 per cent before 2030. And one way it intends to do that is by imposing a punitive mileage-based eco-tax on the drivers of diesel trucks, in the hope that the financial pressure will become so unbearable that they’ll switch to electric trucks instead.

The one big advantage the centre-right (and more pure Right-Wing parties) have is that the centre-left can no longer prance around pretending that the evil Right will destroy the lives of the working classes:

The final twist in this tale is that the European left is on the side of the posh road-blockers, not the working-class ones. The left sings the praises of Extinction Rebellion’s plummy disruptors of traffic, while either ignoring the revolting farmers and truckers or denouncing them as eco-sinners and dangerous populists. That’s another thing we should thank the rebels for – they’ve driven a truck through the modern left’s pretence that it gives a damn about working people.

It’s one of the secrets to Trump’s win in 2016 and 2024: whether by calculation or instinct he made the connection between the increasingly shitty lives of the working class and a Left that’s increasingly not just abandoned them but despises them – especially the Silent Male Voter:

If we take a macro perspective, we see that such young men have never known a culture in which males are not routinely described as “problematic,” “toxic,” or “oppressive.” Going to university, and working at modern companies, they live in a world of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies—many of which promote an insidious and pervasive form of anti-male discrimination. Yet to talk about it in public invites social ostracism. To criticise DEI is to risk being called a Nazi.

These young male voters know about theories of patriarchy and white supremacy, but they have never known a culture which celebrates the Great Man Theory of history. Thomas Carlyle’s nineteenth-century framework for understanding the past is seen as an anachronism, not worthy of serious thought.
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As one party-goer told me, “[Musk] caught a fucking rocket with mechanical chopsticks.” Yet despite his achievements, Musk is more likely to be scorned than celebrated by the Democratic establishment.
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This tension between achievement and resentment explains much about our current moment. The young men I met that night in Manhattan weren’t just voting for Trump’s policies. They were voting for a different view of history and human nature. In their world, individual greatness matters. Male ambition serves a purpose. Risk-taking and defiance create progress. 

It’s also the reason why Trump’s stunt of “working” at a McDonalds was so brilliant; he was having fun and trolling his enemies – and they rose to the bait of sneering at the very people for whom McDonalds is much more than just a job:

Over the years, I’ve come to understand the role McDonald’s plays in the day-to-day life of Americans, especially those toward the bottom, and those suffering from mental illness. That’s why I could have scripted the chain of events that led to Mangione’s capture, down to the appearance of the regulars who first noticed him (like the white-haired man with a chain round his neck who seemed friendly but not entirely at ease speaking into a CNN mic.)
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 I’ve witnessed many occasions when employees and morning regulars have gone out of their way to help those who are suffering. I’ve seen people offer free food and calls for assistance, and I once heard a female customer call her husband, tell him to come to the parking lot, and repair a broken-down car, free of charge.

You can’t sneer at Trump for being a fat bastard because he likes eating McDonalds and then sneer at him working the drive-through window, for once being on the other side of the fries. The point was that he is in McDonalds regularly wherever he goes. Yes, it was an absurd stunt, but unlike Harris and other politicians cos-playing at such a role this one worked because of Trump’s long-held identification with the place, a fact confirmed over the years by his enemies. Ordinary people knew it was a joke, they were in on it as much as Trump was, while the Democrats and the US Left revealed their own cynicism and hatred of the place – and those who inhabit it – which is also well understood by the public after years of McDonald’s bashing by the Left.

I suggest you read the whole article, The Year of McDonalds, but I’ll leave you with the following, which is actually a description of how the Left not only lost the working classes but turned them into the volcano that exploded around the globe in 2024, and will continue to blast them with fire and rocks in the years ahead:

McDonald’s is wildly popular with every group of Americans—urban, rural, male, female, middle or working class; it unites every demographic in the U.S., with a single exception: the highly educated, especially academics. They alone, as a group, seem to have moral issues with McDonald’s, and while they might use it, they do so grudgingly, usually to appease crying kids or for a rest stop on a long trip.
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Their framework doesn’t fully understand what makes the average American tick. By focusing on what can be measured, they often miss what is meaningful. In their eyes, systematically imposing ideas from the top down is the route to building the best society, and a human is a transactional, rational, economic thing.