Donald Trump with Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr, Mike Johnson, Vivek Ramaswamy, Donald Trump Jr, Dana White, and Kid Rock. Office of Speaker Mike Johnson. 16 November 2024.
Is the UK ready for America’s new MAGA team? At the Cato Institute, Ryan Bourne wonders if Britain is “ready for America’s new political vibe?” He writes:
British politics is suddenly dominating conversation on X for all the wrong reasons. Tech titans like Elon Musk have stumbled onto the grooming-gangs scandal – a series of truly horrifying crimes that were downplayed or ignored by various authorities, in part because of fears about anti-Muslim backlash.
Musk, Bill Ackman and other Americans are lighting up X with their outrage, accusing local British politicians, the police and public authorities of throwing vulnerable girls under the bus to preserve votes or ease racial tensions. They’re slamming Keir Starmer’s record as Director of Public Prosecutions and hammering Jess Phillips, the Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, for recently blocking a fresh inquiry into grooming in Oldham.
Whatever the precise fairness of each critique, Britain must grapple with the full shame of this episode – an episode that, while it did hit the headlines sporadically, never became the campaigning story of the press and broadcast media in the way its scale and importance justified. Now, the unblinking American spotlight may finally force that reckoning. But this American attention is really just the first example of a broader force set to affect Britain’s politics: the vibe shift in politics stateside. Most UK commentators haven’t fully grasped the implications of how that different American mood music will shape their own political discourse.
Detailed by both Tyler Cowen and Niall Ferguson, through 2024 there was a sharp change in the dominant atmosphere of American politics. This wasn’t an ideological revolution, as such, but was amplified by the fusion of the Trump Right with a raft of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Wall Street financiers. Pushed towards Trump’s orbit by government pandemic overreach, executive jawboning of tech companies on content moderation and left-wing antisemitism after the October 7 attacks, this newly emboldened group of major personalities felt free to voice unfiltered opinions – and thanks to Musk’s X, they had a platform willing to host them.
It’s about style and swagger more than ideological purity – a new atmosphere rooted in a few loose principles and an unapologetic way of expressing them.
This new vibe slams wokeness, mocks political pieties, shrugs at technocratic expertise and gleefully tears up red tape and HR rules. It puts free speech and meritocracy on a pedestal, scoffs at claims of sexism or racism and is willing to blow up the old order if that’s what it takes. In this atmosphere, unfiltered, edgy opinions – often delivered with a dash of humour or hyperbole – are not just accepted, but celebrated. These ‘vibes’ helped propel Trump back into the White House, and his second win has only solidified this rowdy new political climate.
Make no mistake: this vibe shift isn’t underpinned by a tidy political manifesto. After all, these same voices can cheer Javier Milei for slashing tariffs while also backing Trump’s plan to raise them. It’s about style and swagger more than ideological purity – a new atmosphere rooted in a few loose principles and an unapologetic way of expressing them.
And it’s going to reshape Britain in two major ways. First, because X remains a key platform for many UK political types, plenty of centre-right and right-wing figures have embraced this new swagger. Think of it as the reverse of the BLM wave: back then, a left-leaning Twitter fuelled mass virtue-signalling even in Britain, but now the contagion is in the other direction.
Read more here.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 8, 2025
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