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Sigmund Freud made numerous admiring references to Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 book Psychology of Crowds. But in spite of that, that book was good.

A crowd isn’t just more than the sum of its parts, argued Le Bon, but something qualitatively different. Its principal characteristics are “impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement or the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments, and others”.

I loathe crowds with unmitigated passion, partly because of physical aversion and partly because I grew up in a country where individuality was discouraged to the point of being proscribed.

We were all ordered on pain of death to toe the Party’s ‘general line’ in the spirit of ‘proletarian collectivism’, to scream ourselves hoarse at rallies blessed by the appearance of whoever embodied the general line at the moment.

I left all that behind me when leaving the Soviet Union as a young man – or so I thought. I was wrong though. The inner need of some, dare I say most, people to be part of a baying throng exists independently of any political cause.

Hence it can be marshalled in support of any such cause, good, bad or something in between. One gets the impression that the desire to emulate a herd of cows all mooing at the same time lurks in most breasts, waiting for the right stimulus to come out.

That takes some predisposition, which I lack. As I grew older and wiser, my self-esteem was abating in inverse proportion. But whether it was at its apex when I was a youngster or at its nadir as I am now, I’ve always refused to share in a collective conscience. If I go to hell, I’ll do so in my own fashion, not as part of some corporate entity.

In that connection I remember a conversation I had with an older French friend some 20 years ago. During the war he had fought with the Free French, ending the war in Berlin. Serving as an army officer, he said, were the best years of his life.

I said I could never be a soldier because I hated taking orders. “I didn’t mind taking orders,” he replied, “because I liked giving them.” “That,” I said, “is something I’d dislike even more.”

This foray into the past isn’t as an exercise in solipsism, but merely an attempt to sketch a mental and psychological vantage point from which I observe with distaste or even horror the mass psychosis surrounding Donald Trump. The videos of him appearing at MAGA rallies remind me of the Walpurgisnacht I witnessed in the USSR and also of the newsreels depicting Mussolini with his black-shirted mobs.

This isn’t about any specific policies put forth by Trump. These must be analysed on merit, irrespective of the source or the mass response they elicit.

In fact, I quite like most of Trump’s policies, although not all. In fact, speaking to a virulently anti-Trump American at a party last autumn, I said (inexcusably rudely) that voting for Harris was a certifiable symptom of a mental disorder.

Some of Trump’s policies may come to grief, or they may not. Most, I believe, will produce a beneficial outcome, and none is likely to result in a disaster. But his basking in mass adulation, encouraging the herd instincts described by Le Bon, is a disaster already. Its corrupting effect is much more toxic than the failure of any policy can ever be.

Trump isn’t the threat to democracy his detractors depict him to be with hysterical spittle-sputtering that matches the eye-popping enthusiasm of MAGA crowds. But then neither is he the saviour of mankind.

Trump has been in the public eye for almost as long as I’ve been in the West, and I remember his appearances on American TV when he was a relatively young man in his late 30s, early forties. Comparing those memories with the reality of Trump today, I feel certain that since then he must have assiduously cultivated his gesticulation, facial expressions and jutting jaw in, perhaps unwitting, imitation of another mass communicator, Mussolini.

Many observers have pointed out this parallel, and Private Eye spoofed it by mislabelling the two photographs placed side by side. Most of such commentators dislike everything Trump stands for, which I don’t. But the parallel is unmistakable, as is the crowd’s reaction.

While it’s silly and disingenuous to equate Trump’s policies with Mussolini’s, I fail to see much difference between hysterical crowds screaming “Il Duce! Il Duce!” and hysterical crowds screaming “Make America great again!” And neither can I ignore the similarity of the two men’s reaction to human beings acting like a herd of dehumanised creatures.

Even when they are on their own, having a civilised conversation over a glass of something, Trump’s camp followers – far from all of them Americans, by the way – display the characteristics Le Bon identified in crowds. They may leave the crowd in body, but in spirit they remain its fragments.

People who are otherwise eminently capable of exercising critical judgement put that faculty on hold when Trump or his policies come up. Trump is beyond criticism, just as Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini were to their acolytes. That they were evil and he isn’t is true but beside the point. I’m talking about people suspending their humanity and acting on knee-jerk instinct.

Trump’s acolytes bestow the kind of adulation on their idol that Jesus Christ didn’t even demand for himself. As he put it, “And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.”

In the eyes of his supporters, Trump is entitled to the same protection against criticism as that enjoyed by the Holy Ghost but not by Christ himself. And they defend that position with the ardour of zealots worshipping a secular cult.

Any criticism of a Trump policy, even if amply supported with facts and reasoned arguments, is rejected out of hand. There is no disagreement with Trump; there is only heresy. Everything Trump does is God’s gift to mankind simply because Trump does it.

This upsets me, even though I can reiterate that I wholeheartedly support most of Trump’s initiatives. But by cultivating this kind of animalistic following he risks undoing everything good he may try to do.

Someone demanding and encouraging such a response will eventually believe his own infallibility, even if he didn’t start out with that arrogant conviction, which Trump might have done. And the leader of any great nation, whatever its politics, depends on wise and, if need be, critical counsel.

Someone with Trump’s obvious character flaws, of which narcissism takes pride of place, is likely to ignore criticism and get rid of those brazen enough to offer it. That may lead him to gross errors of judgement, to which none of us sinners is ever immune.

As for those who worship and hate him with equal uncritical passion, they relinquish the advantage of being human, a moral and cerebral agent possessing and keeping up his own individual account with truth. That upsets me because I’m a closet humanist who believes we are all supposed to be made in a certain image and likeness.

In a word, you can’t. Not if you proceed from any rational criteria or such outdated notions as sound economics or democratic choice.

If you still stubbornly cling to those obsolete ideas, you’ll never understand why Labour is visibly pushing Britain towards customs union with the EU and, eventually and inexorably, some sort of sub-membership.

A customs union is a time-dishonoured trick for dragging countries into a single superstate. It was first used and refined by Prussia in the 19^th century, when the lesser German principalities were either seduced or coerced to enter the Zollverein.

That was sold as a customs union, just as the EEC was sold as merely a way to realise economies of scale by close cooperation among European countries. In both cases, that was a lie. The real purpose was political, to create, respectively, a single pan-Germanic state and a federal European superstate.

Considering that we already have a free trade agreement with the EU, there seems to be no conceivable economic reason to relinquish the sovereignty won, and since then abused, by Brexit. But I did tell you Labour isn’t about the economy.

It’s about Marxist longings that include the urge to exact revenge on the upper classes and an equally powerful craving to create a single, communist world state. As The Communist Manifesto says, “working men have no country”, which commandment gave rise to a particularly vile form of internationalism.

If you wonder about precise definitions, don’t. For Marxists, such as Starmer and his gang, words mean whatever they want them to mean at any given moment. Thus, their current definition of the upper classes includes even people at the lower end of middle-class incomes, while their ‘working people’ are what used to be called lumpen proletariat.

As typical Marxists, they disregard the wishes of the very demos in whose name they supposedly govern. Britons voted for Brexit in greater numbers than they had ever voted for anything else, and most did so out of their dislike of uncontrolled immigration.

The previous Tory governments were socialist too, but they weren’t Marxist. That’s why they went through the motions of trying to keep those criminal cross-Channel boats at bay, a pretence that Labour has since abandoned.

Whatever loose controls the Tories tried to impose have fallen by the wayside, and one understands why. Swarms of cultural aliens landing on our shores inflict damage on traditional Britishness, something Marxism loathes. They also swell the welfare rolls, which serves the dual purpose of beggaring the economy (aka ‘the rich’) and bringing more people under state control.

Edging closer to Europe won’t make our trade with the EU any freer, but it’s practically guaranteed to scupper any chance of a trade deal with the US. Say what you will about Trump, but he detests Marxism and surely he can see through its crypto variety favoured by Labour.

He also hates the EU and was a great fan of Brexit (I detect a causal relationship there). Moreover, he likes to be known as an Anglophile, a passion he evinces mainly by his affection for Scottish golf courses and the royal family.

That’s why Britain has so far not figured among the targets for the tariffs Trump has imposed already or plans to do so shortly. But ‘so far’ are the operative words. If Trump detects that the Starmer government is acting in character by indulging its Marxist instincts and edging closer to the EU, he may – almost definitely will – slap the same tariffs on Britain.

Even if he doesn’t, we can kiss any hope of a trade deal with the US good-bye. That grim prospect becomes even more real when Starmer reiterates his reluctance to raise our defence spending beyond its current suicidal level.

However, whatever happens, it’s wrong to regard the Labour government as a failure. I looked up ‘success’ in the dictionary and found out it means “the accomplishment of an aim or purpose”. Since, unlike Marxists, we use words in their proper meaning, we must declare Starmer’s government a rip-roaring success.

They are doing exactly what they set out to do: turn Britain into a fully, as opposed to quasi-, socialist country, run by a Marxist nomenklatura, whose “aim or purpose” is to shove its perverse dogma down the people’s collective throat. If the people become impoverished as a result, so much the better.

After all, Marxists proclaim their undying affection for the downtrodden. Hence it stands to reason, their kind of reason that is, that they must increase the number of the downtrodden. This is a task socialists of every kind accomplish with invariable elan, making them a success on their own terms.

Take it from someone who had to study eight compulsory Marxist disciplines at university, the only way to understand Labour is to assess it by Marxist criteria. This isn’t to say that they too had to scrutinise recondite communist texts at university (those of them who, unlike our Deputy Prime Minister, actually went to one).

In all likelihood they never advanced past incendiary leaflets or, in extremis, The Communist Manifesto. Yet the way they’ve lived their lives, the company they’ve kept, the papers they’ve read, the meetings they’ve attended have all conspired to inject Marxist toxins directly into their viscera, bypassing any rational cognition.

Brace yourself for the worst: it hasn’t yet come. But any student of Marxism knows it will.

For want of the right word, a battle may be lost. And this is a battle President Trump has engaged, with the few sane people still around hoping he’ll win.

Mr Trump has commendably ordered federal employees to remove their pronouns from their e-mail signatures, firing another salvo at DEI insanity. I often describe it as such, but keeping in mind that there is a subversive method in that madness.

The woke Lefties know that the path to their autocracy lies through glossocracy, controlling people’s minds by controlling their language. To continue the military analogy, words are the units taking part in that battle, and surrendering even one of them weakens the position of righteousness.

Trump seems to understand that, and hence his order. But his troops still ceded his positions by allowing the woke Left to run away with one key word. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene unwittingly highlighted that retreat by displaying a sign outside her office, saying: ‘There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE “Trust the science!” ‘

The quotation marks around “Trust the science” can mean only two things in a world governed by proper usage. Either the phrase is a direct quote from a recognised source, which it isn’t, or Mrs Greene means one shouldn’t trust the science, which she doesn’t. Using quotation marks to add emphasis is as illiterate as it is, alas, widespread.

I wonder if Republicans have decided they owe it to their leader to support his cavalier disregard for proper syntax, but this is a separate matter. What concerns me here is that the sign is wrong on a more fundamental level.

Let me just give you what I consider the proper version and you’ll know what I’m driving at. The sign should read either “There are two sexes: male and female. Trust the science!” or “There are three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Trust the grammar!”

Know what I mean? Gender is a grammatical, not biological, category. Pronouns have genders, three of them; people have sexes, two in number.

The Left started the corruption of the term to add a dimension of self-identification and to downplay the ironclad biological distinction Mrs Greene has in mind. Yes, they say, biologically speaking there may be only two sexes, male and female, but that doesn’t matter one jot. What’s important is how a person identifies, which ‘gender’ ‘they’ (never he or she) chooses.

Letting the adversary corrupt language in this fashion is tantamount to ceding a vital position. That’s how battles get lost, and then wars.

Trump’s next executive order should be a ban on the use of the word ‘gender’ in that subversive meaning. But the marching order he has already issued is something all decent people should applaud.

But, unlike Trump’s declaration of war on wokery, his readiness to start a trade war is ill-considered. But not in every respect.

He is about to slap 25 per cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, along with a 10 per cent levy on China. Also, he “absolutely” promises to put tariffs on the EU which, Trump said, “has treated us so terribly”.

It’s wrong to pan these predictable announcements roundly. Tariffs may be imposed for good or bad reasons, and we should be able to know the difference.

As I understand the president, and he isn’t always easy to understand, the tariffs on those three countries are mainly punitive, with the transgressions committed by Canada and Mexico evidently seen as 2.5 times worse than those perpetrated by China.

Trump wants to punish America’s northern and southern neighbours for failing to control the flow of illegal migrants and illicit drugs across the border. If so, though its effectiveness remains to be seen, the punishment is just.

The same goes for tariffs on China, whose global economic conduct is appalling. Any step taken to slow down China’s quest for strategic supremacy should be welcomed, even if it comes at a price.

The EU is about to be penalised for mistreating the US, though Trump didn’t specify exactly which offences he means. That doesn’t really matter: the EU mistreats everything and everyone it comes in contact with, and in any number of ways, take your pick.

If Trump indeed plans to impose tariffs on America’s largest trade partners for punitive and strategic reasons, he’ll find no disagreement in these quarters. But he genuinely seems to think that the US will also derive an economic benefit, and there I think he is wrong.

“We’re going to put tariffs on chips. We’re going to put tariffs on oil and gas. That will happen fairly soon, think around the 18^th of February, and we’re going to put a lot of tariffs on steel,” Trump said.

“Tariffs don’t cause inflation. They cause success,” he added, conceding, however, that there could be “temporary, short term disruption”. “But the tariffs are going to make us very rich and very strong,” he said.

The statement about inflation and success is simply wrong, as any economist will confirm. In his first term, Trump provided direct proof of this when he slapped tariffs on steel. As a result, he protected some 3,000 jobs in the US steel industry – while causing the collateral damage of about 70,000 job losses in industries dependent on steel.

America may get away with levying tariffs on oil and gas, considering that her own hydrocarbon industries are in rude health. Her economy may suffer if foreign producers retaliate in kind, but in general energy autarky is a distinct and good prospect for the US economy. That’s more than one can say for her other industries.

Imposing tariffs on chips, for example, is cloud cuckoo land, considering that 68 per cent of the world’s chips, and over 90 per cent of the most advanced ones, come from Taiwan – and most of the rest from China.

Tariffs will make chips more expensive, driving up the price of all products that use them, which nowadays is to say just about all products. When it takes more money to chase the same volume of goods, inflation ensues – this is plain common sense and the ABC of economics.

One wonders what they taught young Donald at Wharton, but whatever it was it certainly wasn’t that “tariffs cause success”. The disruption they’ll produce may indeed be “temporary, short-term”, but only if Trump stops them after a while. Otherwise they’ll cause lasting damage.

Trump does come both rough and smooth, and his bag of goodies is very much mixed. But on balance his first policies are at least interesting and mostly promising.

By contrast, our own government policies are a different mixed bag, delivering as they do both doom and gloom. There are things HMG can learn from the US president — but won’t.

This question in no way implies that he shouldn’t have won. On the contrary, the ideas Trump shared with the electorate, the promises he made, were much more sound than those of his rival.

No, take that comparative back, let’s talk in absolutes. His ideas were mostly sound, whereas his rival’s weren’t. Moreover, he could be confidently predicted to carry his ideas out or at least do his best to try.

Yet better programmes don’t necessarily win elections under conditions of universal suffrage, nor do bad programmes necessarily lose them. For example, everything Labour proposed during their campaign last year was guaranteed to produce a disaster. And yet they won by a whopping majority.

Is the American electorate more sophisticated? In fact, I’ve heard MAGA people go out of their way to compliment the voting public who, they claim, saw through the Democrats’ Left-wing policies and revealed their true conservative nature. This ignores the fact that exactly the same electorate, give or take, elected Biden four years ago and earlier gave two terms to Barack Obama, that living argument against affirmative action.

It was Socrates who, according to Plato, first decried indiscriminate democracy. Voting, Socrates said, was a skill and, like any other skill, it had to be developed, not awarded as an automatic birthright. Specifically, an essential qualification was a heightened ability for critical thought, knowing the difference between truth and falsehood, fact and judgement, opinion and argument, likely and unlikely.

Anyone who says today’s masses in any country, including the US, have that ability is lying, probably for ideological reasons. Voting for most people is a knee-jerk reaction to some irritants, either positive or negative. Usually it’s the latter, with most people voting not so much for one candidate as against the other.

Our 2024 general election is again a prime example: even many Britons who tend to vote Tory went for Labour because, according to them, the Tory government was useless. So it was, but they lacked the skill Socrates considered essential. They couldn’t put two and two together to see that Labour would be even worse, catastrophically so.

That’s why Trump won not just because the voters found his programme to be better upon mature deliberation. That alone wouldn’t have carried the day, and even his rival’s vapid vacuity, though doubtless helpful, wouldn’t have been decisive.

Trump realised that underneath the outer shell of wokery the electorate wore either willingly or under peer pressure sat a vast reservoir of uniquely American patriotism. And he had the demagogic skills to tap into that reservoir more successfully than any candidate since Ronald Reagan.

When Trump shouted about the Democrats keeping America from being great again, he was a preacher fulminating against heretics and for true faith. He was a priest of the secular American creed of self-worship, replete with messianic connotations.

Winthrop’s (and Christ’s) “city upon a hill” and O’Sullivan’s “manifest destiny” came together in Trump’s rhetoric, and sparks flew. Americans were served a reminder of their secular cult of national exceptionalism, shamed about their prior apostasy, and their knees jerked.

It so happened that this time around they voted for the right candidate since Harris would have done to the US what Starmer is doing to Britain. But a similar osmotic appeal could under different circumstances have brought to power someone considerably less qualified to wield it.

For over two centuries, Americans were taught that their country is more than just a country. It’s God’s message to the world, the fulfilment of His plans for mankind, a lesson every other country should heed. That’s how they were conditioned to understand national greatness, and Trump found a way to refresh that lesson in their minds.

I’m aware of only one major country other than the US where patriotism takes on a quasi-religious dimension: Russia, with her self-serving idea of the Third Rome, replaced for a while with an equally messianic communism and then revived.

The other two nations I know well, British and French, aren’t immune to regarding their countries as exceptional, but any attempt to express that feeling in quasi-religious terms would elicit a wry smile in London or Paris.

Britons may happily sing their intention to “build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land”, but deep down they know there can be only one Jerusalem and it already exists. Anything else can only be an impostor, or else a metaphysical simulacrum.

Yet there are many Americans who understand ‘a city upon a hill’ and ‘manifest destiny’ literally. This messianic feeling continues to fertilise American grassroots, for all the attempts of the liberal intelligentsia to weed it out.

Donald Trump is both a product and promulgator of the secular religion of American self-sacralisation. He sensed its dormant vitality and awakened it with consummate skill.

One has to be American to stand up in response to that clarion call, and my American passport is long since expired. However, one has to acknowledge that the US has become a great country largely on the strength of her religious self-worship.

Unlike the Russian vintage, this has been channelled into creating a secular paradise as free of suffering as it’s possible to achieve in this world. But it’s a peculiar paradise, suspect and ultimately unfathomable to people weaned on (if eventually off) the culture owing its existence to a formative act of suffering.

By all means, we should root for Trump’s America, regret her failures and applaud her successes, especially since we all stand to lose from the former and gain from the latter. But we’d try to emulate her at our peril since that would involve repudiating not just Britain’s national history but also her national character.

Anyone who thinks that’s possible or indeed desirable is deceiving himself.   

Three typological figures have traditionally stood against the spiritual background.

The religious man says he believes. The atheist says he doesn’t believe and can explain why. The agnostic says he doesn’t know one way or the other.

The difference between the last two types is marginal. Neither of them believes in God, but the atheist is prepared to support that position with arguments, invariably spurious ones. The agnostic shies away from the argument but not from the disbelief.

As the masses march through history, a typical progression one can glean is from faith to agnosticism and then to atheism, that is first to doubt and then to aggressive denial. By and large, it was the believer who dominated the first 15 centuries of Christianity, with only a trickle of agnosticism dripping into the mighty stream of religion, and but the odd drop of atheism.

Then, over the next few centuries, faith ran incrementally drier, and agnosticism itself became a mighty stream with a few atheist tributaries. In the 19^th century atheism gathered strength, and in the 20^th it broke banks to flood the social landscape.

None of these has disappeared: the atheist, agnostic and believer are still extant. But none of them dominates any longer. A new type has appeared to shove the old ones aside.

He doesn’t believe, disbelieve, nor even says he can’t make up his mind. He just doesn’t care one way or another: the subject of God isn’t one on which he expends any mental energy.

Whenever religion comes up at a party, apathy overcomes him. He yawns and moves towards another group, where discussion revolves around subjects that really matter: sports, investments, home decoration, TV shows, sex, sometimes politics. Real life in other words.

Since this type deserves his taxonomic slot, I’d call him an apathist. His whole being exists on one plane, religion on another, and the two planes never intersect even tangentially. He has more important things to worry about, and when he hears a reference to God he is neither indignant nor doubtful. He is apathetic.

I also find him excruciatingly boring. A man who never asks what Dostoyevsky called “the accursed questions” about first causes and last things really has no interest at all in matters of the spirit. Such questions force their way into the conscience of anyone who has ever read serious books, heard serious music or pondered anything of serious interest.

The apathist is several rungs below the vagrant in the O. Henry story The Cop and the Anthem. When cold weather comes, that man deliberately commits minor crimes just to spend the inclement months in the warmth of a gaol. And then he walks past a church, with the sound of an organ chorale heard out in the street. The vagrant is transfixed; he feels in touch with eternity and decides to make something worthwhile of his life (and at precisely that climactic point he has his collar felt).

Our apathist has never had such an experience. He may be more comfortable than O. Henry’s hero, he may be rich and even educated, after a fashion. But, to me, he is still a crushing bore. Someone not worth talking to or indeed about.

However, the apathist has one thing going for him. He may be vulgar and probably is, but at least he doesn’t have to be. All he has to do is continue to ignore that subject altogether. The agnostic and the atheist don’t have that option, at least not when they broach religion, as, unlike the apathist, they tend to do from time to time.

The agnostic’s vulgarity quotient is lower, and it comes into play only when he laments that the proof of God’s existence is lacking. That statement ought to be part of the dictionary definition of inanity.

A man can’t prove God’s existence by definition: a higher system can understand the lower one, but not vice versa. The greatest religious thinker of all time, Thomas Aquinas, knew that, which is why it’s a mistake to refer to his famous Five Ways as proofs of God’s existence.

St Thomas himself never called them that. He came up with five deep and impeccably logical arguments (from ‘first mover’, from universal causation, from contingency, from degree and from final cause), but he had the intelligence and humility not to call them proofs.

He ended each argument with the words “and that is what we call God” (not “that is what God is“), showing that this was the greatest height to which the human mind can aspire. After that an impassible partition comes down: thus far, but no further.

The same goes for the earlier ontological argument put forth by St Anselm of Canterbury. That was an exercise in philosophy, not forensic proof. Anselm defined God as “a being than which no greater can be conceived.” Even someone who denies the existence of God, he argued, must have such a concept in his mind.

Conversely, someone who denies or even doubts God for lack of the kind of proof one expects in a lab forms a conclusion on the basis of ignorance and absence of any cogent thought. That’s neither grown-up nor clever. It’s intellectually vulgar.

At least, the agnostic doesn’t push his vulgarity to an unbearable level. He just shrugs, says he can’t be sure one way or the other and leaves it at that.

The atheist is much, much worse. He emblazons his vulgarity on a banner and waves it around for all to see every time he tries to prove that God doesn’t exist.

These days I can’t be bothered to join such verbal jousts, other than saying that he’s right. God doesn’t exist. It’s because of God that everything else exists, which is an oblique reference to both Anselm and Aquinas.

But the atheist seldom stops there. He has a bit between his teeth, and nothing can stop his gallop towards the far reaches of vulgarity.

He’ll commit the gross logical faux pas of mentioning natural science, not realising that he is crawling along a separate – and lower – epistemological level. He’ll talk about the continuing misery in the world, showing his ignorance of elementary theodicy. And he’ll do so with the passion of a zealous vulgarian proud of his vulgarity.

God looks down on those shenanigans and smites the atheist with the lightning of inanity. A miracle happens, one I’ve witnessed many times.

An otherwise intelligent, erudite and even subtle thinker immediately starts sounding like a blithering idiot, something he never does when any other subject comes up. I’ve heard people whose logic is forged of high-grade steel commit infantile logical errors that would put a secondary school pupil to shame (or would have done before the collapse of our education).

Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat, Romans used to say, repeating the thought first uttered in Greek by Euripides and Plato. “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” They do, but gods don’t stop their punishment there. They also make such a person sound vulgar.

As one of the 24 members of the Russell Group, Cardiff University is among Britain’s finest, whatever this distinction means these days.

That’s why it’s telling that its vice-chancellor, Wendy Larner, is about to swing an axe, citing a black hole in funding. Over 400 academic jobs will be cut, mostly in modern languages, ancient history, music, religion, theology and nursing.

With the exception of nursing, which really belongs in a medical school, these subjects should be the mainstays in the curriculum of any university worthy of the name, never mind one of Britain’s finest.

“I know that these proposals impact some staff more than others and they will cause a great deal of uncertainty and anxiety for those potentially impacted,” said Prof Larner, whose own syntax suggests an urgent need for a remedial English course.

Then again, she is a sociologist whose alliterative field is ‘globalisation, governance and gender’. One can impact an impact in that discipline by speaking in impactful bureaucratese only. In fact, that must be a job requirement.

You’ll be relieved to know that the vice-chancellor hasn’t announced any cuts in either her administrative and DEI staff or in her own annual £290,000 salary. Nor do I think she will: such things must be held sacred.

Some people may wonder why the university’s non-academic staff of 3,660 outnumbers its 3,419 dons. Yet every one of those admin jobs is much more vital: there are forms to fill by the tonne, and it takes a large labour force to make sure diverse people are equitably included.

Such is the zeitgeist: any public institution functioning according to modern principles, be it an NHS hospital, a major charity or a university, is increasingly dedicated to activities extraneous to its mission. The ideal for which they strive is hospitals getting rid of doctors and nurses, charities of their ultimate recipients, and universities of academics. Such people only get in the way of the higher purpose pursued by such outfits.

At universities, it’s the humanities that bear the brunt of redundancies. We don’t need historians, linguists, musicologists or theologians. We need DEI enforcers.

This again compels me to recall my youth misspent in the Soviet Union, so here comes another sleepless night of cold sweats. There, in 1919, Lenin ordered the execution of the few grand dukes still alive after the spate of 1918 murders.

One of those nobles, Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, was an historian renowned well beyond Russia’s borders. The Enlightenment Commissar Lunacharsky, who leavened his bloodthirstiness with smatterings of cultural pretensions, cited that fact when asking Lenin to commute the sentence.

Comrade Lenin’s reply laid out the blueprint that evidently still inspires our universities. “The revolution,” he said, “doesn’t need historians”. That uppercut of a response carried the day, and Nikolai Mikhailovich followed his relations into an unmarked grave.

Lenin’s adage can work the other way too: no need for historians betokens a revolution under way. As part of it, British universities are going the way of their Soviet counterparts.

Rather than elevating students’ minds, they combine the functions of brainwashing laundries and trade schools. This academic debauchment is so far expressed in a less sanguinary fashion than it was in Russia circa 1919, but the effect is similar.

Cardiff blamed the state of its finances on “declining international student applications”, and one wonders why Chinese and Indian youngsters, the principal groups of foreign students in Britain, are shunning Cardiff University. Could it be because they are more interested in real knowledge than in gender studies and DEI?

Cardiff doesn’t hold exclusive rights to this nonsense. Other Russell Group universities are following the same path at the same speed if half a step behind.

Durham University is slashing 200 academic jobs and Newcastle University is adding 300 to the unemployment rolls. Some 72 per cent of English universities are getting into the red, and more than half of all UK universities are laying off academics or cutting courses.

You get no prizes for guessing which courses they are cutting. Gender studies? Women’s studies? Black studies? Yeah, right.

Meanwhile, the government is raising tuition fees from £9,250 to £9,535, but that’s unlikely to plug the hole made by foreign students voting with their feet. That increase will be a drop in the bucket, considering that universities are currently making a loss of about £2,500 for each domestic student.

However, when Labour charges more for anything, be it taxes, duties or education, the purpose is usually not fiscal but punitive. Britain under their stewardship is the only Western country imposing VAT on school fees, which, with thousands of pupils having to migrate to overcrowded state schools, has a negative net effect on state revenue. But at least the middle classes are taught who’s boss, so they don’t get ideas above, or even at, their station.

That’s Leninism in action, if so far without attendant violence. The social pyramid has to be truncated, with another top put in its place. Statesmen, nobles, haute bourgeoisie and scholars have fallen by the wayside, with socialist apparatchiks taking their place.

Socialism doesn’t eliminate social hierarchies; it just puts at the top those who barely qualify to be even at the bottom.

The damage this does in academe is the most devastating for being the most enduring. We can just about survive a few years of inept government staffed with jumped-up nomenklatura. But I’m not sure we can ever recover from the knock-on effect of universities run by experts in ‘globalisation, governance and gender’.

The degrees they dole out are increasingly worthless, and people are beginning to realise this. That has to be the greatest part of the financial difficulties experienced by even our top universities — and of the social disaster lurking just round the corner.

Now, if at all possible, one should never pan without proposing, so goes the imperative British wisdom. Alas, doing something about the quality of our higher education would involve sweeping long-term changes to the whole modern ethos.

I don’t know how that can be accomplished without a revolutionary upheaval, and I detest revolutionary upheavals. However, I can offer an instant solution to the funding problems of our universities.

Do a Trump on them: sack at least 80 per cent of the administrative staff and eliminate DEI departments altogether. And oh, by the way, that same approach would also do wonders for public finances in all other areas too.

As for Cardiff University specifically, I’d suggest it start by getting rid of the vice-chancellor. She isn’t up to the job.

Who has insisted that Trump had the 2020 election stolen from him? And that, had he got his just deserts, Russia wouldn’t have invaded the Ukraine?

If your answer is ‘Trump’, you are only half-right. Yes, Trump did say those things, and more than once. Yet the other day Putin repeated those statements practically verbatim.

“I’ve always had a businesslike, pragmatic and even trusting relationship with the current president,” Putin said. “And I can’t help but agree that if his victory hadn’t been stolen in 2020, the crisis in Ukraine might not have emerged in 2022.”

Call me a Trump hater and report me to the MAGA police, but this kind of consonance bothers me, as it should bother anyone concerned with the advance of Russian fascism into Europe.

Suspicions of collusion between Trump and Putin have been floating about for years. A thorough investigation into the matter revealed no evidence to vindicate such suspicions, but, as Carl Sagan once said, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Absence of evidence may only mean the perpetrators were adept at hiding it. Considering that in this case one of the parties is a career KGB officer, the requisite skills were always on tap.

Still, even when there is no evidence to indict, there may be enough evidence to suspect, especially if the two parties constantly provide grounds for sound conjecture. Last week, Trump did just that by giving his (and Putin’s) version of the war.

Essentially, he apportioned the blame equally between Putin and Zelensky, an even-handedness that absolves the aggressor of a criminal violation of international law.

Trump magnanimously allowed that Putin was slightly rash when he set out to recolonise the Ukraine and stamp out her hard-won independence. However, “Zelensky… shouldn’t have allowed this to happen either. He’s no angel,” added Trump.

Fair enough, the last time I looked at Zelensky’s photographs I didn’t see a pair of wings attached to his back. But a victim doesn’t have to possess celestial qualities to be victimised. Raping a prostitute, for example, is still a felony.

The Polish leaders in 1939 were far from being cherubim too, and yet the world had no problem identifying Nazi Germany as the aggressor. Nor could Gen. Mannerheim and other Finnish leaders be readily confused with seraphim – and yet the League of Nations kicked the Soviet Union out for committing an act of blatant aggression against Finland later the same year.

Zelensky has his flaws, and so does his country. I’ve heard Putin fans accuse the Ukraine of corruption a thousand times if I’ve heard it once, and yes, there is plenty of corruption there. Not as much as in Russia but enough. So does that justify a brutal invasion, mass murder and indiscriminate bombardment of residential areas. Does that justify rampant rapes, torture, looting, kidnapping of children?

Anyone answering yes to these questions should push that magnetised iron bar away from his moral compass. It’s going haywire.

Getting from moral to practical matters, how does Trump think Zelensky could have not “allowed this to happen”? What should he have done on 24 February, 2022, when enemy armour crossed the Ukraine’s border and advanced on Kiev?

Simple. Zelensky should have surrendered immediately because Russia is so much stronger. But let’s not paraphrase Trump’s pronouncements; they speak for themselves:

“Zelensky was fighting a much bigger entity, much bigger, much more powerful,” Trump said. “He shouldn’t have done that, because we could have made a deal.”

Is that the royal ‘we’? Yes it is.

“I could have made that deal so easily, and Zelensky decided that ‘I want to fight’,” Trump continued. This is, mildly speaking, disingenuous on more levels that one finds in your average Trump Tower.

First, on that fateful date Trump was in no position to make any deals, other than those involving the construction of yet another Trump Tower. He was not the US president then, and neither did he have any official capacity to act for the administration.

So that’s just our typical MAGAlamania, but it’s also much worse than that. No ‘deal’ (and I think Trump’s use of that word should be rationed by an act of Congress) could have been struck at that stage – not by Trump, not by Biden, not by NATO, not even by God Almighty.

Putin declared that the objective of the invasion was to “de-Nazify and demilitarise” the Ukraine, which is to wipe out her sovereignty and reincorporate her into Russia. His timetable for that operation was short: three days to a week.

Unlike Trump’s defunct 24-hour deadline for ending the war, Putin’s plan was realistic. Had the Ukrainian army not put up resistance, Russian armour could have indeed covered the 400 miles from the border to Kiev in three days.

And then no deal could have been made any longer. Zelensky and his whole government would have been murdered, Putin’s stooge Yanukovych or another quisling would have been wheeled in, and the world would have been faced with a fait accompli.

An independent Ukraine would have sunk into oblivion, millions of Ukrainians would have been purged, more millions robbed, and the country would have been forced to become a Russian satrap. Yet there was that obstreperous Zelensky who “decided that ‘I want to fight’.”

The blame for the ensuing massacre is thus apportioned equally and, if anything, Zelensky is slightly more culpable. By taking on “a much bigger entity” he scuppered the chance of a deal, meaning he is neither “pragmatic” nor “businesslike”.

It’s from the wobbly platform of such understanding that Trump will start negotiating with Putin, possibly allowing Zelensky to sit in at the talks between the two grown-ups.

An essential part of that understanding is Trump’s certainty that the US has squandered too much money supporting the Ukraine. Yet the figures he has cited in support of that belief are as factual as the US taking credit for splitting the atom.

The US, he said, spent “200 billion dollars more than Europe” in support of the Ukraine. But hey, if facts stand in the way of a deal, then so much the worse for facts.

In reality, the US Congress has allocated (as distinct from delivered) about $170 billion to the Ukraine since the full-scale Russian invasion, $65 billion of it in military hardware. The corresponding number for the EU is $145 billion, plus another $15 billion contributed by Britain. I detect almost parity there, but let’s not quibble about numbers. It’s the thought that counts.

Moral and pragmatic often go their separate ways in politics, but this is one of those situations (which are more numerous than is commonly believed) where they coincide. The moral position on the war has to be unequivocal, but then so does the strategic need.

An evil regime has a self-declared aim of reconstructing the Soviet empire, understood in the broad sense as the whole of Eastern Europe. Ten of those countries are NATO members, as now is Finland, a neighbour of Russia.

By heroically holding the invaders at bay, the Ukraine is the West’s first line of defence, with her blood filling the moat separating absolute evil from relative good (Western countries aren’t angelic either, let’s concede this point). Allowing the aggressor to overrun the Ukraine is bound to have the same consequences as the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s – but with a new twist.

Delivering a victory to Putin is tantamount to disassembling the system of collective security that has more or less kept Europe at peace for 80 years. A subsequent attack on a NATO country, most likely one of the Baltics, will put NATO before a stark choice. Either engage Russia in a full-blown, possibly nuclear, war or repudiate Article 5 of the NATO charter, leaving Europe at the mercy of Russian hordes.

I agree with Trump that Europe should invest much more in her defence and, unlike him, I also believe that both Europe and the US should remove all stops from their support of the Ukraine. This is the moral thing to do and it also happens to be the practical one.

Trump is also right when saying that the Ukraine “has had enough”, although I’d be tempted to add that so has Russia. Yes, the war must be ended, and the only way to do so is to bring the two countries to a negotiating table, with America perhaps overseeing the proceedings.

But starting the negotiations from the presumption of equal guilt means putting the Ukraine in an invidious losing position from kick-off. That’s why I see Trump and Putin singing in unison as a portent of gloom.

My advice to Trump is to find a spot somewhere between a deal and a holy crusade against evil, and use it as the starting point of any negotiations. Closer to the latter would be my preference, but then I too can be pragmatic in my expectations at times.

This phrase usually means making things worse. However, President Trump has hinted at the possibility of reversing its meaning.

Ostensibly speaking to the World Economic Forum at Davos but in reality to Putin and OPEC, he said: “If the [oil] price came down, the Russia-Ukraine war would end immediately.”

Don’t know about immediately, but Trump has a good point. Overlaying the historical graph of oil prices over that of Russia’s military forays one can see a different inverse relationship, as I’ve found out by following expert opinion.

Thus, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, when the oil price was at a record high. Corrected for inflation it equalled $140 in today’s money.

In 2008 Russia attacked Georgia. The oil price was still high, about $130, again in today’s money.

In 2014, Russia annexed the Crimea and set the Donbass on fire. The oil price was stubbornly staying in triple digits, at about $110 a barrel.

And the price was still $110 a barrel in 2022, when Russia embarked on a full-blown aggression against the Ukraine, plunging Europe into a war the likes of which hadn’t been seen since 1945.

Since then the price has come down, to about $78. But it’s still high enough for Putin to finance the war by circumventing Western sanctions and dumping his oil at sale prices to anyone willing to do business, mainly China.

That relationship also works the other way: Russia tends to succumb to peace overtures when the oil prices dip.

In 1986 Ronald Reagan struck a deal with Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil producer. The Saudis agreed to crash the price per barrel by stepping up their production. The prices went down from $140 a barrel to $30, and the button for Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan was pushed.

In January, 2015, the oil price dipped from $110 to $50 a barrel. A month later, Russia signed the Minsk agreements, which she broke the instant oil became more expensive again.

Oil economists believe that getting the price down to the 2015 level of about $50 will force Putin to sue for peace straight away. That strikes me as way too optimistic, the kind of optimism that can only ever be based on a deficit of knowledge.

If currently Russia is spending over a third of her budget on the war, a collapse in oil prices may raise that proportion to 50 or even 75 per cent. That would turn the Russian population into cold and hungry paupers deprived of even the bare essentials of life.

But that wouldn’t deter Putin, or at any rate wouldn’t do so immediately. Concern for the well-being or even lives of the people has never figured prominently on the Russian list of priorities, certainly not since 1917 and not all that much even before then.

Their conduct of the on-going war shows that treating lives with cavalier disregard hasn’t exactly gone out of fashion there. Putin’s generals are pursuing the war effort by paying no attention to the growing list of casualties. They are throwing wave after human wave at fortified positions, with their forces advancing through the puddles of their comrades’ blood.

Conditions in the rear haven’t yet reached catastrophic proportions, but the Russians are considerably worse off now than they were three years ago. Yet one doesn’t see any mass protests, nor any fiery headlines in the papers. Such is the nature of any totalitarian state – and of the Russian people whose tolerance of deprivations has been honed throughout their history.

Having said that, the avenue to peace that Trump hinted at looks promising. The president’s transactional talents may not work on the Russians, but the Saudis are more receptive to pressure. They may grab at any carrot dangled by Trump because they stand to lose a lot if he swings a stick.

Trump’s entreaty of “Drill, baby, drill” may produce the same effect: if America boosts her fracking effort, she can flood the markets with liquefied natural gas, which too is bound to push hydrocarbon prices down.

There is no reason for the oil price not to drop as far down as $30 or even $20. That would indeed crush the Russian economy, making any foreign forays unthinkable even for Putin and his accomplices.

The Saudis may scream bloody murder, but that’s where the carrot can come in. The US could offer OPEC countries any number of concessions that would make up for the lower price of their principal export. In any case, such a dip would only have to last as long as the war. Once it has ended, the prices may be allowed to seek their natural level.

Donald Trump is on to something here. He might have identified the only way for the Ukraine and her Western allies to occupy a position of strength in any negotiations with Russia. Instead of appealing to Putin’s nonexistent good nature, Trump could simply whip his trusted calculator out and show him a few simple sums.

Here, Vlad, this is what’ll happen to your economy at $50, $40, $30 or $20. And did I forget to mention it? Here’s a copy of my agreement with OPEC who are ready to do what it takes. So this is where you sign.

This approach has got to be more successful than trying to intimidate Russia with more sanctions they know how to circumvent, or to bully Zelensky with the threat of cutting supplies off. As a concomitant benefit, a period of cheap energy would inject some resuscitating medicine into the sclerotic veins of Western economies.

A footnote has to be attached to every pronouncement made by Trump, good, bad or indifferent. His words and his deeds have been known to go their separate ways, and he doesn’t always take the trouble of thinking before talking.

But I have a feeling that this time around he has found, and is prepared to act on, the right ploy for ending the war – not in 24 hours, not immediately, but soon. Best of luck, and do let’s hope the strategy will succeed.

Any physiognomist casting an eye over our chancellor’s face will suspect she isn’t excessively bright. Then she’ll say something, anything, and the suspicion will turn into a certainty.

Yet so far no psychiatrist I know of has diagnosed Rachel Reeves with schizophrenia. That oversight ought to be corrected, and soon, before she hurts any more people.

Schizophrenia, as you know, is characterised by a delusional divorce from reality. And one doesn’t have to be a trained shrink to see that poor Rachel from Complaints has that condition, if only perhaps in a mild form.

(Rachel acquired that nickname when saying on her CV that she had been a top economist at the Bank of Scotland, and she justified that job experience by being economical with the truth. In fact, she had worked in the complaints department of a retail bank, fobbing off distraught customers who asked for a higher overdraft limit.)

But judge for yourself. This is how Rachel describes her experience of travelling through China on a recent trip: “I went on this train from Beijing to Shanghai, it’s 1,200km, it got there in four hours. Can you imagine if I’d said to the vice-premier, ‘I would like to understand what you did around environmental rules’? … We would have sounded like lunatics. We can’t get stuff done in Britain because of these ridiculous rules.”

I agree. Every sensible Briton knows that “these ridiculous rules” are hammering nails into the coffin of the economy. And every such individual is well within his rights to complain – in fact it’s his civic duty to do so. Provided, of course, that it’s not he who is responsible for suffocating the economy with a suicidal commitment to net zero.

Rachel, by contrast, is one of those directly responsible, holding as she does the second-highest position in a government whose climate fanaticism is unmatched anywhere in the world. So which of those “ridiculous rules” is she planning to rescind?

She seems to have this schizophrenic ability to become in her mind someone she isn’t in reality, in this case someone outside the government looking in. From that vantage point, one she shares with all of us, she can, indeed should, criticise our useless government to her heart’s content.

Now, I don’t know what the therapeutic protocol is for dealing with delusions, and I’d welcome any advice from medically trained readers.

Are you supposed to get the patient in touch with reality by, for example, telling Kevin that he isn’t Napoleon and should take that silly hat off, Jane that she isn’t Lady Godiva and should put her clothes on, and Rachel that she isn’t an outsider to this government and should either get rid of those ridiculous rules or shut up? Do tell me.

Everything about Rachel is progressive, including, by the looks of it, her schizophrenia. Speaking at Davos, she said:  “We’re all sick of Britain being in the slow lane, whether it’s British CEOs or British investors, and we want to see a revival of those animal spirits so that we can grow the economy and bring investment here.”

Rachel then channelled her inner Trump by holding the US president up as an example of someone whose can-do attitude is working wonders in America. “I think we do need more positivity,” she said.

The reality is that whatever economic success Trump may be able to achieve will be due not so much to what he is (a positive thinker) as to what he isn’t (a Marxist ideologue). Rachel is just that, yet she scolds British investors and businessmen for being pessimistic as if she had nothing to do with fostering such sentiments.

Her abrupt about-face on Trump is also nothing short of insane.

For the past decade or so, the Labour brass (including Reeves) have been demonising him as a racist, fascist and in general the devil incarnate. Now they desperately need a trade deal with the US, they want Britons to become as positive as Trump – to a point that they don’t notice that their catastrophically incompetent government is destroying their country in the service of an evil ideology.

I’ve already mentioned the net zero madness, all those rules Rachel finds ridiculous but does all she can to multiply. But that’s only a start. Correctly sensing that climate fanaticism alone may not destroy the economy beyond recovery, our heroine has slapped such extortionist taxes and strangulating regulations on the economy that she started a massive exodus of wealth.

One wealth-producer is leaving Britain every 45 minutes, doubtless to the resounding chorus of “good riddance” performed by our governing Marxists. Hundreds of businesses are closing down, and those that are still holding on by their fingertips are laying people off.

Supermarket chains lead the way, with Sainsbury’s announcing 3,000 redundancies and Morrison’s not far behind. And investors, both foreign and domestic, aren’t investing because they don’t like throwing good money after bad. As a result, public borrowing is becoming not only greater but also more expensive.

In the fine tradition of socialist governments everywhere, Rachel is robbing the Peter of the private sector to give to the Paul of public employees. These are the only people who are doing well under Labour, with record wage hikes blithely dispensed by Rachel from Complaints.

“I want to keep the talent here,” she says. “In recent years too much has been drifting overseas.” True, so it has. But at nowhere near the rate of the past six months, when she took charge of the Exchequer.

Yet Rachel’s medical condition is such that she lives in the virtual reality of her mind, not in the actual reality of life. Thus, she blames the Tories for whatever economic problems Britain is experiencing: “You can’t turn around 14 years of sluggish growth in six months,” she says.

No you can’t. But you certainly can eliminate growth altogether, which is what Rachel from Complaints has done.

Economic growth in any country is inversely proportionate to the amount of socialism in it. The Tories are socialist too, but less so than Rachel and her mates. That’s why last year Britain’s growth, though undeniably sluggish, was still the fastest in the G7. Now it’s the slowest, having ground to a halt.

Every economic forecast, apart from those emanating from Rachel’s department, isn’t just pessimistic but doomsday. And even the Office for Budget Responsibility is downgrading forecasts every day.

Incidentally, Trump said yesterday that Starmer’s government has done a “very good job thus far”. That statement is as far from reality as anything Rachel from Complaints is saying, but one hopes that in this case the aetiology of the problem is merely ignorance, not madness.

Then again, Trump can’t be held responsible for anything he says: he is too garrulous to exercise even elementary self-restraint, and too egotistic to hold his statements to any tests of facts or general knowledge.

Thus he made a promise to indulge his fondness for “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”, tariffs, mentioning plans to introduce levies as high as 40 per cent on all imports.

Then some economically literate advisers must have talked sense into Trump, and the bar began to come down incrementally. First, 40 per cent became 20, then 10, but even such a tariff on British exports to the US would inflict even more damage on our economy than Rachel can cause on her own.

That’s why she is full of praise for Trump, where before she was scathing about him and not always selective in her epithets. Overall, I can’t shake the clichéd feeling that we live in an asylum run by the lunatics. Please, please tell me I’m wrong.

Democracy in America is arguably the most seminal work of political science ever written, and definitely one of the most prescient.

Its first volume appeared in 1835, 190 years ago and only 59 years into America’s life as an independent country. And yet much of the book reads as today’s reportage.

This isn’t to say I find all of Tocqueville’s political philosophy of equal value, but, when reading a significant book on any subject, my tendency is to concentrate on the points that make it significant. In this case too, rather than arguing with many of Tocqueville’s contentious ideas, we could all learn from his sage observations.

It was Tocqueville who first explained to Americans that what they had created wasn’t exactly what they had set out to create. Democracy, not mixed republican government, was central to American politics. However, unlike both Jefferson and Adams who deplored that development, Tocqueville rather welcomed it.

But not without reservations, and I find these more interesting than the praise. Tocqueville believed that only democracy could find a proper balance between equality and liberty. However, he was aware of the problem that has since become as evident as it is ubiquitous:

“But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.”

Tocqueville knew that not only political liberty might suffer as a result, but also intellectual freedom: “The majority has enclosed thought within a formidable fence. A writer is free inside that area, but woe to the man who goes beyond it.”

As a result, Tocqueville could think of no other country where there was “less independence of mind, and true freedom of discussion, than in America.” It was mainly in that sense that he spoke of “the tyranny of the majority”, a phrase also used by another champion of liberty, if a less nuanced thinker, John Stuart Mill.

While writing about America, Tocqueville always had his native France in the back of his mind. He was hoping France and other European countries would transplant America’s good features while remaining immune to the bad ones. His hopes have so far remained forlorn, and, largely as an effect of unchecked democracy, the West shows every day how little attention it has paid to Tocqueville’s caveats.

Many of his observations were both eagle’s-eye accurate and crystal-ball prescient. Pointing out that most people in the US government were lawyers by trade, Tocqueville feared that American politics would become excessively legalistic as a result:

“Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that does not turn, sooner or later, into a judicial question.”

True enough, of the 56 signatories to the Declaration of Independence, 25 were lawyers, as were 31 of the 55 members in the Continental Congress. That situation hasn’t changed much: 51 out of the 100 US senators were trained as lawyers. Although the percentage is somewhat lower in the House, Tocqueville’s numerical observation still holds.

What he didn’t anticipate, and neither did anyone else, is the amount of judiciary activism in the US (and, these days, elsewhere), with judges acting as political players, not just referees. They turn political questions into judicial ones not to protect constitutional purity but, as often as not, to usurp political power.

In fact, that practice is so widespread that political motives are impugned even to purely legal decisions. Thus, the predominantly leftwing press was up in arms about the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse Roe vs. Wade. Pundits insisted the judges had ruled that way out of conservative (or religious fundamentalist, take your pick) distaste for abortion.

In fact, Their Honours merely scrutinised the federal Constitution and decided that nothing in it could be interpreted as an argument for or against abortion. Hence it was up to the states and not the central government to legislate the issue.

During his first post-inauguration hours, Trump fired a volley of executive orders at everything progressive mankind holds dear and sane mankind abhors. The President is clearly intent on pushing executive power to (some will say beyond) its constitutional limit. Considering that he has a majority in both Houses, political opposition is too weak to stop the Trump juggernaut.

That’s why massive legal regiments have been thrown into battle, trying to do exactly what worried Tocqueville: turn political questions into judiciary ones. That continues the tendency that took shape during Trump’s campaign, when the opposition often relied not on political arguments but on questionable legal tactics to get ahead.

That Trump’s order to deny birthright citizenship to children of illegal immigrants would be challenged in court was clear even to me, a rank amateur in such matters. Birthright citizenship regardless of the parents’ residence status is guaranteed by the 14^th Amendment, and it would take another amendment to overturn it. That’s a lengthy process at best, and Trump has neither the time nor probably the votes to succeed.

Just as the aforementioned rank amateur predicted, 22 states have filed legal challenges and lawsuits, probably meaning that sound idea will bite the dust. I can’t say I’m upset: as the Romans used to say, dura lex, sed lex – the law is harsh, but it is the law. And it’s the law that should rule a civilised country, not a ruler full of sound ideas.

Also finding itself at the end of a lawsuit is Elon Musk’s DOGE, the outfit charged with the worthy mission of cleaning up the Augean Stables of the federal payrolls. The lawsuit filed by National Security Counsellors takes exception to DOGE’s lack of transparency.

Apparently, a federal advisory committee, which is what DOGE is, is supposed to keep regular minutes of meetings and allow public access, whereas Musk would rather do his work in camera.

That’s supposed to violate the Federal Advisory Committee Act, and I’m sure lawyers on both sides will have a well-paid field day arguing the toss. But I suppose DOGE could sidestep this one suit by making some concessions and continue to do its important work. I wish a less hideous character than Musk were in charge, but it is what it is.

The lawsuit filed by the National Treasury Employees Union may be harder to dismiss. Trump’s worthy intention is to sack tens of thousands of federal employees he sees – correctly, I think – as useless, actually harmful, leeches on the body of the public finances.

But it was predictable that getting rid of so many people would run into legal challenges, both individual and class suits. To speed matters up, Trump reinstated Schedule F, reclassifying all those employees as political hires and therefore sackable when the politics changed. If the government succeeds in reclassifying them in that manner, the employees will lose the right to appeal, which the union says is unprecedented and diabolical.

And so it goes, the legal merry-go-round spinning and gathering momentum as it goes. Some objections to Trump’s policies raise legitimate constitutional concerns, but most are simply legal sticks thrust into the spokes of political wheels.

They may not stop the juggernaut, but they can certainly slow it down, and Trump only has four years to implement his policies. So prepare yourselves for a whole bunch of further suits, some legitimate, most frivolous.

I hope Trump can chart a safe course through the legal reefs, but that’s not my subject today. I’m simply marvelling at Tocqueville’s sagacity. He noticed almost two centuries ago the seeds that have since sprouted into mighty trees.

If he suddenly came back, he’d look at today’s America and utter the aphorism coined by his contemporary, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”.