In the words of the poet, something’s happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear.  At least not clear to the ossified bureaucracies that control public policy in the Western Hemisphere.

Outdated and unscientific 19th-century notions of “democracy”—rule by majority—are interfering with the best-laid plans of smart people.

Their response has been to run a senile guy who craps his pants for President of the United States.

The European Union was the crowning achievement of governance by the childish naiveties of the college term paper.

The free peoples who survived the Norman Conquest were supposed to accept rule by well-credentialed twits who didn’t even bother to land troops to achieve their outsized authority over all things British.

Then in June 2016 Brexit happened. People in Great Britain voted to throw off the EU yoke and get on with life.

Also in June 2016, Donald Trump closed out the Republican primaries as candidate for President of the United States upon a promise to retake power from intrusive bureaucrats—“Drain the swamp!”—America’s extra-constitutional version of the EU.

Brexit stalled upon the failure to reach an agreement with the EU. The bad faith negotiation proved to Brits their wisdom in removing the power to govern from alien hands.

In America, bureaucracies acted covertly with their counterparts in Great Britain to undermine the election of Trump and, failing that, to neuter his presidency.

In an act of projection, the story the American spy agencies and their MI6 crony Christopher Steele pushed was that Trump was working with a foreign government—Russia—to develop opposition research against his opponent.

The matter was investigated, but not the actual crime of domestic and foreign spy agencies working on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s political campaign.

Instead, the original false premise of Russian collusion was beaten to death, with show arrests over process crimes and phony leaks that yielded fake headlines, all designed to knock Trump off stride.

In Great Britain, the West’s most imperial bureaucrat with a bad haircut, Boris Johnson, figured out a way to technically comply with Brexit while conceding the prerogatives of power to European bureaucrats: Grant authority to them in trade agreements.

That way Britain would not technically be under the official authority of the EU.  But it would not be permitted to engage in even the most rudimentary commerce without the blessing of Brussels.

Touché Democracy. For good measure, Johnson scuttled a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, because American and EU bureaucrats need wars to keep themselves busy.

In 1983, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn issued the following prophetic criticism of the West in his “Men Have Forgotten God” speech at Buckingham Palace, upon his acceptance of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion:

[O]ur godless age has discovered the perfect anesthetic — trade! Such is the pathetic pinnacle of contemporary wisdom.

Today’s world has reached a stage which, if it had been described to preceding centuries, would have called forth the cry: “This is the Apocalypse!”

Yet we have grown used to this kind of world; we even feel at home in it.

Dostoevsky warned that “great events could come upon us and catch us intellectually unprepared.” This is precisely what has happened. And he predicted that “the world will be saved only after it has been possessed by the demon of evil.” Whether it really will be saved we shall have to wait and see: this will depend on our conscience, on our spiritual lucidity, on our individual and combined efforts in the face of catastrophic circumstances. But it has already come to pass that the demon of evil, like a whirlwind, triumphantly circles all five continents of the earth.

Drive along the banks of the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati and you will pass town after town of closed plants, boarded-up storefronts, EPA cleanups, and people invested in properties no longer valuable, because manufacturing has been transferred to China – under free trade agreements.

Trade!

What is left behind is largely low-skilled labor, with wages driven down by the abundance of illegal migrant workers. It is a despair-inducing mess. There is an opioid epidemic.

Which brings us, finally, to J.D. Vance, whom President Trump has selected to be his vice-presidential nominee.

Besides Brexit and Trump, a third thing happened in June 2016. Hillbilly Elegy was published. It was a first-hand account by author J.D. Vance describing the working-class discontent in those Ohio towns.

That discontent would lead to Trump’s election a few months later, when he carried the mostly Democratic, working-class states of the industrial Midwest.

Vance was not connected to Trump, and he did not write a political book. He went on to ride his notoriety into fleeting Hollywood-darling status. Ron Howard made his book into a movie.

But Vance refused to play minstrel in their Hollywood’s narrative of life, and he was abandoned by the smart people.

He ran for Senate in Ohio and won. He has become Trump’s most effective defender in Washington. Sen. Vance is the third leg under the June 2016 table.

Trumpism and Brexit and Hillbilly Elegy. June 2016 were weeks when decades happened.

This is an election about the discontent of the Western working class against the false god Solzhenitsyn described as “Trade!”

J.D. Vance is the ultimate non-compromise candidate. He focuses the 2024 election on economic matters important to Trump’s base of voters. He is a great pick.