President Trump has not so much hit the ground running as performed an Olympics-level sprint flattening all obstacles.
Hardly had he arrived in the Oval Office than he started signing dozens of executive orders fulfilling the promises he’d given the American people to push back against the forces destroying the country.
It was an astonishing example of how leadership can change a mood and a set of presumptions.
The black clouds of coerced conformity started to roll away.
People stifled by years of vilification for wanting to live in an America they recognized suddenly dared to believe they could breathe again.
Above all, Trump’s arrival in office has overturned years of talking America down and injected instead an ebullient optimism that America will become not just great but whole again.
You don’t have to agree with everything he’s doing to acknowledge Trump has changed the political dynamic. Thousands of tinpot liberal emperors have suddenly been exposed as having no clothes at all.
The rest of the world has looked on astonished and with no small amount of envy.
In Britain, my own place of birth, the Labour government that’s destroying the country with its refusal to uphold the nation’s historic culture and values can only gape impotently across the pond at what real national leadership looks like.
This presidential energy may yet spark an even more vital revolution. Abolishing DEI, securing the border and expelling extremists from campuses and the country are important reforms that speak to voters’ most immediate concerns.
These are all, however, the damaging outcomes of a way of looking at the world.
Even if Trump’s reforms mean America once again rejoices in only two genders, white people are no longer vilified for the color of their skin and universities return to the free play of ideas, the forces that caused the social fabric to unravel will still be there and capable of repeating the exercise.
That’s because they were part of a seismic and destructive shift in Western society that has taken place over several decades and captured the minds of so many cultural leaders.
As I write in my new book, “The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West — and Why Only They Can Save It,” these Western elites mounted a systematic attack on their own society and therefore on civilization itself.
Ordaining that the West was born in the original sins of colonialism and racism, they took an ax to its foundations in the traditional married family and an education system transmitting the culture to the next generation.
Since that culture was deemed racist, it had to be replaced by a babel of cultures over which core Western values — such as equality for women, freedom of speech and one law for all — had no authority.
The Western nation, seen as the source of prejudice and war, had to be superseded by transnational laws and institutions, such as international human-rights law and the United Nations, that stood for the brotherhood of mankind.
This utopian vision was supposed to usher in a brave new world of peace and justice. Instead, it produced disastrous social divisions between groups warring for power. It sapped individual aspiration by a victim culture based on grievance and resentment and made the West an increasingly tempting target for its enemies because its elites insisted — as in John Lennon’s famous lyric — there is nothing to fight or die for.
At the root of all this was the progressive erosion of biblical values that had given the West its core principles of right and wrong, personal responsibility and duty to others.
This erosion provided a golden opportunity for Islamists, who perceived that the resulting spiritual, moral and political vacuum made the West theirs for the taking.
The combination of increasingly dominant Islamists and the radical left, marching in lockstep in pursuit of the common goal of destroying the West, was vividly illustrated by the grotesque response to the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in Israel by Hamas-led Palestinian Arabs from Gaza and the war that followed.
Instead of supporting Israel’s desperate defense against an enemy intent upon wiping it out, many in the West viewed the Gazans as victims of Israel, which they repugnantly defamed as a nation of aggressive child-killers.
On the streets of Western cities, thousands of Muslim and left-wing demonstrators repeatedly chanted for the destruction of Israel, the murder of Jews and jihad against the West. And a tsunami of antisemitism was unleashed across Britain and America, Canada and Australia.
It was no surprise Israel and the Jewish people were at the eye of this storm. Just as Israel is defending the West against Islamist forces determined to destroy it, Western progressives who attack Israel and the Jews are themselves attacking their own society and its core Jewish principles.
Judaism, through the vehicle of Christianity, was the source of conscience, justice and reason that created the greatness of Western civilization.
After Oct. 7, what we witnessed was the disappearance of conscience, justice and reason. And the explanation for that lies in the degradation of Western culture.
Many — especially in Britain and Europe, which have borne the brunt of all this — despair that the battle for civilization is already lost. But it has not yet properly been fought.
I suggest in my book a resistance movement should be mobilized, a coalition for civilization made up of people from every ethnic, cultural and religious group who want the West to continue and will fight to uphold its historically rooted principles of truth, freedom and justice.
They should draw upon the unparalleled Jewish record of survival to learn how to embed biblical precepts into everyday life to provide spiritually starved people with a sense of meaning and purpose to their lives. They need to promote a culture of attachment based on the family, the nation and the transmission of tradition and cultural memory.
Trump’s ruthless championing of American interests is already causing the rest of the world to recalibrate their actions.
Now he needs to champion this coalition for civilization to fight the suicidal liberal ideologies that have eroded the West’s foundations.
The reason Trump was elected against historic odds is that millions rose up in revolt against a liberal establishment that was defaming and weakening America, erasing its historic identity and turning it into a battleground between groups viciously warring for power.
They wanted instead to belong to a nation shaped by an identifiable heritage whose values they shared in a place they recognized as home. And millions of others in Britain and Europe, who are terminally disillusioned with their political establishment, long for exactly the same thing.
This is why Trump’s second term is critically important. If he rises to the challenge, America will lead the battle to save civilization and will strengthen similar popular revolts in other countries. If he fails, the West may go the way of ancient Rome, a decadent society weakened from within and vulnerable to enemies from without.
Above all, the West must make a choice: to surrender or survive.
The fight for civilization is on, and there’s everything to play for.
Melanie Phillips’ “The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West — and Why Only They Can Save It” is published by Wicked Son and available on Amazon.
