How To Be A Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for its Survival

by Ian Dunt

Many people associated Trump and Johnson closely together. They both took leadership positions in their respective nationalist movements. They both lied incessantly. They both lacked intellectual consistency. And on a personal level they seemed to recognise that their projects were complementary to each other. But in fact the differences between them were subtle, counter-intuitive and important. Unlike Johnson, Trump was a committed nationalist and had been all his life. The target of his resentment changed – from Japan in the 1980s to Mexico in the 2010s. But the basic approach was always the same – a demand for America to come first and a suspicion and resentment of foreigners. He was less intelligent than Johnson and unable to place these positions within any kind of coherent ideological framework, but his instincts were reliably and uniformly racist, xenophobic and aggressive, like a ball covered in shattered glass.