Here we are, the day of the US election: a vote which follows an unusually rancorous campaign in a nation more than normally divided by culture, ideology, and notions of ‘identity’ – real or affected.

To the extent we believe what their advisors have told them to say on the stump or promote in their slick, slanted advertising slots, Trump is the man who wishes to preserve as much of the status quo as possible – for good or ill – while Biden stands as the front half of a curious pantomime horse: a half-century veteran, machine politician who seems to aspire to eke out his dotage as head of the student union of some awfully Right-On, Liberal Arts college.

Given that society has become increasingly atomised and fractious -tribal, even – in recent years, perhaps the last thing this election is about is “The Economy, stupid” but – were it to be so, it would be hard to say that Trump’s pre-COVID term of office was not at least a qualified success, even if its accomplishments were simultaneously built upon the shifting sands of credit expansion and lessened by the protectionist atavism of his debilitating ‘trade wars’.

Biden, on the other hand, is a man who has stood for both nothing and everything during his long years guzzling at the Top Table but who now seems happy to stumble his way through whatever ‘progressive’ script his teleprompter-jockeys throw up before him.

It is typically the case in Western politics – particularly post-Soviet, Western politics – that elections are not just ‘advanced auctions of stolen goods’, as H. L. Mencken so sardonically put it, but sham battles between the Tweedledee Left-of-Centrists and Tweedledum Marginally-more-left-of-Left-of-Centrists.

Those pinning anachronistic Blue coloured badges to their lapels in the US, (unhelpfully, Red, Black, or Orange elsewhere in the world) are largely unprincipled careerists who perceive the greatest threat to their self-advancement to lie on the Water-Melon Green-Red fringe – and who also sniff the biggest bucks coming from the pockets of the biomass and bird-killer boondoggle rent-seekers who want to stop the seas rising another millimetre or two by regularly packing the coastal defences with fresh bundles of taxpayers’ dollar bills.

Conversely, their opponents are similarly unencumbered by a moral compass nor much possessed of experience of the rigours of having to earn an honest, private sector living. These chancers’ main strategy is to treat the small-c conservative voters whose values they notionally espouse as forlorn political orphans and to proceed try to steal as many as possible of the votes to their left in order to command that minuscule plurality of a disillusioned or apathetic electorate who do bother to turn up to vote which is necessary to their personal advancement.

Should this shamelessness inspire their bedrock constituency to turn, in its disenfranchised frustration, to a newly-founded party or seek to elevate an outsider to the captaincy of their old one, they, it, and he will be routinely derided as being ‘populist and reflexively smeared as ‘far-right’, its matrons and machinists, shopkeepers, and solicitors damagingly tarred as ‘neo-Nazi’.

The associated hyper-inflation might be ahead of, not behind, us this time around, but the Weimarian echoes of polarisation, street-violence, and the demonisation of opponents are already here, at least in embryo. The 1920s saw the Rote Frontkämpferbund battling with the Sturmabteilung. We are treated to the edifying spectacle of Antifa versus the Proud Boys, though it must be said that the former’s numbers and organisation not only dominate the scattered hooligan bands of the latter, but also enjoy much barely concealed support among the media and the political mainstream.

Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind, do I hear you say?

Whatever the relative demerits of such roving bands of marauders, the only real losers in this, as in the previous, conflict are the good, ordinary folk of all colours and creeds whose simple civic pleasures, not to mention their valiant local businesses and routine interactions, are what fall victim both to the savagery itself and to the mutual suspicion and hostility it foments in its wake.

America is hardly alone in this, of course. Nor is much of it President Trump’s ‘fault’ – except inasmuch as he has proven anomalously resistant to the typical Western leader’s cowardly compliance with the never-ending assault of the Identitarian Left on all aspects of Enlightenment culture, their fellows’ cherished traditions, their bourgeoise politesse, and their everyday tolerance and understanding.

In reducing all of public life and most open discourse to either a Maoist ‘struggle session’ or a Stalinist show-trial, the 68-ers, – the ‘Soixante-huitards’ – now percolated up through the ranks of society to its most elevated levels of power and influence – have so successfully suborned the swelling battalions of aspiring young diploma-hunters that these latter new Red Guards and Young Pioneers have come perilously close to inaugurating a new Cultural Revolution every bit as terrifying as the old.

This we simply cannot allow. And so if Donald Trump – flawed, vain, truculent, often unlikeable human being that he is – is our best hope of warding off the intertwined, existentially-dangerous assaults on our lives, loves, livelihoods, and liberties which the unholy alliance of the Campus Communards and the reptilian Technotyrants of Davos are using the fear of this soi-disant pandemic to undertake, his much lesser evil is the one we must embrace.

Little of what we can perceive offers unbounded cheer for the financial markets in which we ply our trade, even though they have so far been slow to react to such gloomy prognostications – perhaps lulled once more into complacency by the ever-present promise (or threat) of the further unrestricted creation of the new central bank money needed to prop them up.

Here we would do well to consider that, however long it takes to play out, at some point we shall to have to face up to the harsh reality that while we can certainly create unlimited amounts of money, we can also destroy unimaginable amounts of wealth with its use.

Meanwhile, as we wrestle with this and the many other difficulties now facing us, one group at least – that comprised of the sinister puppet-masters in Davos – must be very pleased indeed with the fruits of their year’s work.

Let us hope Mr. Trump can wipe some of the conceited smiles off their faces by securing four more years in the White House.