The dominant political thought in Western countries is essentially from the far left. It’s now called ‘wokism’. As such, it is often infantile, so infantile that it would not be tolerated for a moment in Beijing. More than a century ago, Lenin indicated this in his tome, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder.

Today’s dominance of woke thought should not surprise us. After all, the comrades’ long march through Western institutions, by deliberate design, began with education for the purpose of replacing it with their indoctrination. Did they also ensure teachers adopted inferior woke tools to seriously damage the West?

Deliberate or not, the result is a significant proportion of students are, through no fault of their own, effectively illiterate and innumerate. Even worse, they have been taught to hate their countries. Unlike most Western governments, even conservative ones, Donald Trump is unwinding this.

The reason for the dominance of woke thought is, in my view, the decline of religion. Man is a spiritual being who needs to believe. A saying usually attributed to Chesterton explains what happens when spiritual belief disappears, leaving a consequential emptiness. My recollection is, ‘When a man stops believing in God, it is not that he believes in nothing. It’s that he will believe in anything.’ Much of what is advanced in woke ideology defies common sense. An example is the woke inability to define a woman. At its most evil, woke belief becomes child abuse when it authorises medical action, even surgery, on children on the ground of ‘gender dysphoria’.

The recent American presidential election confirms that the opposite of woke, common sense, is more likely to be found among the working class than the elites.

High support for woke ideology among  politicians, at least in Canberra, is readily explained by the fact that only 3.5 per cent were engaged in a working class occupation immediately before their election. In fact, most were already political insiders.

In the absence of believing religious doctrines such as, say, the incarnation or the Trinity, beliefs which do no harm and may well be true, such a politician craves woke formulae, such as ‘global warming’, updated out of embarrassment to ‘climate change’.

When such a politician hears this, something like a light bulb lights up in his head, just as in a Donald Duck cartoon.

This need for woke solutions can extend to converting some sensible tool or measure into a woke dogma.

We see this today in the debate over the commonsense use of tariffs by the Trump administration.

The range of tools available to government, concerning international trade, fall into two categories, free trade or fair trade, which was once called protectionism.

Both can have a legitimate place.

Australia used protectionist tools to build a domestic manufacturing industry, most of which has been unwisely abandoned.

This began when the Whitlam government surprised the nation, and especially the working class, by the equivalent of an executive order for an arbitrary 25-per-cent across-the-board tariff cut.

With free trade and climate catastrophism now both woke dogmas, manufacturing has disappeared on this isolated continent more than in any other OECD country.

Now, woke politicians have mining and farming well in their sights to make us the Argentina of the South Seas.

Meanwhile, the Americans, naively also endorsing free trade as some silver bullet, have increasingly been the victims of sharp protectionist practices even by defeated foes they lavishly endowed with aid to help their recovery. American governments were at their most extraordinarily naive when the brutal mass-murdering Chinese communists were facing collapse. The Black Book of Communism estimates the death toll under Mao Tse-Tung was as high as 65 million.

With Mao’s passing the politburo feared they were doomed. However, there was a beacon of light which could be seen at night even from the so-called ‘Peoples Republic’.The brave would risk their lives in shark-infested seas to reach it. That was Hong Kong, a  successful economy based on free enterprise under the rule of law. Unlike all her other colonies, the British dared not grant it any significant degree of self-government. The politburo would not have tolerated that.

They did, however, calculate that they might survive by partially following Britain’s Hong Kong model and enter the capitalist world. This culminated in Bill Clinton naively letting them into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to have access to the priceless Most Favoured Nation status. The foolish assumption was that the comrades would also see the advantages of becoming democratic.

Clinton should have made their admission subject to a strict condition requiring the application of Hong Kong standards of governance and increasing democracy. As Australians especially know, the politburo broke every rule in the WTO book. It remains a brutal dictatorship.

Meanwhile, greedy firms saw that moving US manufacturing to China would increase profits, even if they were forced to hand over intellectual property on top of what was already stolen. That Chinese workers were underpaid and had few rights, that slave labour was also used and American workers would lose their jobs caused the greedy no concern whatsoever.

This view extended to Australia when a free trade agreement was proposed, notwithstanding the gullibility of dealing with a communist government and assuming that it could be trusted to operate under the WTO rules. Contrary to the written advice of Rick Brown, one of the nation’s best political strategists, demonstrated in the republic referendum, Australia entered into a free trade agreement with the communists.

So when PM Scott Morrison dared propose an effective inquiry into the origins of Covid-19, the agreement was effectively shredded, international trade law flouted and a massive range of unlawful penalties imposed by the comrades, including baseless anti-dumping duties, tariffs and trade bans.

Which brings me to Donald Trump. As historian Tim Stanley notes in the UK Telegraph, his use of tariffs is ‘perfectly rational’. The very fact that he has a plan, Stanley says, ‘beats his critics’. President Trump’s is refreshing and vigorous and one for which he has a mandate. It has every likelihood of success.