I read JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy years before he was popular. In fact, I bought his book while I was in Shanghai in 2018. It turns out it was the most unlikely of places to buy the book – a country where his forthcoming role as Vice President of the United States is unlikely to garner support for his background. But for me, Hillbilly Elegy was an American version of my own upbringing (sans the drugs), and when Vance was announced as the next Vice-President of the United States, I immediately saw Trump’s reasoning.

If you’ve ever been a Queensland Bogan, a NSW Westie, or even a Canberra Booner who suddenly lands at a university in Canberra, you know exactly what JD Vance was up against when he joined the elite university set. In Cairns, if you don’t say G’day to everyone you walk past, you’re a snob. In Canberra, if you even look at a passerby, you’re a complete weirdo.

The opposite is also true. If you go to university, you are a Canberra type. It is the Australian equivalent of the soutpiel.

As the Wokerati have marched through the institutions, they have branded everything with their own hateful view of the world where they are the so-called ‘healers’, and people who have done the hard yards like Peter Dutton are the ‘haters’. It is such a ridiculous view of the world but that has been our lot for at least the last three years.

JD Vance is the real healer, but he has already been pasted with the ‘hater’ brush.

Yet JD Vance is much closer to those Australians who are disaffected by the current political trend that sees poor people cross-subsidising rich people who then parade their empty virtues as aspirational.

The thing is, Middle Australians are closer to Middle Americans than the Wokerati might think.

Middle Australia may not be the cultural doyens of the Canberra set, but they are hardly the antichrist of Australian culture. People easily forget that those who fought for our country did so out of a spirit of patriotism that the Canberra set find abhorrent.

What the Canberra set does not realise, as the Voice Referendum proved, is that they are completely out of touch with the very people who create the conditions whereby the Canberra set can wax lyrical about all things Woke.

As Woke arrived in Australia from the United States, so Trumpism as its antidote is about to sweep the decks clear of the Wokerati and their nonsensical ideology that undoes the common good through extreme individualism.

As James Fitzjames Stephen argued in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, liberalism that prioritises individualism over the common good is fraught with danger. While I was once a convert to all things John Stuart Mill from his On Liberty, the Wokerati have convinced me that individualism in the extreme can undermine the very fabric of our society, which is manifesting in antisemitism and the weak response from the current Labor government. Let’s not mention the puke-worthy Greens and their disgusting view of the world. We JD Vance types can only take so much nonsense.

JD Vance represents the American equivalent of the Anzac spirit. Willing to put one’s life on the line in service of one’s country. If you want to split hairs about JD Vance’s service, let me draw you back to the words of Samuel Johnson:

‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.’

If you haven’t served in any capacity, then your critiques of those who did are as meaningless as your Woke tropes.

The presidential system in the US allows presidents to serve no more than two four-year terms. This stems from their revolutionary heritage. King George III or his ilk would never replicate the divine right of kings in the New World. Australia has a similar heritage, despite its penchant for constitutional monarchy.

JD Vance also brings to the politics of the free world the family values and work ethic of ‘the middle’. For all their differences, Middle America and Middle Australia are as benignly different as Vance’s grandmother is Mamaw while my grandmother is Ma. Any criticism of his Middle America thesis is a critique of my own. Ensure you refer to the Johnson quote above before you open your trap or chip your nail on your keyboard.

What Trump has done is give hope to those of us who believe in the efficacy of the free world in the opportunity of a decade of prosperity. We want our politics to work in favour of the common good, not in favour of the group at the sacrifice of the individual as in socialism.

As inner-city types or the Canberra set try to one-up Middle Australians, perhaps they might reflect on their own privileges provided by the actions of Middle Australians, past, present, and emerging, who protected this country from external aggressors and enabled the Wokerati to have the freedom to ponder their failed political experiment in the first place.

Thank God for Trump, and for the likely continuation of common sense under his successor, JD Vance.