The brilliant British political commentator Melanie Phillips has posted a piece at her website in which she declares that the British "Conservative party is in the process of destroying any electorally viable alternative to itself... because it has turned itself into the champion of the things that are of overwhelming importance to the British working class." The same thing, she concludes, is happening in America under President Donald Trump.

Those things that are of overwhelming importance there and in the U.S. are "are stopping mass and unsustainable rates of immigration, restoring control over national self-government and working to make Britain once again a prosperous global trading nation, restoring in the process patriotic pride in national identity and in values such people recognise, identify with and share." The left, or Labour Party, "currently stands for the opposite of all this. It is therefore unelectable whoever becomes its leader, because it is dominated by metropolitan progressive universalists who despise the (always) conservatively-minded working class."

Gee, that sounds familiar here too. She continues:

In the US, President Trump is doing exactly the same in attracting the support of millions of working-class Americans. He’s done this by promising to restore jobs and defend the US against radical Islamism, thus giving ordinary Americans hope again in the future and in the idea that their country itself has a recognisable future.

Far from his leftist caricature as another Mussolini in the making, he is actually restoring constitutionality and the rule of law – in contrast to the Obama administration which undermined both. Trump is enforcing the law against illegal immigrants, for example; and when the courts made their dubious rulings against his own admittedly dubious order suspending immigration from states designated as a danger to US security, he didn’t ignore the courts but tore up his order and drafted a new bill.

Amongst the public, people are getting the measure of this most unusual President and are coming to understand the distinction between his style and substance. While his loose-lipped way of speaking is far from ideal, because language matters and the US President should be careful to be accurate in what he says, people understand what he actually means – which by and large they find to be sensible and true. They discount the careless or coarse way he talks because that’s the way many of them talk too. What matters to them is not what he sounds like but what he actually does.

As we know, those who voted for both Trump and Brexit were repudiating the progressive consensus. The continuing reaction by those progressives not only confirms everything these who voted for Trump and Brexit thought. It is likely also to drive into their camp many who didn’t vote Trump or Brexit or who have serious reservations about either or both.

Whatever their concerns, they are looking now in horror at the opposition and recoiling from their sheer irrationality, obsessive hatred and contempt for democracy and the people. They understand that those shrieking daily that both Brexit and Trump are about to usher in a dark age of tyranny embody in themselves the greatest threat to freedom, reason and decency.

She concludes with this:

The Washington Post has put up on its masthead just below the title the rubric “Democracy dies in darkness”. A newspaper that not only defines its entire existence in opposition to the democratically elected US President but misrepresents all available evidence to state falsely that he is destroying democracy is no longer to be taken seriously as a newspaper.

The left doesn’t realise it but it is staring at its own electoral demise.

Read the rest here.