Australians are fortunate that we have been part of the world’s most benign empires, first the British and then Raymond Aron’s Imperial Republic, the American.

Apart from Joe Lyons’ insistence that, married to a divorcee, Edward VIII was unacceptable as King-Emperor, Australians normally have no role in determining the imperial leadership. This does not stop us from debating the choice of the President and thereby, Dux liberae mundi, leader of the free world.

In fact, most of our commentariat condemned Trump in 2020 and overwhelmingly preferred the compromised, incapable Biden. This was notwithstanding the fact that on the delivery of good policy, Trump had proved to be the greatest leader of the free world since Ronald Reagan.

The choice in 2024 will be crucial, with the US now fighting an internal enemy far more dangerous than any foreign power.

The spectre of communism that Marx and Engels long ago saw haunting Europe has mutated, and dangerously so.

Just as the German High Command’s delivery of Lenin to St. Petersburg in a so-called sealed train inserted, as Churchill put it, a bacillus plague into the Russian Empire, so a new strain of communism is infecting the West.

This is despite the fact that the original strain resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of human beings, the impoverishment and enslavement of over a billion, with, as Mark Levin declares in American Marxism, Marx being ‘wrong about almost everything’.

The mutated bacillus has dropped the failed class struggle for ones based on race, sex, and an invented new categorisation, gender. Drawing on once fashionable eugenics, there is a frantic push to meld increased abortion into infanticide, impacting disproportionately on the poor and the black. Add to that, the discredited theory of man-made global warming, as scientific as the alchemy of turning lead into gold, net zero benefitting Beijing while the West has been seriously weakened by their foolish adoption of that brutal communist-designed response to their Wuhan virus, the lockdown.

While the English-speaking world, unlike the Latin, had a natural immunity to old-style communism, too many have fallen head over heels for this ugly mutation. The famous ‘long march through the institutions’ has resulted in much of education and swathes of the media becoming mere agents for indoctrination, while big business increasingly adopts climate and other policies. There is a distinct resemblance in this to the corporate fascist states of Europe, the model adopted by Beijing after the Maoist disaster.

All this calls for a leader of the free world who can reverse the tide as effectively as Donald Trump did in his first term.

In the meantime, post-mortems continue over the US mid-term elections. As noted here last week, partisan gerrymandering and states still tolerating practices encouraging fraud, such as ballot harvesting, have had their impact. But these alone do not explain the Republicans’ failure to secure an even higher vote in the House and to gain seats in the Senate.

Democrats, mainstream press, and the Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell  blame Trump.

The real villain is the Republican establishment, dominated by Rinos, Republicans in name only. This was explained by one of the great Republican leaders, Senator Ted Cruz, at a meeting of the Republican senators’ conference in the beautiful old Senate chamber where in 1856, Representative Preston Brooks beat slavery abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner almost to death with his cane.

Cruz pointed out that McConnell has acquired dictatorial control of $300 to $400 million of electoral funding, using this to advance those who will support him, usually so-called moderates, while underfunding or even not funding conservatives close to the base, such as Cruz.

Cruz pointed out that hitherto elections for leader were carried by acclamation with no agenda for the term discussed. This time Rick Scott was standing.

Cruz said that over the last two years McConnell, whom polling suggests is the country’s most unpopular Republican, has allowed all the Biden legislative programme to pass with the votes of ‘moderate’ Republicans. Dispirited, too many in the Republican base are tempted not to vote.

Cruz challenged McConnell to name just one thing he would be prepared to fight for in the coming term. Rather than answering, McConnell pointed to each senator recalling  how many millions he gave for his or her election campaign.

Cruz argued that the Republicans had levers over funding which could be used to block or amend the worst Republican measures. Current ones, he said, could include blocking the withdrawal of tax exemptions from churches, schools and charities who do not support gay marriage, the dismissal of unvaccinated soldiers or the funding of 87,000 additional IRS tax staff to harass political enemies.

While McConnell was predictably returned as leader, Cruz believes this challenge is a turning point in making the leadership more accountable and especially to the base.

This was followed by Attorney General Garland’s announcement of the appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate Donald Trump. Garland surprisingly admitted that the two reasons were Trump’s announcement of his candidature in the 2024 presidential election and Biden’s similar indication.

In his recent book, Justice Corrupted: How the Left Weaponized Our Legal System, Senator Cruz argues the Left has corrupted the US legal system. It is as if the US were a communist state where the law is wielded as a weapon, with biased judges and lawless prosecutors intimidating, silencing and even imprisoning Americans who stand in the way of their radical agenda.

Their ‘enemies list’ even includes parents who dare to speak up at school board meetings against the teaching of critical race theory to their children.

The only way this can be reversed is by strong leadership emerging in the 2024 election, which of course requires two things, First, that it be as reasonably free from fraud  as Governor DeSantis assured in Florida and second, that the base has confidence in the Republican party.