‘We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,’ venture capitalist and PayPal founder Peter Thiel famously quipped.

‘We had this multi-faceted, multi-dimension progress in the first half of the 20th Century … rockets, aerospace, the green revolution and agriculture and computers and new medicines.’

Since then, ‘there has been this generalised sense of stagnation’.

Maybe Thiel spoke too soon.

In the lead-up to the October election, President Trump has put forward what is undoubtedly one of the most unique policy agendas in recent memory.

And though it drew derisive scoffs and tut-tuts from the usual dorks, to anyone looking down the barrel of yet another boring-as-sin Australian ‘election about nothing – and three-ish decades of continued decline – Trump’s energetic vision for America is truly enviable.

It’s called Agenda47, and its policies range from – literally – flying cars, to entirely new cities, to, ahem, mass deportations.

Think less techno-optimism and more techno-nationalism.

And though this may sound ridiculous, have a dig into it and his other policies, and the vision the document proposes offers a picture of something unseen in politics anywhere.

These are policies that recognise the stagnation and decline, and offer a way out.

‘Just as the United States led the automotive revolution in the last century, I want to ensure that America, not China, leads this revolution in air mobility,’ Trump announced.

‘These breakthroughs can transform commerce, bring a giant infusion of wealth into rural America, and connect families and our country in new ways.’

In a moment where the peak of progress is hormone replacement therapy and getting stabbed on the train, it’s nice to be offered a different vision of the future. One that isn’t anchored around some corrupted form of leftist ‘social equality’, but instead real technological pioneering that changes lives for the better.

Freedom Cities In My Backyard

And where will you go, American man, in your shining flying car in the night? To the new ‘Freedom Cities’, of course.

‘We’ll actually build new cities in our country again… These Freedom Cities will reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a new shot at home ownership and in fact, the American Dream.’

YIMBoids should take note, the new paradigm is here. Despite classing themselves as the forward-thinking ‘progressives’ in the housing debate, policies like this show them up for what they often are: slow, boring, shallow-minded, status-quo enjoyers. Utterly devoid of originality and creativity, they prefer to fetishise a sort of Abe’s Oddworld Existence, built around things like light rail and ‘rezoning’ – things which simply facilitate and prolong decline. The right has reclaimed progress – rather than tinker around the decaying edges of a dying city, we will build new ones entirely, it says.

And if flying cars and freedom cities aren’t your thing, the document has plenty of serious policy red meat that also paint a picture of a completely renewed America. It’s promising: Trump learned from his first term, and won’t be swamped by the bureaucratic state again.

Mass firings, mass deportations

This includes a document called, somewhat ominously, ‘Schedule F’, which legislatively lays out the red carpet for the firing of up to 50,000 civil servants, replacing them with ‘political appointees’.

‘Get F’d!’, the Murdoch-press headlines will read. This move is obviously about smashing the Deep State and replacing it with the Trump State. In times of chaos – if chaos is indeed what the USA is looking at – then executive power is paramount in order to move nimbly, to not succumb to sclerosis and decay, to put out fires, and to leap forward, not fall. This is step one on how to get there.

Another red hot item on the list is deportations. While Biden is bringing in more migrants than any other time in America’s history (roughly 2.5 million ‘migrant encounters’ at the southern border last year alone) Trump’s plan is to send ‘record numbers’ right back.

‘To help speed mass deportations, Mr Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings,’ the New York Times reported.

And to further facilitate this process of mass deportation of illegal migrants, there’s talk of Trump deploying Troops at the southern border. The precedent is very simple. In the same way that executive power is utilised in times of national emergency, so too is the military – and this is without doubt an emergency: consider the continued killings, crime sprees, and enormous costs resulting from the latest migrant surge. Troops at the border are by no means an unusual prospect to anybody who is normal and has balanced hormones.

Of course, the media has responded with the usual reaction to these proposals, with Rolling Stone calling the agenda ‘draconian’, and the New Yorker describing them as ‘unhinged’.

But that doesn’t matter to Trump, because Republican voters have declared him the best possible person to lead their party into the election, gifting him incredibly high polling, sold-out events, and now the Republican nomination.

Trump Train is now high speed and high tech, and now also air-mobile. Bettered with battle scars of a fairly disappointing first term, driven forward by a sense of do-or-die, and complete with a vision for a new America; we’re back.

What about a New Australia?

Most interesting of all is how Agenda47 represents a break from conservatism. No more ‘standing athwart history yelling stop!’ This is the right claiming back ‘progress’ as their own, something Australia desperately needs.

Contrast this with ‘Policy Traditionalism’: the belief that people are more or less quite content with the status quo and only require minor policy tweaks for things to be perfect. This has effectively been the leading style of politics since Menzies and the Labor Party.

‘This is where I have tried to position NSW One Nation, around a belief that Australian public policy reached a high-water mark of effectiveness during the Hawke-Keating-Howard-Costello era. There was never any need for change.

‘For Traditionalists, our watchword is evidence: to reject the Left’s agenda based on its observable adverse impacts. Why, for instance, would Australia destroy its resource and manufacturing industries and millions of jobs when the elimination of our carbon emissions cannot have any measurable impact on global surface temperatures?’

Wrote the former leader of One Nation NSW, with the party vote going on to drop multiple percentage points. Major parties, also practising policy traditionalism in their own way, continue to slide. As one friend tells me, ‘The defining thing to remember now is not that they want to vote for this party or that, they don’t want to vote for either party.’

Policy traditionalism is in effect the politics of nostalgia. It’s for an older, saner, more cohesive and prosperous era. Agenda47 is the right-wing politics of the moment: decline, but the future possibilities. While Labor and Liberal take turns in offering Australians ‘A Better Future’, each party has paradoxically presided over continued a worsening country: morally, economically (in a real sense), and creatively. Neither have accepted that the country is in decay, and so neither is willing to ask and answer the hard questions to fix things.

Our politics is instead a sickening commitment to the same-old, a deadening disgust that strikes at the gut of anyone with any civilisational ambition who has cast eyes on stagnant cities and rapidly worsening suburbs. You can see it everywhere: in our TV presenters, our roads, our god awful ‘arts’ … the decline is everywhere and is inescapable. It seeps into family life, friendships, and health.

But it isn’t absolute or forever. It’s a decision. A lead blanket placed on life and growth.

Australia 2024, to Australia 2050

Ask yourself, what do you want Australia to look like in 5 years, 10 years, 50 years?

If I were the Coalition – or a new party – I would stop talking about taxes, negative gearing, and other sleeping pills for a moment.

I would instead talk about the future. The Labor Party may want a Big Australia. What is the alternative vision for that? What does a Brilliant Australia look like? What does a ‘Smart Nationalist’ country look like?

What about a pause on incoming migration? What about completely re-gearing our economy away from free trade, and mass migration and back to manufacturing? What about nuclear power? What about irrigating the interior? What about nationalising Qantas? Turning Australia into the hyper-productive bread basket and efficient mineral-rich miner state of the south? Speed trains between satellite towns and cities? We have one of the longest coastlines in the world, why not a few decentralised seaside and airport suburbs here and there, accessible by boats, small planes, and flying cars?

Crazy? Sure. But the alternative is grim decline, downward mobility, and endless unnecessary debate about trivial, boring, ineffectual matters. Complacency breeds stagnation, and stagnation breeds decay.

The Risk

Every change will come with incredible risk. The Liberal’s Shadow Minister Angus Taylor said last week that without immigration Australia would be in a recession, and he’s right. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. The Current Thing is failing, something new is needed, and risks must be taken, otherwise this all ends.

As I tweeted:

Australia doesn’t just need to dramatically cut immigration, it needs to completely re-gear its economy so that it never needs mass immigration again.

It’s a ridiculous, destructive policy that enriches the few, benefits the political left, and hurts literally everybody else.

The big fight won’t be cutting immigration but changing the country to be more self-reliant. This means more nationalisation, more manufacturing and bigger creative bets, like we used to.

A grand alternative vision for Australia is needed.

We once had Premiers who wanted to build space programs in North Queensland. Let’s get back to that. Call it mad, but at least it’s more than just more of the same. Australia is in a sclerotic state and the end is in sight – unless things change.

Australia, take a note out of the page of Trump’s Agenda47, and start planning Australia 2050.

Read more at www.queenslandia.com

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