“These are the just and reasonable demands of a righteous public.”

That was my favourite line in U.S. President Donald Trump’s inaugural speech, delivered minutes after he made the oath of office.

It wasn’t a headline grabber. It wasn’t up there with “American carnage,” “totally unstoppable” or his calls for America-first policies.

But what that line did was get to the heart of what ails the Western political world so sorely today and what has caused the institutional rot that is now beginning to be rejected.

The demands Trump was referring to were people’s wishes to live in safety, to have good schools for their kids, and for public services they can rely on. This is nothing new and Trump’s predecessors never disputed their importance.

What is disputed though, by a growing consensus of elitists, is that it’s the people of a country or city who get to decide what’s good for them. And that their requests are just and reasonable precisely because they originate from them and from no one else.

One big example right now is the climate change shakedown currently underway that’s wasting so much money and causing so much harm. It’s a darling of an issue for the political establishment. For many of them, it seems to be their top priority. Yet the regular people don’t care about it a whit.

When electors are asked about their top concerns issue by issue, climate concerns usually rank near the bottom.

This hasn’t stopped the political class from signing unrealistic agreements, raising taxes and fees on the little guy, and forking over billions of dollars to their preferred corporations to experiment with green schemes.

For anyone who’s been struggling to understand just what the term “elites” actually describes, this tells you everything. The elitist mindset is first and foremost the idea that you know better than others, not just how you should live your life, but how they should live theirs and what their priorities should be — even when they’ve explicitly told you otherwise.

There is a crisis of confidence in governance, make no mistake about it. But it’s not caused by Trump. It’s caused by decades of institutional decay in which the political class focused more on side projects and shiny baubles while core services rotted.

This hit home for me in a very tangible way five years ago when I covered a sinkhole opening up on an Ottawa highway. It swallowed a car, but thankfully the man driving home from work to see his young daughter escaped unharmed. The chattering classes simply turned it into a social media meme and had a good laugh about it, not comprehending they were actually watching a scenario emblematic of the decline of Western civilization.

While the city’s politicians were busy debating safe injection sites and additional bike lanes, primary infrastructure all over the city, some of which was installed more than 100 years ago, was decaying and putting people’s lives at risk due to years of neglect. The nation’s capital was literally rotting from the inside out. It’s just not right.

Another related problem that Trump will hopefully take an axe to is the moral relativism that has so permeated Western countries. It was a treat to hear Trump say “we defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own,” if only because of how it would have made the loony left squirm.

These days they act as if anything other than total open borders is a form of hate speech, as if a country can even still be a country if it doesn’t have some form of rules as to who is and isn’t a citizen and how the citizenship process is smoothly governed.

If the establishment doesn’t like the fact that it’s Trump who’s been brought in to wind down their agenda, then they only have themselves to blame.

Not only do the people’s demands tend to be reasonable and just, they’re also usually moderate, clear cut and simple. It really shouldn’t have been that hard to govern with the people’s wishes in mind.

But instead the establishment screwed it up big time.

afurey@postmedia.com