Today I will happily cast a vote for Donald Trump. According to the conventional narrative in Europe, that means I must be racist, isolationist, an idiot or all three, right?
Wrong. Trump has won me over with a campaign focused on breaking away from the corruption and incompetence that has characterised so much of my country's leadership over the past 20 years. He has built a remarkable coalition for change, consisting of everyday Republican voters and working-class Americans in industrial regions where Democrats have usually been more successful. He is arguably the closest thing to a One Nation conservative that US politics has seen in a generation. That's why tens of millions of Americans will be voting for him.
There is an obvious parallel to recent British politics. Voters who supported leaving the EU were not Right-wing extremists, they were ordinary people who wanted to reclaim control of their lives. America also has globalist bureaucrats to contend with - not in Brussels but in Washington, DC. Voting for Trump is a way of reasserting America's national interests against a self-centred elite that dreams of reshaping the world in its own image, as over trade deals negotiated in secret by civil servants.
Trump will reopen questions that the establishment considers closed. Voters would like stricter enforcement of the laws against illegal immigration. This policy is favoured by citizens of all ethnic backgrounds, including Hispanics; but not by the Washington technocrats, who think less of public order than what immigration contributes to the bottom line of big businesses.
Likewise on war and peace: Americans are disgusted by the inept use of military force over the past two presidential administrations, which have yielded only chaos and gains for Islamist extremism. Hillary Clinton has the worst record of any US politician: she voted for George W Bush's Iraq war as a senator and as secretary of state was the driving power behind Obama's intervention in Libya.
Trump is no isolationist. He is not looking to abrogate treaties with Japan or America's Nato allies. But he has raised a question that the public has long been asking, namely, whether America carries too much of the burden for defending Europe and East Asia. Since the Cold War, the self-declared foreign policy experts have made so many catastrophic mistakes - involving themselves in endless Middle East conflicts while simultaneously antagonising Russia and depending on China to underwrite our debt - that they have forfeited the public's trust. It's no paradox to say Trump may strengthen the old alliances by forcing them to mend their ways and justify themselves anew.
British voters have had a taste of how judges can take it upon themselves to void the will of the people. The US Supreme Court and lower judges have laid down the law on many questions that should properly be left to the people and their elected representatives, particularly in matters related to same-sex marriage - which became law throughout the US by a Supreme Court decision. Trump is no opponent of homosexual rights: he made history at the Republican convention this year by featuring a speaker, the entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who said, "I am proud to be gay".Trump opposes judicial activism, however, and has promised to appoint to the Supreme Court justices who will stick to interpreting the constitution rather than rewriting it.
The theme of all Trump's positions has been to give the public back its voice in the nation's most important decisions. Yet instead of addressing his campaign in these terms, his political and media opponents target his personal failings, exaggerate his brash and politically incorrect tendencies, to paint him as a bigot and a lunatic. It has worked, but only up to a point. British voters were also called bigots and irresponsible naifs for supporting Brexit. When they vote today, Americans may well feel that taking back responsibility for their own lives and laws is worth that risk. That's certainly the conclusion I've reached. On the big questions, Trump is right. I'm with him.
Daniel McCarthy is editor of The American Conservative.
Telegraph, London
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