Posted on 12/14/2018 7:49:32 AM PST by Kaslin
Is it coincidence or contagion, this malady that seems to have suddenly induced paralysis in the leading nations of the West?
With lawyer-fixer Michael Cohen's confession that he colluded with Donald Trump in making hush money payoffs to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, America's stage is set for a play that will run two years.
As Democrats test the waters for a presidential run by savaging Trump, the establishment Trump detests and defeated in 2016 will use every weapon in its considerable arsenal to break and bring him down, as it did half a century ago to Richard Nixon.
By spring 2019, Americans will be unable to escape the vitriol on cable and social media. And the outside world will see America again as a house divided. Our politics will be even more poisonous than now, and it is not easy to see what would bring our warring tribes together again.
Consider, then, the situation of our old ally Great Britain.
Prime Minister Theresa May was just forced to pledge that she would not lead her party in the next election -- to survive a no-confidence vote in Parliament. A third of all Tory members voted to throw her out.
The no-confidence vote was called after May had to cancel a vote on the Brexit plan she had negotiated with the EU, when it was evident that a coalition of Tories and Labor would vote to kill her plan.
May has been humiliated. Yet her humiliation solves nothing. The clock is running toward a March deadline for concluding a Brexit deal. And no plan acceptable to both Parliament and the EU is on the table.
The possibility exists that Britain could simply crash out of the EU, causing severe economic damage to both.
Realizing this, Brussels has left the door open if Britain should vote in a second referendum to remain in the EU. But calling and carrying out that referendum would be a betrayal of the 52 percent of the British people that voted to restore full national independence.
While London wanted to stay in the EU in 2016, England voted to leave. Northern Ireland wanted to stay, as did Scotland, though 45 percent of Scots had earlier voted to declare their own independence from Great Britain.
In France, after four Saturdays of anarchy, arson, looting and vandalism of her national monuments, President Emmanuel Macron capitulated to the rioters. He withdrew the fuel tax that triggered the uprisings. He agreed to have his government add $113 a month to those earning the minimum wage, and to let workers get overtime pay and Christmas bonuses tax-free, and to revoke higher social charges on modest pensions.
The cost of Macron's retreat is estimated at $11 billion, 0.4 percent of France's GDP. Saturday will tell us if his appeasement bought peace.
The political collapse of Macron has been extraordinary.
In 2017, he won almost two-thirds of the national vote, and his La Republique en Marche! won an absolute majority of the National Assembly.
Today, one poll puts Macron's approval at 21 percent. The idea that he can replace Angela Merkel as the recognized leader of the EU seems ridiculous.
As for Merkel herself, hailed as leader of the West in the time of Trump, her party and coalition lost so much support in the recent election that she stepped down as leader of the CDU and pledged not to run for another term as chancellor.
Europe's fourth-largest economy, Italy, is now led by a coalition of the populist-left Five Star Movement and populist-right Lega party. The coalition seeks greater freedom on spending than Brussels is willing to allow, and a halt to migration from across the Med.
With Poland and Hungary at odds with Brussels over alterations in their political systems, the EU has never seemed less united.
What are the underlying causes of these 21st-century crises of Western democracies?
Certainly, globalization, with its creation of ties among transnational elites at the expense of nation-states and their indigenous peoples is one. Capitals -- Washington, London, Paris, Berlin -- seem ever more distant from the countries they rule.
Then there is demography. The native-born of almost all Western nations are aging, shrinking and dying. Death rates exceed birth rates. While peoples of the West are living longer, they are producing fewer children to replace them.
At the same time, Western elites have welcomed foreign workers and left borders unsecured against mass migration. And the people coming in, almost all now from the Third World, are not assimilating as the children of 19th- and 20th-century European immigrants to the USA had largely done by 1960.
A consequence and related cause is the rise of tribalism, or ethno-nationalism, the search for identity and community with one's own. Loyalties to family, tribe, neighborhood, culture and country appear paramount, rising above intellectual and political alignments.
The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing, said Pascal. And so it does.
Thomas Sowell once pointed out that liberals dominate government and academia because those are two institutions where you can thrive even if you suck at doing anything right.
A printed, fiat, unbacked currency - creating massive debt - courtesy of the Federal Reserve
That debt supports every leftist ideologue and social-engineer in academic, government, business and elsewhere.
secular humanism + marxism + postmodernism = collectivism, subjectivism, relativism, and emotionalism which leads to ends justify the means and might makes right, which leads to force, violations of natural rights, and destruction.
You’re probably correct.
If you read Rudyard Kipling’s “Gods of the Copybook Headings”, published in 1919, it’s fairly obvious something was going horribly wrong, even without the war.
A house divided? More like a house where the crazy uncle in the basement gets loose. Let’s hope the hysterical over-reach that the Dems are about to unleash will be their undoing in 2020.
If it’s so intellectual how come it’s all falling apart (and rightfully so).
Maybe they are all a bunch of high brow, ill-educated, self absorbed idiots.
If you look more closely--for example the haunting line about the lights going out in Rome, you will note that the poem is not intended to be time specific. It addresses the endlessly repeated process of people following the marketers of slogan & fantasy. Of course 20th Century egalitarian socialist movements would be an example of that recurring phenomenon, of people following the "Gods of the Market."
Socialism
Upon my arrival in the United States the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more I perceived the great political consequences resulting from this new state of things.
In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.
Religion in America...must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of it. Indeed, it is in this same point of view that the inhabitants of the United States themselves look upon religious belief.
I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere faith in their religion -- for who can search the human heart? But I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or a party, but it belongs to the whole nation and to every rank of society.
In the United States, the sovereign authority is religious...there is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America, and there can be no greater proof of its utility and of its conformity to human nature than that its influence is powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth.
In the United States, the influence of religion is not confined to the manners, but it extends to the intelligence of the people...
Christianity, therefore, reigns without obstacle, by universal consent...
I sought for the key to the greatness and genius of America in her harbors...; in her fertile fields and boundless forests; in her rich mines and vast world commerce; in her public school system and institutions of learning. I sought for it in her democratic Congress and in her matchless Constitution.
Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power.
America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.
The safeguard of morality is religion, and morality is the best security of law as well as the surest pledge of freedom.
The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other
Christianity is the companion of liberty in all its conflicts -- the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its claims.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The Great CHOICE.
Killing about 3,300 of your most innocent children a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, for over fourty years, will do that.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man—
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began
...
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter
return!
The article misses who actually composes the leadership of the West. The European west is done. It was over ages ago. The mantle has been picked up by the United States, but is joined by other states such as Japan and South Korea. Both nations, while not “Western” are established functioning Western style states, with strong nationalism, purpose, and mostly functioning economies. We might add the emerging states of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, who have strong national identity.
Yes, he really did nail it. Reality catches up with wishful thinking, every time.
“By spring 2019, Americans will be unable to escape the vitriol on cable and social media.”
Actually we can, we can turn it off. My tv hardly ever comes on and when it does is on golf.
Perhaps, it’s affluence.
Affluenza.
The West slit its own throat the moment women began to vote.
People the world over took to praising the virtues of Democracy as a formal system and didn’t tend to their own development in virtue — or at least, people took the question of virtue off the table with windbaggery about Our Rights while they attended to their development in Lord-only-knows-what self-indulgent junk.
Thanks for pinging me to this. It’s an excellent and well-crafted piece.
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