Several serious commentators — one being US Professor Victor Hanson — are warning: “Brace yourself for what’s coming in 2024”. Hansen sees bad omens darkening the future. Is he exaggerating? Perhaps not.
One cannot help but notice how badly tempered Americans and Europeans have become. Calm, reasoned discussion of issues is gone; Yelling, emotivism, and ‘othering’ is commonplace; something terrible is coming. A gut feeling, Tucker Carlson says. “There are “angry people who feel like they have no recourse, who don’t think elections are real …”.
What might these commentators be suggesting?
Well, they are explicit on one point: the West has been sinking beneath the waves of its’ Cultural Revolution — the deliberate canceling of virtues and legacies of traditional civilization to be replaced by a cultural hierarchy that upends and inverts the societal paradigm that is close to conquering all.
The unanswered question: Why has Western society been so passive, so unreflectively supportive of the sheering away of its civilizational ethos? This must be the first revolution in which half of society knows and sees well there is a revolution, and the other half seems too distracted or has not noticed. There is no simple answer to this conundrum.
But most just don’t see it; they cannot admit the Revolution’s objective (though it is not hidden) is that these well-to-do members of the middle classes are precisely the ones (and not the elites) that the cultural revolution seeks to displace and to sanction (as redress for historic discrimination and racism). Not for who they are now but for what their ancestors may have been.
General Wrangel (a Tsarist officer and commander) wrote in his memoirs how, after serving during WW1, he came to St Petersburg just at the point that the Bolsheviks were wreaking havoc with the discipline of the Imperial Army’s (‘his army’). There was chaos in the streets, but to the affluent of the city, life continued as if some ‘normal’ could be enjoyed in comfortable co-existence with the revolution out on the streets. He describes attending a cinema with the audience oblivious to the anarchy beyond the theatre.
Flabbergasted, the general hastened from St Petersburg to warn the Tsar of approaching catastrophe. However, on arrival at the Court, Wrangel was shocked to see that 80% of the Romanov women, most of whom he knew, wore a red ribbon. Their ribbons testified to sympathy for the very forces who later would murder these Romanov women.
Today, our élites, too, sport a ribbon — not red, but a Rainbow one.
None of these commentators forecast a Romanov outcome (yet). But they are warning that the civic landscape in America is shifting dramatically fast: One may wake up one morning to the gender horror being imposed on children, to their cultural class being eased out of their jobs, to the realization that it is not ‘correct think’ any longer to laugh at the absurdities of the nomenklatura.
And that dissent leads to persecution: If you join the ‘Party’, you’re exempt; if you’re don’t, you’re on your own.
A nascent counter-revolution, however, is underway, in which a segment of the electorate is driving towards the re-installation of those civilizational and metaphysical principles that gave national sustenance over centuries. They are (rightly or wrongly) not prepared to recant those values, nor to assume ‘guilt’ by submitting to the demands for reparation.
The point here is obvious: The scale, complexity (and viciousness) of the problem is growing. And with it, anger mounts.
‘Black patterns’ are forming. At one level, the US President is senile, and the ‘permanent functionaries’ are terrified: “They thrust a stake through Trump’s heart, but they are afraid that stake could come out any time”, Hanson writes. Should Trump win, vendetta follows, and “their goose is cooked.”
The present Israeli-Palestine conflict is sending further ‘shivers’ up the ‘functionary spine’: Biden may prioritize his loyalty to Israel over Democrats winning the 2024 election. He is hemorrhaging domestic support.
Hanson argues that there is a perception among the Democrats that Trump is now the more formidable figure — he is more justified in his anger due to the injustices he has endured.
Election 2024 becomes a black void. Can a broken US voting system be expected to resolve such deep bitterness? No one knows; many are afraid.
On another plane, the revolutionaries’ diversity and identity politics have resulted in the absolute prioritizing of ideology over practical governance (or even common sense). This cultural transition has signally failed to improve life for the majority but, on the contrary, has spawned system dysfunctionality. Nothing works appropriately anymore; entropy prevails.
Adjunct to the cultural aspect has been the revolutionary ‘transition’ from a real economy — the mainstay source of employment for ‘deplorables’ — to a new high-tech, green, AI-economy to provide for a diversity and social justice-based economic model. Meanwhile, deplorables are relegated to becoming financial outliers.
These cumulative transitions require mammoth money-printing. All was ‘well’ when the project could be financed at zero-cost interest rates, but the scheme’s Achilles’ Heel is inflation and spiking interest rates. And that precisely is what has arrived. The exponential Western debt explosion to fund ‘transitions’ now threatens to take the entire ‘revolution’ into financial crisis and recession.
A crisis in formation — of spiking inflation and crashing living standards — is fermenting a dangerous brew of widespread disenchantment.
Into this simmering brew, the revolutionaries have further injected their ideological opposition to national borders and the embrace of open-door immigration. The US Border is kept open — 9 million immigrants have entered since Biden was in office, and 6 million more are anticipated to enter the US between now and the 2024 election. The Mediterranean border is effectively open, too.
This influx of persons, some of whom are hostile to European culture and ‘white imperialism’ — at a time of severe economic crisis — represents a powder keg that is bound to explode at some point. What happened in Dublin (and Paris last summer) will keep happening again and again. It will devastate EU and European political structures.
““Open borders”: nobody in their right mind would do that,” says Hanson. So then, why do it? What is the intent behind flooding a society with immigrants? In Germany, native-born Germans are now a minority amongst minorities. What exactly is the ‘endgame’ envisaged?
In posing the immigration ‘endgame’ question, many other issues – the pandemic and climate catastrophe (expatiated only by the massive sacrifice of economic standards) – swing into question. Were they all just ‘stimming’ money printing ploys of one sort and another to keep the transition liquified — or is there some darker end-game implicit?
How can the global, multi-polarity bloc manage a West edging towards moral, political, and possibly financial collapse?
The post-war history is not encouraging. It is one of the West attempting to keep itself whole by creating a Manichean enemy around which it can gather and unify.
The US likely will continue to confront China — China presently is the ‘only topic in town’ in DC and is prioritized for its centrifugal potential on a polarized polity. But will, or can, the US follow through with its threats? Probably not.
The other discussion (mainly confined to neo-con circles) is (still) ‘how to weaken Russia in the post-Ukraine reality?’ Russia has overwhelmingly won in Ukraine. The neo-cons likely will find only diminishing traction for a Ukraine-Part Two.
Trump, should he survive and take office, often ‘talks the neocon talk’, but acts to defuse tensions — reflecting the reality that the GOP is fractured: Institutionally neo-con at the ‘upper-level’, but increasingly populist at the grassroots.
Russia now has a ‘Europe problem’ of lingering, unrealistic ‘geo-political’ ambition. Other than war, the December 2021 draft treaties proposed by Russia offer the only peaceful means to finding a modus vivendi between the Heartland and the Rimland.
But will there be any adult in Washington to answer the phone when the time arrives?
[1] Conflicts Forum 11.24.2023-12.1.2023
This column was originally published at Canada Free Press
The views expressed in CCNS member articles are not necessarily the views or positions of the entire CCNS. They are the views of the authors, who are members of the CCNS.
