The Eurozone is sliding into recession, again. France is on fire, again. Italy is in open revolt and nationalist populism is rapidly gaining ground across the entire Western world. We cower behind concrete as we wait for the inevitable Islamist attack while apologists for religious genocide walk among us unchallenged, and in many cases proactively protected by the establishment. In response to these crises of their own creation, our democratically elected governments conspire to stifle free speech and police unfashionable opinions in the name of security; the oldest Faustian bargain known to civic society.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. We were promised that a post-national world would usher in greater peace, prosperity and security for all. Instead we are reaping a bitter harvest of fragmentation and frustration first sowed by the post-Cold War consensus of neo-liberalism, a consensus which was foolproof, evidence-based and unassailable…right up until the moment it was properly tested in the real world.
To put it another way, our political, academic and media elites held certain truths to be self-evident without really thinking them through. Or even worse, they did think them through and pressed ahead anyway, knowing that the real-world burden of their lofty aspirations would be borne by those least able to resist the post-national reality they were never consulted about. That idea may sound a bit like a conspiracy theory, but it would help to explain the otherwise mystifying decades of hostility and organised vilification of all who dared to question whether borderless travel, mass migration, national outsourcing and state-sponsored multiculturalism are in fact unalloyed benefits. After all, if the establishment was so confident in the robustness of its ideas, why would it actively seek to destroy those who questioned the its orthodoxy?
Unfortunately for the average citizenry of the West, the Globalist consensus was based largely on the dubious premise that post-national authority is inherently virtuous, although the source of that virtue was never really explained. To the global elite, the nation state, often developed through centuries of turmoil and bloodshed, is a hindrance to progress; something to be bypassed with increasingly esoteric mechanisms of control and concealment. EU Withdrawal Agreement, I’m looking at you!
The thing that’s been most disappointing, if not downright disturbing about the whole Globalist experiment has been the eager collaboration of our elected officials in eroding the legal and cultural protections afforded to their own constituents by the settled, sovereign nation.
Rather than raising the standard of living for all, the Globalist agenda has enriched and emboldened a few unrepresentative groups while neutering the middle class, keeping a tight lid on workers’ wages and making us all less safe and less secure. This in turn gives state officials the perfect excuse for more authoritarianism as they try to keep a lid on the simmering tensions their very own policies have brought into being. Both the socialists and the nationalists have some valid points to make about this current state of affairs, which is why they are becoming more and more popular.
The Globalist dream of a borderless world for things, people and cultures is now revealed as a skyscraper built on sand, and I think its architects have always sensed the truth deep down. Their smoke and mirrors routine would perhaps be slightly more forgivable if such shady arrangements had delivered some degree of prosperity and security for the average citizen. Of course, if it had actually done any of that, the tsunami of nationalist populism currently sweeping through the Western world would simply have no reason to exist.
Now, predictably, the establishment is lashing out at its own citizens as they begin to realise just how much they’ve surrendered in exchange for a few worthless trinkets like visa-free travel and cheaper mobile roaming. As the failure of our elites is finally exposed, they are defaulting to a time-honoured pattern of repression, censorship and victim blaming. In their eyes, it’s our fault for not accepting our diminished status and bending the knee to a new post-national aristocracy
Here in the UK, we can see the Globalists’ tone-deaf response to this existential malaise as a few neo-liberal defectors attempt to coalesce around a rapidly shrinking voting bloc. I don’t know if they’re aware of the deep-seated anger which is driving the current political paradigm shift, but simply re-branding a few shallow elitist ideas will not stop the sands from shifting beneath them. In fact it will probably hasten their political demise.
Some novel and powerful pieces have been smuggled into the establishment’s rigged game, and for the first time in many decades our self-appointed betters really don’t know what to do.
They could have avoided all of this, but their fates have been sealed by their own hubris.
