A lean and hungry spirit moves its hand through political movements and parties throughout the West. It’s not exactly Left or Right, liberal or conservative.
In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally triumphed in the European elections. She subsequently called President Emmanuel Macon to dissolve parliament. “He has no other choice to dissolve the National Assembly and choosing a voting system that is more democratic and finally representative of the real opinion of the country,” she said. Macron, who fancies himself a Roman god, has bled.
In Italy, the nationalistic League emerged from the rubble of the European elections as the largest political party in that country. Its embattled leader, Matteo Salvini, now struggles against an establishment that promises to hold its ports open for the wailing refuse of Africa. Salvini is down, not out, and his platform resonates with the people.
Some 83 percent of Italian voters see refugees as a threat; 80 percent demand limits to the number of refugees and are against welcoming them with open arms. Salvini has tapped into a yearning for something that Italians feel in their bones, and whatever it is, it is not “democracy,” which somehow always seems to favor the oligarchs.
Across the pond, Nigel Farage was deemed the most dangerous man in Britain after his Brexit Party went from nonexistent to first place on the island. Now Prime Minister Boris Johnson may usurp Farage’s title, as he flirts with bypassing, or ignoring, legislation to prevent a no-deal Brexit if it is forced through parliament by Remainers. Brits are leaving Brussels in the rearview, one way or another, singing “England for the English!” all the way home.
In the Netherlands, Thierry Baudet of the Forum for Democracy affirms the “fundamental truth” that his people “have a right to exist,” to be “proud of their country and defend it.”
Australian evangelical Prime Minister Scott Morrison delivered a stunning upset at the polls, confirming fears of a “Trumpian uprising” in the Land Down Under. The pitchfork wielding plebs are fed up with mass immigration and with the bugmen in Sydney and Melbourne who are only too happy to see the jobs of the unwashed offshored.
In Finland, the anti-immigration, anti-climate action Finns Party is the country’s most popular political movement. “The eternal and unlimited right to always decide freely and independently of all of one’s affairs lies only and solely with the people, which forms a nation separate of others,” reads the Finn’s program.
Denmark’s Social Democrats swept the polls on a platform that combines left-wing economics with immigration restrictionism, going so far as adopting a cap on the number of non-Western immigrants allowed into the country. It is becoming increasingly clear, said Social Democrat leader Mette Frederiksen, “that the price of unregulated globalisation, mass immigration and the free movement of labour is paid for by the lower classes.” Though they have since reneged somewhat on their populist promises, what matters most is that the people of Denmark approved of them.
The Conservative People’s Party of Estonia has thundered into parliament advocating the abolition of same-sex civil unions, professing a pro-life agenda, and fiercely opposing European Union quotas for taking in asylum-seekers.
These elections have placed flesh on the ideological bones of this worldwide phenomenon. “The same patterns of populism,” writes Henry Olsen, “cultural conflict and the movement of well-off and educated center-right voters away from their traditional party are happening around the globe.” Many of these movements and parties feature left-wing economic policies, yet emphasize conservative social values as the solution for a world gone mad. At this Marine Le Pen groped, when she said that the outcome of French polling “confirms the new nationalist-globalist division in France and beyond.”
And they have, to the discomfort of some, seen the rise of what Alexander Hamilton called “energetic executives.”
The Central European University, cried the New York Times, “founded in Hungary after the collapse of the Soviet Union to champion the principles of democracy and free societies, announced on Monday that it was being forced from its campus in Budapest by the increasingly authoritarian government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban.”
That those “principles” had been infected with communist ideology is likely what brought the Gray Lady to tears over the university’s demise.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the de facto leader of Poland, has taken strides to liquidate and rehabilitate Poland’s subversive courts, which he believes have been “subordinated to foreign forces,” and have suffered a “collapse of moral principles” out of line with those of the traditional Polish character. The courts have become a “stronghold of post-Communists,” says Kaczynski, and they are aided by liberal politicos in Poland. Just to prove him right, the “Court of Justice of the European Union” in Luxembourg, demanded a suspension to Polish judicial reforms and the reinstatement of purged communist-era judges. And, when Kaczyński said that capitulating to EU immigration quotas threatened to “completely change our culture and radically lower the level of safety in our country,” the New Yorker pitifully asked, “is Poland retreating from democracy?”
In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro ran on the promise of setting his hand against the Marxist and criminal elements in his country, while openly admiring figures like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. Bolsonaro won by a landslide, carried on the backs of Brazilian patriots disabused of a globalist worldview.
What is it about this zeitgeist that frightens the ruling classes most of all? It is that people are waking up to intolerable political conditions, to see beyond petty party politics, and through the impossible dreams of liberalism that draw us nearer to the totalitarian reality of communism.
People are waking up to see that “democracy” as these people express it merely means whatever the oligarchs and post-Communists say it means. One need not look any further than the truly demonic effort of the American ruling class into gaslighting the people and president into impeachment to see evidence of the same conditions here.