It is hard to describe the clueless hubris exhibited by the smug, self-satisfied G7 “club” while they played grab-ass for photo-ops in the Cornish sands of Carbis Bay, even as the world they ravaged is roiled with deprivation, dislocation, and angst; and a tsunami of populist contempt rises and races toward them.
The Babylon Bee most succinctly identified the G7’s political dimension—“People Who Ruined World’s Economies Gather To Discuss How To Fix World’s Economies.” Yet, recognizing this meeting’s historic import, Ricochet editor-in-chief and “Undisputed King of Stuff” Jon Gabriel tried valiantly to more fully capture this twilight of the elite in his piece, “Repeating Dead Rituals from a Former Age”:
In 1910, nine European sovereigns posed for a final ‘family photo’ before the Great War. They gathered for the funeral of King Edward VII, appropriately enough. Within ten years, the majority had lost power via abdication, assassination, revolution, or death . . . Pantomimes like this week’s G7 Summit reveal an enervated order that doesn’t wield power so much as it clings to it.
These nine European sovereigns in 1910 were the heads of state in elitist, stratified societies. Ultimately, their cupidity helped spark the unprecedented butchery of World War I. Consequently, their regimes were deposed; and the ideological foundation of their authority was held by their peoples to be an illegitimate basis for ruling.
After its execrable, barbaric experiments in fascism and Communism and a second world war, Europe ultimately followed the example of the American Revolution: the true sovereign power of a nation was acknowledged to stem from its people with their consent. Those monarchs who remained were relegated to figureheads, tourist attractions, and tabloid fodder.
Yet is the consent of the governed the legitimacy upon which these G7 leaders rest? And, if so, will it be swept away with them as the Undisputed King of Stuff cautions:
The danger ahead is that, as [Martin] Gurri writes, ‘You can condemn politicians only for so long before you must reject the legitimacy of the system that produced them.’ Everyone senses a change coming and pray it’s nothing like what swept away the world of 1910.
The legitimacy upon which these G7 leaders have based their rule increasingly is not upon the consent of the governed, but upon the coercion of the governed through the powers of the administrative state, multinational corporate actors, and Big Tech. This is elitism and it’s why these leaders fear its antithesis—populism—even to the point of endeavoring to slander and libel it as “white supremacy” and prosecute it as “domestic terrorism.”
If one listens carefully, these G7 elitists echo the rationale for ruling used by the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP leaders have long held that history has rightfully placed them in totalitarian control of their population; and that they must protect their nation’s prosperity and security from liberty, which they equate with democratic disorder.
How does this differ from the G7’s messaging—both collectively and individually—on a host of issues, ranging from the pandemic’s lockdowns to outsourcing jobs to appeasing tyrannical Iran and genocidal Communist China? Take, for instance, climate change. “Climate deniers” are on the wrong side of history; only the elites and their “experts” can recognize, decide, and prescribe the issues and crises; the world will end in disorder and death unless the elites are ceded the people’s liberty; and there are no quantifiable metrics—nor promises—by which the people will again be free.
In both instances the people’s liberty is deemed a danger to the greater good.
The presumptions of the G7 leaders would revert political legitimacy from the people’s God-given right to liberty back to privileges and favors granted by the benevolent hand of the elite. It is a postmodernist riff upon the divine right of kings—albeit this time with an amalgam of oligarchs, bureaucrats, and “experts” running the show for their own benefit. Despite their paeans to their professed noble motives, all they offer is fear—namely, the end of the world from some impending apocalypse: e.g. COVID-19, climate change, white supremacy. (The elitists’ demand to “do what we want or the world will end,” would sound silly if the stakes weren’t so great.)
Thus, in rejecting these “leaders” who cling bitterly to power, the public will be rejecting an elitist system that has fearmongered, lied, censored, coerced, and emotionally extorted them. In the United States, this will constitute a popular restoration of our revolutionary principles. In Europe, it will constitute the full realization of the revolutionary promise of 1848 and 1989.
It will be arduous, but we should remain undaunted: from the twilight of the elites a new dawn of freedom is rising.