by DAVID STROM
If you look at the elections going on in the West, you may notice a pattern.
It’s not liberals or conservatives winning so much as parties out of power beating those who are clearly members of the ruling Establishment.
Now, it’s true that, for the most part, the left or center-left has been holding power in most places, so it looks like conservatives are ascendant, but things aren’t quite so cut-and-dried–most notably in the United Kingdom, where the nominally conservative party is about to get trounced.
What seems to be going on is a universal dissatisfaction with how the ruling elite have been running things, and with good reason. Whether it is conservatives, liberals, or “moderates,” the ruling elite has been committed to policies that have eroded the power of individuals and vastly increased the power of the state.
Moreover, Western governments have made abundantly clear that their commitment has been to a form of transnationalism that has grown increasingly unpopular. As borders have opened up throughout the West, citizens have grown restless as crime has skyrocketed, economic growth has slowed, and national cultures have been diluted.
Trump’s election in 2016 was the first and most obvious example of a trend that is now cresting, and his loss in 2020 by a razor-thin and disputed margin was driven at least partially by the chaos caused by pandemic policies and the riots of 2020. As we can see from the polls showing people’s retrospective regret for electing Biden, people liked Trump’s policies prior to 2020 and long for a return to the status quo ante 2020.
The political upheaval in Europe is an expression of the same discontent with the internationalist elites, as well as the massive political shifts in El Salvador and Argentina.
What is driving all this is a populist revolt against an elite that has been sacrificing ordinary citizens in favor of transnationalism–a bureaucratic order that ignores the needs and desires of citizens in favor of a bland, technocratic universalism that substitutes statist welfare policies for citizen-driven choice.
Rule by “experts,” in other words.
I am sympathetic to concerns about populism, which can take very ugly turns. But, to be honest, whatever concerns one has with populism should apply moreso to the tactics used by the transnationalists.
After all, transnationalists use left-wing rioters as enforcers with regularity. Almost all the political violence we see comes from the Left these days, and it is tolerated or even encouraged by the Establishment that stokes fears of an emergent fascism that never seems to emerge.
If you are worried that populism will put pitchforks into the hands of peasants marching on the streets to tar and feather the leaders of a country, perhaps you should worry more about the communists on the streets demanding that government get bigger and borders be opened more.
The WEF, the UN and the CFR totally and tyrannical Globalists Socialists the reason for all this whole Global Warming/Climate Change scam