THE 21ST CENTURY IS REMINDING US OF SOME
uncomfortable truths. Abroad, recent controversies over the rise
of Chinese mercantilism, the specter of Iranian and North Korean
nuclear weapons, tensions in the European Union, the calcified
Palestinian question, mass migrations, and the resurgence of
Islamic terrorism all offer a number of lessons. At home, just as
instructive is the strange juxtaposition between Obama’s suave
progressivism and Trump’s coarse conservatism. Here are 10
takeaways from our current controversies.
PARADOX 1: The prosperity of consumer capitalism does not necessarily
lead to constitutional government. China’s haphazard embrace
of quasi-market capitalism simply made Beijing richer, more
regionally aggressive, and more internally authoritarian once
the state allowed its elite and those who were well-connected
to make all the money they wanted. In the long term, more
economic growth may enhance greater personal freedom, but
there likely must be preexisting conditions or ongoing political
reforms to benefit from economic liberalization.
PARADOX 2: Once a nuclear power doesn’t always mean a nuclear
power. Both South Africa and Ukraine likely possessed nuclear
weapons and, after cost-benefit analyses, gave them up or
at least cancelled their proliferation efforts. North Korea may
well be reduced to the Stone Age by international boycotts
and embargoes, but it will likely eventually give up its nuclear
ballistic missiles. Most anti-Western nuclear and wannabe
nuclear regimes require patrons that can be leveraged, or have
economies that are vulnerable, or need money to keep volatile
populations quiet. What was lacking in the past was not the
ability, but the Western will, to stop North Korea from gaining
nuclear ballistic missiles. The same calculus is true of the nuclear
aspirations of Iran. It, too, blusters and threatens–not from a
position of strength, but from the fear that it is economically
vulnerable; that its proliferation patrons Russia, China, or North
Korea can be coerced into not extending technological aid;
and that it is plagued by a restive population. Both Iran and
North Korea have no desire to see pro-Western Egypt, Japan,
Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and Taiwan go nuclear to achieve
regional deterrence.
PARADOX 3: European Union has realized that its efforts to transform
a successful common market and effective free trade and travel
zone into a continental pan-European national state are in
crisis. Brexit, north-south financial tensions, east-west schisms
over illegal immigration, and fears of a resurgently aggressive
Germany are tearing the EU apart. The EU super-state may well
prove no more successful than Napoleon’s effort at a continental
system. Such a utopian quest always demanded a level of
coercion contrary to national sovereignty and democratic
government, a level of censorship antithetical to Western free
expression, and a group of pragmatic social engineers akin to
those who formed the European Common Market rather than
the contemporary cadre of impractical but haughty bureaucrats
and careerists in Brussels.
The EU super-state may well prove
no more successful than Napoleon’s
effort at a continental system.
PARADOX 4: The more non-Westerners abandon their homelands and
flee to the West—especially en masse and illegally—the
more these immigrants ironically seek to replicate in their new
country the very cultural conditions they forsook. All immigrants
from time immemorial are naturally schizophrenic about their
homelands—they romanticize their country of origin in the
abstract, while experiencing relief that their new home is not
like the old one they abandoned. But Europe is especially inept
at assimilation, integration, and intermarriage, while Middle
Eastern immigrants are particularly reluctant to embrace the
Western secularism and personal freedom to which they flock.
The result can become a toxic brew.
PARADOX 5: In the 19th and 20th centuries, Germany’s neighbors feared
its power, expansionism, and unification schemes, as well as its
tendency to become petulant in its victimhood. Such anxieties
are now being once more expressed by Germany’s friends
and allies. Central and Eastern Europeans oppose its policy of
open borders and its nonchalance about illegal immigration.
Germany’s immediate neighbors are confused over its
mandatory green energy initiatives, while its policy of forcing
mandatory austerity on indebted Mediterranean European
nations is splitting apart the European Union. The Germany of
2018 is not that of 1946 or even that of 1989, but it often polls
as the most anti-American nation in Europe.
PARADOX 6: Middle East is not the center of the geostrategic universe.
Another Arab embargo would be absurd. The real crisis is not
the tension between Israel and the Arab nations, but rather it
is Israel and its Arab neighbors’ fears of an ascendant Persian
Shiite Islam. The United States is no longer much leveraged by
Middle East oil considerations. The Palestinians have seemingly
overplayed their victim, terrorist, and intifada hands. Slowly,
the West is coalescing to the view that it is past time for the
Palestinians to build a prosperous nation-state on the West
Bank. If Palestinians are still considered refugees from the late
1940s, then so too are contemporary Sudetenlanders, East
Prussians, Russian Cossacks, Volga Germans, Southeast Asians,
Hungarians, and Jews of the wider Middle East.
The real crisis is not the tension
between Israel and the Arab
nations…
PARADOX 7: The great immediate dangers to Western Civilization are not
hunger, global warming, inequality, or religious fundamentalism,
but obesity, consumer culture, utopian pacifism, multiculturalism,
declining demography, the secular religion of political
correctness that threatens the right to free speech, an inability to
protect national borders and to create a common culture rooted
in the values of the West, and an absence of belief in spiritual
transcendence and reverence for past customs and traditions.
The challenge is not just that Australians, Canadians, Europeans,
and Americans increasingly cannot articulate the values that
explain why throngs of immigrants migrate to their shores, but
that even if they could, they feel that they probably should not.
PARADOX 8: The great dangers to modern constitutional government and
a free press come not from silly and easily identifiable right-wing
racists and bumbling fascists, but rather, as George Orwell saw,
from glib social utopians. Similarly dangerous are their compliant
media enhancers who insidiously tolerate the abuses of the
administrative state, in the exalted quest for equality, justice, and
fairness. Those responsible for eroding our freedoms will not
likely be jowled generals in shades and epaulettes, but the lean
and cool in hip suits who speak mellifluously of a predetermined
arc of history bending toward their utopian mandate. Nothing
is more dangerous to democratic government than a media that
believes it is an agent for social justice, voluntarily surrenders its
autonomy, and sees the loss of its independence as a small price
to pay for the adulation it receives from the state.
PARADOX 9: The goal of government in a Western constitutional state
should be conceived of in terms of economic growth, such as
by achieving an annual GDP rate of 3 percent or greater, an
unemployment rate of 4 percent or lower, and a rising middle
class per capita income—not an increase in state subsidies, state
bureaucracies, and state regulations. Those in the state who
exude empathy often cannot deliver it; those in the private sector
who rarely mention compassion, often deliver it. A good job, not
state sustenance, is the fountainhead of a good life.
A good job, not state sustenance, is
the fountainhead of a good life.
PARADOX 10: Crudity in popular politics, as now witnessed in Europe
and the United States, is never to be welcomed. But if transient
coarseness is sometimes the price of dissolving calcified and
destructive norms, and is constitutional, then it is an acceptable
antidote to suave institutionalized mediocrity. Proving that black
lives do indeed matter is sometimes best achieved by ensuring
the African-American unemployment rate is below 6 percent,
and that traditionally neglected job-seekers gain leverage over
employers. An economy growing at over 3 percent per annum
usually renders arguments over minimum wage laws irrelevant—
employers gladly increase wages when they are desperate for
new workers though they are reluctant to do so when ordered
by the state and are in not much need of new laborers.
The Western world is in turmoil largely because of the
widening gap between what the people see as true and the
“truth” that their governing classes impose on them for the
purported greater moral good. The result is a schizophrenia like
that seen before the collapse of the Soviet Empire, in which no
one believed that the reality they lived had anything to do with
the reality delivered by the media and the state. Trumpism and
popular movements in Europe are simply symptoms of another
problem—that what the ruling elite said was true was often a lie.