The Spectre of Populism

At the World Economic Forum, keynoter Joe Biden warned global elites that the unraveling of the middle class in America and Europe has provided “fertile terrain for reactionary politicians, demagogues peddling xenophobia, anti-immigration, nationalist, isolationist views.”

Evidence of a nationalist backlash, said Biden, may be seen in the third parties arising across Europe, and in the U.S. primaries.

But set aside Joe’s slurs — demagogues, xenophobia.

Who really belongs in the dock here? Who caused this crisis of political legitimacy now gripping the nations of the West?

Was it Donald Trump, who gives voice to the anger of those who believe themselves to have been betrayed? Or the elites who betrayed them?news of an almost transcendental quality.”

James Burnham, the ex-Trotskyite and Cold War geostrategist whose work Francis admired, called liberalism “the ideology of Western suicide.”

If the West embraces, internalizes and operates on the principles of liberalism, Burnham wrote, the West with meet an early death.

Among the dogmas of liberalism is the unproven assumption that peoples of all nationalities, tribes, cultures, creeds can coexist happily in nations, especially in a “creedal” nation like the USA, which has no ethnic core but rather is built upon ideas.

A corollary is that “diversity,” a new America and new Europe where all nations are multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural and multilingual, is the future of the west and the model for mankind.

Yet, large and growing minorities in every country of Europe, and now in America, believe that not only is this proposition absurd, the end result could be national suicide.

And when one considers the millions who are flocking to Trump and Sanders, it is hard to believe that the establishments of the two parties, even if they defeat these challengers, can return to same old interventionist, trade, immigration and war policies.

For Trump is not the last of the populist-nationalists.

Given his success, other Republicans will emulate him. Already, other candidates are incorporating his message. The day Francis predicted was coming appears to have arrived.

Angela Merkel may have been Time’s Person of the Year in 2016, but she will be lucky to survive in office in 2017, if she does not stop the invasion from Africa and the Middle East.

Yet Joe Biden’s dismissal that it is reactionaries who oppose what the progressives of Davos believe is not entirely wrong. For as Georges Bernanos wrote, when Europe was caught between Bolshevism and fascism:

To be a reactionary means simply to be alive, because only a corpse does not react any more — against the maggots teeming on it.

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