Pushback

There seems to be an unending stream of bad news assaulting us.   North Korean nukes.  Threatened pullout of the U.S. from JCPOA with Iran.   The Las Vegas massacre.  Burning controversies over Columbus Day, the National Anthem, and now the Boy Scouts. Trump fighting with Democrats AND Republicans and maybe his own State Department.  Tom Petty gone, pronounced dead prematurely but sadly, he is really dead.  I don’t believe I’ve experienced a more tumultuous time in my lifetime; the 60’s are beginning to look like child’s play.   Twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War, when the End of History was announced, it appears that the American Experiment, and the notions of individual liberty and the Enlightenment are on the ropes.   State power and supranational power (here and abroad seems to have made great advances. 

Across the West and elsewhere, progressives and globalists have largely been successful since the end of the Cold War in taking power, decision making and accountability away from localized sovereign states and placing it in the hands of an unaccountable body.  Multiculturalism goes hand in glove with this trend—that is denying local culture and social norms, and in particular, denying any claim that the locals have that they like their culture more and putting everyone on the same plane.  Nowhere is this more prevalent than in Europe.  In Europe, the global elitists sometimes go so far as to blatantly deny their own culture, as Emmanual Macron did during his campaign in France, when he asserted that “there is no such thing as French culture.”   That kind of absurd thinking exists only in the minds of the global elite.  There most certainly is a decidedly French culture, just as there is an American culture (and even within America there are certainly regional subcultures).   And politically, separate cultures tend to want the right of self determination----they don’t want to be governed by a far-off group.   

The globalist elite have managed to achieve a greater degree of political power centralization in three ways.  First, through crisis creation.  Whether it be climate change, or, in the U.S.  health care, the Statists have argued that these are big problems that require big government or even supranational solutions.   Second, they label opponents:  xenophobic, Islamophobic, sexist, populist, white nationalist, climate change deniers, and the like.   Hillary Clinton famously labelled her opponents “Deplorables.” It forces opponents to fight the label, rather than argue on the merits of any particular policy.   Third, they argue against the intelligence of the choice of the people as if it delegitimizes them.  In both the U.S. 2016 election and in the U.K. Brexit vote, the MSM took great pains to demonstrate that the people that voted for Trump or for Brexit were, on average, less educated, less informed, and more provincial—the great unwashed masses.  And, of course, the bigger the government, the more it siphons off resources from individuals. 

Across the globe, the forces of Big Government and multiculturalism have largely been prevailing as of late, there have been several notable instances of green shoots of autonomy popping up.

In the U.S. of course, was the surprise election of Donald Trump.  Yes, he is blunt, crass, impulsive, and says odd things.  But as I asserted in an earlier blog, his most significant campaign promise was, “I am your voice.”   As the Obama administration wore on, Obama turned to memos and executive orders to impose his agenda.  Nowhere was that more apparent than the transgender bathroom wars started by an Obama memo.   I don’t know what the right policy is, but I do know that the wrong policy is to have the federal government dictate what should be done by fiat, without discussion or input and impose its will on a local school system.   It was exactly acts like that that put Trump in the White House.

Brexit also was a reaction to an overbearing E.U. busily imposing lots of rules and regulations from afar without any input from the locals at all.    It was also in part, a rejection of the immigration policies of the E.U. which caused social disruption in Europe (more on this in another blog).  One British immigrant told me that the economy of her entire fishing village was nearly destroyed with picayune rules issued by Brussels.  And she further decided to leave when she got tired of working so hard to pay for the social benefits bestowed on nonworking immigrants.  

Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic are also pushing back.   Seeing what the open door immigration policies have done to the rest of Europe, those countries have asserted their sovereignty and are pushing back hard against the E.U.  Just last week, thousands of Poles lined up at the border to pray for their country.   Each of those countries do have definite cultures and have also had recent experience with Russians (or Nazis) trying to shove their cultures down their throats.   They are willing to withstand the labeling and perhaps the financial penalties to preserve theirs.

Most recently, both the Catalonians and Kurds actually had a vote for independence.   In both cases, the voters voted overwhelmingly to be independent.    In both cases, those peoples have distinct cultures and the yearning for independence has been brewing for some time.   The case of Catalonia was particularly obscene because we witnessed Spanish police in black disrupting and taking over polling places by force and state violence.  One couldn’t help but compare it to the thuggery of the Iranian regime when it put down the Green Revolution.  The Kurdish push for independence is also noteworthy since the resilient Kurds have fought against Saddam Hussein, ISIS, and Turkey for decades.  They continue to fight for liberation in the world’s worst neighborhood.

The genius of our Founders was that they designed a government that largely was intended to vest political power locally because they knew that the farther you get away, the less accountability and deference there is to local social norms and practices.   While we have seen a movement toward centralizing power, there are places across the globe where people are pushing back.

Even voters in Illinois pushed back.   You know there is hope when corrupt, single party Illinois repeals a tax.   In a historic vote, the ill-advised soda tax put into place in Cook County was repealed last week, in a historic vote.   A sure sign that a desire for local control, lower taxes and sanity have not been totally extinguished.