Turn To The Left
Britain and France, perennial rivals in their own minds for European preeminence, have just turned significantly to the socialist left in national elections. In both cases, the shift in power appears more radical when viewed in terms of elected representatives than in terms of actual total votes. Nevertheless, the reality remains: The two leading European nations of the modern era (Germany is not, strictly speaking, a European nation) are still mired, more so perhaps than any of their European allies, in the long-dead twentieth century delusion that socialism, that sad political residue of the nineteenth century’s philosophical detour into romantic materialism, is a viable option for addressing real political problems.
The Marxist or Fabian progressives will now have their way, to a significant extent, with the two countries’ struggling economies, and, at least as ominously, their decayed moral traditions, factionalized social conditions, and the already limp and laughable leftist-driven drift into the identity politics of race, class, age, “gender,” and whatever other artificial collectives the socialists can cobble together as psychological dependents and slaves to their various artificially propped up messiahs du jour. The results of this moment of avowed progressive “change” will be brutal, though the actual power of the newly-elected leftists themselves will likely be shortlived. As the past fourteen years of Tory government in the UK has more than amply proved, progressive structures, once built into a country’s establishment and national psyche, are very difficult to dismantle, especially without principled and coherent statesmen prepared to suffer through the hard fight for a country’s soul that aims at something much deeper than the transient “public opinion” which leads to nothing more substantial than mere election victories.
The short term, for Britain and France, as for the rest of Europe and the entire West, looks bleak, whatever straws of hope the optimists, tribalists, and simpletons may wish to grasp at. The fact that socialist parties could still rise to prominance, having offered such thoroughly proven failure again and again for a century, is evidence of how far away from reason the majority of the civilized world has allowed itself to be led after more than a century of progressive schooling, nihilistic materialism, and the unabated decay of popular taste and common sense. That is the short term, however. There is always a long term, of course, to provide some consolation, and even cheer — to those serious and honest enough to understand and accept that short and long terms, in the context of civilization, are not measured in election cycles, but in centuries.
