Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

The three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Act 4, scene 1
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Johann Heinrich Füssli 1783

The Western World’s political and economic elites, standing in for Macbeth’s witches, have certainly been fermenting Western discontent in their magic cauldrons. All over Europe and North America, electorates are seething with anger, frustration, and fear. Could this be the end of … what? It is hard to see exactly how the Western World will change its many world-views, but change them we must if we are to continue existing. If reality is actually different from our views of it, it has a tendency to remind us of the difference in generally unpleasant ways.

The Unrest in the Western World

Having continually, and almost constantly, ratified the choices and policies of their countries’ elites, the electorates of the West are finding that the results of those policies are not what they were advertised to be. Economies are stagnating, wages are not increasing, traditional norms of behavior are questioned and violated, and our very existence threatened by Muslim jihadis, a revanchist Russia, a soon-to-be nuclear Iran, and a would-be imperial China, not too mention the occasional mentally unbalanced mass killer. What has happened to our erstwhile confidant world views?

It is not hard to find the evidence for all this. In Europe, we can see it in the many Muslim “no go” areas, where multitudes of unassimilated immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East congregate. Mixed in with them is an undetermined number of ISIS agents, waiting for their orders to lethally strike their hosts. In the meantime, given the European Union’s Schengen rules, ISIS agents can cross internal European borders uninhibited to reach any European target. We can find it in the stagnant economies of the Eurozone, which are motivating many to look either to parties of the center-right (such as the Popular Party of Spain, or the National Front of France) or to the far-left (such as Syriza of Greece) for solutions.

The extreme unrest in the United States can be found in many people’s fears of our unsecured southern border (not to mention our unsecured northern border, which everyone forgets). Then there are the ISIS-inspired lethal attacks at the Boston Marathon in 2013, at San Bernardino, California in December 2015, and at Orlando, Florida in June 2016. In addition, we have exactly the same kind of economic stagnation as Europe, a stagnation created by governments. Our fears and malaise have resulted politically in the capture of the Republican presidential nomination by Donald Trump, a man whose ideology is called “opportunism”, and in the almost-capture of the Democratic nomination by democratic-socialist Bernie Sanders.

The Causes of Our Unrest

The proximate causes of our discontent are well known and (mostly) undisputed: they are the stagnation of our economies; the military threats from ISIS, Russia, Iran, and China; and the unresponsiveness of our politicians in finding solutions. However, what are the underlying causes of those causes, and why do we see the results not just in our country, but spread over the entire world? As underlying causes, I nominate the following:

• The general move by most of the world away from laissez-faire free-markets. In many countries, Keynesian economic thought has been politically dominant since the 1930s. Those countries not dominated by Keynesianism had economic doctrine even farther to the Left.
• A gradual acceptance over decades of time of the progressive idea that government must be the primary solver of social and economic problems.
• The political Left has adopted ideas about “multiculturalism”,  causing them to espouse open borders, and to deemphasize the need for assimilating immigrants. Multiculturalism is also suspect in wide spread diminishing of traditional values.
• Many progressives, influenced by multiculturalism, see other cultures’ values as equally as good as traditional Western values. In addition, feeling guilty about an imperial past, they feel that Western countries (particularly the United States) are at fault for much that is wrong in the world.

First, let us consider the move by most Western countries away from laissez-fare, free-market economies. One would have thought that the collapse of communism under the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics would have struck a note of caution

with Western progressives. We also have the examples of India and China, which did not discover appreciable growth until after they started to move away from socialism.

Nevertheless, the urge of progressives to control everything, so that (in their own thinking) they had enough power to correct social ills, is a very potent motivation. As a result year after year, economic power was leached from the free-market to be accumulated by Washington and some of the states. Most of that power was taken by the regulatory, administrative state in departments and agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Brand new ones authorized by the Dodd-Frank Act are the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Financial Stability Oversight Council.

Some of this power has tempted progressives to financial or political corruption, as I have discussed in the posts The Corruption of the Democratic Party, Democrats Want to Imprison Scientific Skeptics?, The Anti-Freedom Bias of Progressives, Are We No Longer a Nation of Laws?, Are You Unconvinced Democrats Are Growing More Authoritarian?, and Hillary Clinton’s Troubles Are Not Finished. Particularly heinous has been the use of the Internal Revenue Service to deny free speech to conservative groups.

Over the years, with progressives controlling most of the news media and higher education, they have been able to persuade a large, and among younger  Americans a growing, fraction of people that government should be the primary solver of social and economic problems. It has gotten to the point that among Democrats there is an almost even split between those who favor socialism over capitalism as who favor the contrary, with 43% of Democrats on either side. This is why after almost eight straight years of a failed Obama administration, the Democratic candidate still has an excellent chance of winning the presidency.

However, a growing list of historical contradictions, opposing what progressives claim, is part of the fuel propelling the current political  rebellion against Western elites. Should that rebellion succeed, it will be because many in those elites have blinded themselves to the nature and strength of the revolt. This is the thesis of an extremely interesting essay by Andrew A. Michta, A Wake Up Call for Western Elites on the American Interest web site. Prof. Michta is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. After making a brief survey of the ills besetting Western countries, Michta makes the following observation about elite reactions to the revolt of the electorate.

The nationalist rebellions that are stirring across the West have thus far generated almost uniform elite condemnation on the grounds that such movements and the parties they have spawned are fed and driven by prejudice and intolerance, racism, discrimination, and—to quote one university discussion—a “desperate attempt to preserve white privilege.” And yet the vision of a globalized post-Westphalian, postmodern, and ultimately post-national future, which only a decade ago seemed well on its way to dominating political discourse as the new consensus in classrooms and boardrooms, is today shaky at best. It is being challenged by a new strand of nationalism taking shape across the West, still uncertain of its own language and the patterns in which it manifests itself in different societies, but by now unmistakably resurgent and growing in its appeal to the public.

That the rebellion might be more than that of knuckle-dragging, neanderthal-like reactionaries seems quite beyond what most in the elites can bring themselves to believe. As Michta observes further on,

However, thus far the narrative [by the elites] of this surge of public anger aimed at Western elites has been confined to the simple, safe, and ultimately maddeningly imprecise concept of “populism,” with its implicitly negative connotation. After all, populists are by definition unsophisticated rubes who pitch the public simplistic solutions to the increasingly inscrutable complexities of the modern world. But this dismissal does nothing to help us understand what these movements are about.

However, as Michta concludes, “the reality is quite different.”  The masses of people who are revolting are not all neanderthal-like after all. As with all really large social movements, this one has its share of neanderthals, just as the progressives have, but many of these rebels are educated, astute people. This nationalistic rebellion, rather than being reactionary, is a rediscovery of the value of their own cultures. Given the examples of ISIS’ barbarity and of Russian crony capitalism (which is not capitalism at all, but rather a form of fascism), it is quite easy to determine that our culture is superior to theirs. If we want to keep our way of life, we had better be willing to fight for it. Multiculturalism, the way it has been defined as all cultures being of equal value, is a trap to be avoided.

Moreover, Michta says, “The West is experiencing a nationalist awakening of a magnitude not seen in decades because the policies of those decades have run their course and are no longer accepted.” With decades of historical experience with the Leftist policies of Keynesian economics, multiculturalism, and authoritarian progressivism, the people can see the results, and they are not pretty.

An Augury of Ideological Change?

One  appreciation everyone should gain from our current ideological struggles is how our troubles are proving the superiority of democratic institutions over authoritarian ones. If Western nations were authoritarian, there would be much blood in the streets by now with civil war. It is in my experience a much misunderstood fact that the justification for democracy is not in the wisdom of the electorate at large, which at any particular time may or may not exist. Instead, that superiority resides in the fact that an unhappy electorate can stage a bloodless coup simply by winning an election. In ancient China when an emperor lost the “mandate of heaven”, he and his supporters also lost their lives. In addition, civil war in authoritarian states also tends to be quite costly in destroyed and damaged property. Hence the bloodless coup of a democratic election is both more humanitarian and economically efficient. Also, since democratic institutions can only be maintained with freedom of speech and freedom of the press, both sides of an ideological conflict can record historical experience as they see it. Such historical records can be compared with each other and with other knowledge and experience to produce a more accurate ideology of the nature of the world.

From all of the angst, anger, and frustration evident today, the reigning ideology of what the best government is like can no longer remain a highly mixed one, with significant aspects of both capitalism and socialism. Instead, government economic policies are either going to be more socialist or more capitalist. In the short run in the United States it could go either way: toward socialism with Hillary Clinton, or (probably) toward capitalism with Donald Trump. If Clinton is elected, however, I would expect reality would continue to give us the very unpleasant kind of lessons we received under Barack Obama.

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