The Tower of Babbling – The Stream

Since his first election in 2016, I’ve argued that Donald J. Trump is a reaction, not the cause of the social and political turbulence in the United States and across what remains of the free English-speaking world and Europe.

When our feeble, often soulless, and frequently half-witted political class creates and perpetuates public policy on the foundations of platitudes, emotionalism, jingoism, legal coercion and manipulation, fraud and corruption, instead of reason, historical evidence, scientific fact, and plain common sense, Donald J. Trump is what you get.

Now, all across Europe, the UK, and even in the rest of the Americas, we are witnessing what happens in real time when enough hard-working citizens become fed up with the never-ending messes made by the “political classes.”

None of the phenomena is difficult to understand.

A New Politics of Evil

Normal people in the West with everyday lives and families live in cultures shaped by freedom of movement, choice, thought, hard work, free markets, and faith in God. They have little time for frivolous arguments about the vagaries of life with which they contend daily, not differently than did their ancestors in other centuries and economies.

Yet over the recent decades in the West, those same rational people’s vocies have been replaced in every forum and social institution by the lunatics on the radical socialist left (and weak-kneed right), whose dark corruption is evidenced by demanding, conniving, and ultimately violent policies promising servitude and dependency, where the lowest denominators in society will be the standard of responsibility and accountability. The precise things that normal people reject in their private, everyday lives.

None of this is even argued about by the radicals anymore. They want to extinguish freedom of thought, speech, and religious practice, and to drag the world into a paternalistic dark age where the powerful, well-connected, rain misery on everyone else like a jilted stepchild. They do it all under the cover of that cursed emotion, empathy. By destroying capitalistic modernity, they explain, they are turning power over to the powerless and setting the captives free, as it were. Most importantly, they aim to replace faith in a God with the scientific dialectic as dogma.

If pressed for a score in this economic and cultural battle, it seems fair to say that the lunatics have the field advantage and the normal people have the ball. But can they score?

Attacks on Freedom Worldwide

The Canadian trucker “Freedom Convoy” in 2022, initiated as Covid restriction and vaccine mandate protests, was a bellwether, in which the Government seized personal and business bank accounts, hacked a funding website to find donor names, and manhandled the national press.

Likewise, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France are the poster children for the moral bankruptcy of “multiculturalism” to either integrate or assimilate vast numbers of third-world migrants into the host culture. Normal citizens who are upset by rising property crime, street violence, grooming gangs, rapes, child molestation, and housing issues find their freedom of speech censored and, in some cases, face arrest and even jail for their wrong opinions.

In the sexual and gender wars, normal citizens all over the West also find that a slip of the tongue, or Heaven forbid, questioning how the choice between only two options of Chromosomal arrangement could be that hard, is a more serious crime than physical assault or larceny. Suggesting sex between the opposite sexes is normal is only tolerated in the absence of critical thoughts about the alternatives. Vast amounts of police resources are devoted to monitoring private speech in these matters rather than addressing public crime.

Looming Economic Apocalypse

Worst of all, the West has generally seen a mounting tax burden that falls disproportionately on the middle class, taking from the most productive to fund programs of dubious value for other people in the economy. It’s that dreaded empathy at work again; perhaps helping the person is precisely the wrong thing to do, turning a could-be producer into a welfare dependent? Or, that last bite of the tax apple drove an inspired businessman to give up for want of those last few dollars?

It’s not that free markets and capitalism don’t work – it’s the only economic model that does work for the average person and family. It is because, as Frédéric Bastiat described in his seminal booklet, The Law, written in 1850, governments abandon their primary duty to protect liberty:

“Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.”

In abandoning their purpose, politicians invariably command the prerogative to build constituency groups with others’ hard labor and wealth.

Bastiat explained:

I do not dispute their [the Government’s] right to invent social combinations, to advertise them, to advocate them, and to try them upon themselves, at their own expense and risk. But I do dispute their right to impose these plans upon us by law – by force – and to compel us to pay for them with our taxes.

To bear out Frédéric Bastiat’s words 175 years later, merely listen to the new crops of radical Marxists on the home front.

Inventing New “Rights” Every Few Weeks

The new mayor-elect of Seattle, Washington, Katie Wilson, claims, “Access to affordable, healthy food is a basic right. We cannot allow giant grocery chains to stomp all over our communities, close stores at will, and leave behind food deserts. [We’ll build] a Seattle where fresh food is for everyone, not just for those who can afford it.”

Unsurprisingly, the new mayor-elect will also be all in on “social housing.” According to her website, the city should build publicly owned, permanently affordable housing for people and families across income levels. One wants to ask the lifelong “social activist” to name one city where “public housing” has been anything but a social and financial disaster?

Of course, Zohran Mamdani, the new Mayor-elect of New York City, has stirred up a storm in his victory speech, too. “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about.”

(It makes one think of Ronald Reagan’s great quip, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”)

The mayor-elect, who has evidently never held a job in his life, wants to [freeze] rents for more than 2 million rent-stabilized tenants.” And famously, wants to [make] buses fast and free, and [deliver] universal childcare.”

Churches Whoring After Strange Gods

It’s not just the politicians who have gone loony, beyond the bounds of rational debate. The historic Anglican Church has imploded in on itself in the cradle from whence it was born, Great Britain. It has meandered down the radical political highway and can’t find its way back to the orthodoxy expressway. From human sexuality, gender, marriage, changing weather, criminal migrants, being woke is never having to say you’re wrong.

And the new Pope, Leo, not to be outdone, has chosen to confirm the political course that Pope Francis forged. Wokeness knows no boundaries, evidently. He has confirmed that we must battle that demon CO2, yet rarely mentions the Biblical admonition to fight the demons right in front of us. “Violence never brings victory,” he remarked, perhaps forgetting Europe itself exists today because hundreds of thousands of Europeans and Americans brought unimaginable violence to bear to secure the freedom he enjoys.

“The key is to seek dialogue, to find fair ways to resolve the problems that may exist within countries.” What does that even mean? The Pope has also talked eloquently about the “growing commitment to dialogue and fraternity” that marks relations between the Catholic Church and Muslims, saying an approach based on “mutual respect and freedom of conscience.” Of course, history and the plain reading of the Bible and the Quran demonstrate that no such possibility exists.

Alas, the road ahead for the Western World is a hard one indeed. Turning back the drift of radicalism and its darkness is going to be costly and complicated, because it’s settled in like an ink stain on a white shirt. Politicians can’t do it – look at the roadblocks thrown in front of President Trump at every step, often by his own party. It’s going to take millions of average citizens rallying around common sense, demanding public accountability, and insisting that politicians step up or step down. But mostly, it will have to be a “God thing,” where good men and women, on their knees, get into the public arena and say, “enough.”

Michael Giere writes award-winning commentary and essays on the intersection of politics, culture and faith. He is a critically acclaimed novelist (The White River Series) and short-story writer. A former candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas, he was a senior executive in both the Reagan and the Bush (41) administrations, and in 2016 served on the Trump Transition Team.