The Center Cannot Hold

 

Yesterday got kinda derailed because an old friend, now a bishop, sent me an infovid of a parrot goosestepping across a kitchen counter to Erika. Stirring stuff, but let's get serious. 

Can the center, as in our globalist managerial elites, their satraps in the media and their, ahem, brain trust in academia and on, can this hold or will it be swept away. Rod Dreher, writing in the European Conservative, thinks its days are numbered.

Here's a snapshot:

Until Joe Biden took the stage in last week’s debate with Donald Trump, the most catastrophically stupid presidential political decision of the year was Emmanuel Macron’s calling a snap election after the National Rally’s impressive showing in European parliamentary elections. After events over the past few days, it is still uncertain as to which blunder will have been the most consequential. Whatever the outcome, we are all watching corrupt systems collapse in real time. Amid this apocalypse—literally, an unveiling—we are seeing a kind of Reformation, the messy birth of a new order.

This is more the case in France than in the United States. The strong National Rally results in Sunday’s first round of voting occasioned an outpouring on France’s streets that could have been scripted by Camp of the Saints author Jean Raspail. 

In some French cities, Antifa and other leftist protesters set fires to express outrage at the results. In Paris, thousands of Islamists and leftists rallied against the ‘far right.’ Look at this clip captured by Luc Auffret. In this vast left-wing crowd, some protesters have raised various standards—the flag of Palestine, the flag of Pride, and so forth—but notice: you cannot see a single French tricolor there. 

Compare this to the image from a National Rally victory party on Sunday. Thousands upon thousands of French voters waving the tricolor, and singing the Marseillaise. 

What does the contrast tell you? It hardly needs elaboration, does it? Among other things, it is visual confirmation that le Grand Remplacement is no conspiracy theory, but established fact. Renaud Camus defines the Great Replacement as “the change of people, the substitution of one or several peoples for the people whose ancestral roots are there, whose history had for hundreds or thousands of years coincided with the territory in question.” All those native Frenchmen in that leftist mob, the ethnically Gallic too ashamed of France to raise her flag, demonstrate that the Great Replacement is also a state of mind. 

France is now in the middle of a fight for its future as a nation. France’s enemies are the Frenchmen who hate her, and the aliens they have brought in to replace the French who resist. This could not possibly be clearer now. Until Sunday, France’s enemies also included the elite establishmentarians of both Left and Right who facilitated le Grand Remplacement, and who counted on the French public’s fear of Vichy to blind them to the emerging reality. 

 

Strong words, and Dreher's clearly employed by the Ministry of Truth. He goes on to quote Rénaud Camus, who predicts the Balkanization of Europe and "future violence," before focusing on the UK and US. He concludes:

We remember the Summer of 1914 as the last idyllic season before the West blew itself to bits with World War I. Will we recall the Summer of 2024 as the last idyll before the West destroyed itself with civil war, even if fought primarily through increasingly radical politics? That conclusion seems rash—for now—but one thing is undeniably clear: the center of Western politics no longer holds. It is dead, and the ones who killed it are not Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, and other politicians of the real Right, but rather the managerial liberals (including Republicans, Tories, and Gaullists) who lived by lies—and who, crucially, believed their own lies.

The historian Barbara Tuchman, writing about the folly of the Renaissance popes in provoking and failing to contain the Reformation, criticized their “obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents, primacy of self-aggrandizement, [and] illusion of invulnerable status.”

“They could not change” the system, Tuchman wrote, “because they were part of it, grew out of it, depended on it.” So it is with the liberal governing elites of the Western democracies. And now, a Reformation is upon us. 

I reckon Dreher's right in the X-Ring with this. You can and should read the whole thing here. Are we in that 1914 idyll? Your call.

Cheers,

LSP