The defeat suffered by the far-left Labour Party in a recent general election in Britain was so decisive, it forces left-wing parties on both sides of the Atlantic to reconsider their policies, and encourages conservatives to hope it is symptomatic of a decline and fall of the Left everywhere.

When we were in the grip of that wild hope, an article in Areo by Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay titled The Left is Having an Identity Crisis drew our close attention.

The title is ironic, intentionally or not, because the Left has been primarily concerned with “identity” ever since Karl Marx drew rigid lines between the classes of the Western world. Your identity in the Marxian view was defined by your class. You were either bourgeois which was bad because you supported the status quo, or you were proletarian which was good because you were destined to make violent revolution. (In his personal life Marx was a social snob, always putting his wife’s aristocratic name and title on his visiting card.) When the proletariats of Europe disappointed the Left after the Second World War, becoming well-off, indistinguishable in their outlook from the bourgeoisie and plainly uninterested in making revolution, a New Left arose with a revised ethic of identity. Henceforth it was the Lumpenproletariat, a vagabond underclass that Marx had despised, that must play the revolutionary role. Their class, the “unemployed and unemployable” (as Herbert Marcuse wrote) was augmented by les misérables of the Third World (Frantz Fanon’s “wretched of the earth”) and others who were powerless and exploited by the bourgeois patriarchy; notably women and the sexually deviant, and even (sotto voce why not?) felons. These “sections” of society would unite under the red banner of socialist revolution, which no longer had to be violent. Instead the Left would advance to power by taking control over the institutions of the Western democracies – or where that proved impossible, by discrediting them. The author of the plan, Antonio Gramsci, described it as “the long march through the institutions”.The sections, united in purpose throughout the world, would get the levers of power in their hands and then change our world that has evolved over millennia, our world of many nation-states, of European and male supremacy, of capitalism and private ownership and unequal wealth, into One World of material equality and moral beauty.

In this drama, your identity according to the categories of the New Left is what matters about you. You are black, female, homosexual, or in the nostalgia of the theorists a worker, so you are expected to take part in, or at least assist, the long march. You are expected to be on the Left.

And now the Left itself is having a crisis of identity? What is it about its Leftness that is troubling it?

Pluckrose and Lindsay, who declare themselves to be liberal and not socialist or “identitarian”, reflect on what is happening in and to the Left in Britain and America, and set about defining, diagnosing, and prescribing a cure for the problem:

The Left is in crisis. We no longer present a cohesive movement, and we no longer form coherent political parties. We are a fractured and ill-defined mess, our goals are diffuse and scattered, and we are hemorrhaging supporters from what should be our base—the working class, liberals, and racial and sexual minorities. It is not clear that left-wing parties and movements are currently listening to that base or have its best interests at heart.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the recent British election, which was disastrous for the left. Labour lost key seats, including in areas that have voted left for close to a century, and experienced its worst drubbing in four decades. An outright majority was won by surely the least credible Tory Prime Minister in living memory.

That’s Boris Johnson they’re talking about. A man who was born to be Prime Minister of England, very possibly a good one. He has sworn to take Britain out of the European Union which is  a corrupt and undemocratic political darling of the Left, so of course the Left abominates him. To persons on the Left, he is almost as bad as our great President Trump.

It seems uncomfortably likely that this disaster is soon to be mirrored in the US by the re-election of Donald Trump for a second term, despite the fact that the American public has had four years—beginning with his 2015 campaign—to notice how manifestly unfit he is to be the leader of the western world. The pressing questions at the moment are, what’s going on? and what, if anything, can we do to stop it?

They do some quite credible analysis of what’s going wrong on their side:

Let’s start with what isn’t going to work. It simply will not do to blame these electoral results on the idea that the majority of the population is ignorant, hateful, or unaware of their own best interests. This is the attitude—made popular throughout the educated left by a growing commitment to elitism and critical theories—that got us into this mess in the first place. This attitude is particularly worrying because it leads leftist activists to double down on exactly those things that are killing the left.

If left-leaning parties around the world hope to have any future electoral success, they need to ditch both elitism and identity-based theory and develop some self-awareness. They need to start listening to the people they are supposed to represent so that they can understand what people actually want from a left-wing party. Only in this way can the left heal its fractures and form a strong and principled movement, with political parties that the general public can trust and respect.

The policies of left-wing parties need to come from the people—not represent revolutionary ideologies most do not share or appreciate having imposed upon them for their own good. The public will not stand for this—nor should they. It is absolutely right to reject the social engineering projects of theorists, activists, and the privileged elite who, like self-appointed philosopher kings, want to order society according to their ideological vision of how things should be rather than how they are or realistically could be.

People who reject the ideologues’ vision are not all racist, sexist, and xenophobic bigots or radical capitalist absolutists. Liberals and working people, who form an overlapping majority, generally have strong opinions on what will make their lives better and society fairer, and they are increasingly deciding that right-wing parties are closer to providing this. Barely electable as those might be, that’s still miles better than being totally unelectable. This is a point our left-wing parties seem utterly unable to grasp—as our elections keep demonstrating. This calls for humility and introspection from the left, rather than doubling down and denigrating the masses for their wrongthink.

Ah, yes. It seems that whenever the workers are given a chance to express their political preference, they choose wicked but rewarding capitalist conservatism over morally beautiful but materially deficient socialism.

But Pluckrose and Lindsay, and probably all Leftists, assume that “most people” really want a left-wing government. One that is not too radical.

So Left-wing parties must strive to keep themselves from becoming too radical. But it’s not easy for them:

Left-wing parties and movements generally have a harder job maintaining consistency and cohesion than conservative ones because of their progressive nature. Progress requires change, moving with the times, and finding new directions. It requires fighting for certain advances and then, when these are achieved, fighting for new ones. Conservatives generally have an easier time with continuity because they seek to conserve aspects of society that they see as good, as well as upholding consistent principles, rooted in consistent moral intuitions of individual responsibility, respect for tradition and authority, cultural cohesion, and family. While differences do exist within conservatism—especially between libertarian fiscal conservatives and religious and/or social conservatives—there are natural limits as to how much principles can change and evolve when they are firmly rooted in the drive to conserve.

Progressives, on the other hand, are always trying to move forward and address new injustices and inequalities. The drive to progress necessarily manifests in many different directions at the same time and these can even contradict each other. One good example of this is the vitriolic conflict between the radical feminists, whose rejection of gender is rooted in an adaptation of Marxist class struggle, and the self-ID trans activists, whose conception of gender is rooted in postmodern queer theory. These groups are both decidedly left-wing and yet they do not agree.

Another such conflict came to light when Goldsmith University’s Feminist Society endorsed the Islamic Society’s protests against communist feminist, Maryam Namazie, due to her criticism of Islamism. For progressives to make progress, their competing aims therefore need to be balanced within a consistent ethical framework—a liberal framework—that can prevent the left from repeatedly fracturing because of incompatible aims and conceptions of the world.

… [There is a] current deadlock between the three main elements of the left [which are]: the radical (or socialist), identitarian (“Social Justice”), and liberal left. She argues that the  liberal left must strongly champion liberalism, as an overarching principle by which the valid concerns of the other strands of the left can be judged. Neither socialism nor identity politics can win back the voters who have gone over to the right because most people support regulated capitalism and universal principles of fairness and reciprocity, regardless of identity. This is perfectly compatible with profound concern about the disadvantages people face because of their class, race, sex, or sexuality.

The socialists—who prioritise the material realities of economic and class issues—and the identitarians—with their myopic and obsessive focus on race, gender, and sexuality as social constructs perpetuated in language—cannot easily cooperate with each other, without a broader framework that is neither socialist nor identitarian. The left needs to focus on both economic and identity issues. … [R]ight now most people want a combination of center-left economics and center-right stability. We can achieve this by restoring liberalism to the heart of left-wing politics and rejecting the lure of illiberal alternatives.

Liberalism, in its essence, seeks incremental reform to address social injustices, and it does so on the level of the individual and the universal. That is, liberalism seeks to produce a society in which every individual has access, in principle, to everything society has to offer, regardless of economic background, race, gender or sexuality. Liberalism is not (as its socialist and Social Justice critics claim) a belief that society has already achieved that aim and a corresponding denial of any continuing disadvantages caused by economic inequalities or prejudice.

On the contrary, by insisting on the rights of the individual and universal principles of non-discrimination we can oppose the barriers impeding any social group. This is the approach taken by the Civil Rights Movement, liberal feminism, and gay pride—with great success. … Critics of liberalism are right to warn us that focusing only on the individual and the universal can lead us to overlook issues disadvantaging specific groups. But we can address these criticisms most effectively by appealing to a broader liberal framework, not by attempting to overthrow it.

We have moved into a new stage of history. The battles the left fought over the past half-century have largely been won. We cannot go back to focusing on miners’ rights and trade unions, or on securing equal pay for women, outlawing racial discrimination, or legalizing homosexuality: we have won those wars. In fact, much of the right supports these advances now too.

So far, not much to make us feel irresistibly compelled to argue.

But next they explain what liberalism means to them:

We have new battles to fight. These include combating climate change, securing our place on the world stage and within the global economy, and fostering a cohesive multiculturalism, free from moral relativism and enforced conformity. The left now finds itself pulled in many directions at once. This is the source of its profound identity crisis.

The intractability of the problem facing the left was made abundantly clear by the recent UK election. Constituencies such as Grimsby and Blyth voted Conservative after decades of being staunchly Labour. As Aditya Chakrabortty points out, this is largely due to changes in working class political identity:

While the party bigwigs threw their weight about, the mines and the manufacturers, the steel and the shipbuilding were snuffed out. With them went the culture of Labourism: the bolshy union stewards, the self-organised societies, most of the local newspapers. Practically any institution that might incubate a working-class provincial political identity was bulldozed.

Workers have other concerns now, and it seems they did not feel that Labour was addressing them. In areas that were long-term Labour strongholds—and which have now turned Tory—a majority of working people also voted Leave in the Brexit referendum. This points to a deep and fundamental rift that cannot easily be ignored—and some of the responses to this division highlight many of the same issues that triggered working-class support for Leave in the first place.

[Jeremy] Corbyn’s Labour Party was torn between honoring the wishes of the many working people who wanted to leave the European Union and those of its liberal and cosmopolitan supporters, who strongly supported Remain. After dithering on the issue for a couple of years, Labour finally compromised by calling for a second referendum, a solution that, by calling Mulligan on the results of the first Brexit referendum, seems not to have mollified its working class base in the least. Since then, a YouGov survey found that Labour voters were more likely to think the next Labour leader needed to be more centrist and that the general population overwhelmingly did not care for identity politics, at least in the realm of gender.

The Economist has described Labour as out of touch with the working class, particularly in the north. …

While the issue of Brexit is far more complicated than a simple left-right divide, it highlights a profound disconnect between the old, class-conscious left and the new identity-conscious (read: identity-obsessed) left. By attempting to satisfy both of them at the same time, Labour is tearing itself apart. We can also see this in the anti-Semitism that now plagues the party, which is a consequence of attempting to come to terms with postcolonial guilt by acknowledging Britain’s role in the current tensions across the Muslim world. As a result, Labour often supports conservative Muslims over liberal ones, and condones—or actively endorses—the sexism, homophobia, and antisemitism that comes along with that position, leaving British Jews in a very vulnerable position. These deep inconsistencies have led many centrist and liberal voters in the UK to believe that the Tories better represent their interests than can Labour.

These political challenges are not confined to the UK. In the US, the Democratic Party is flailing, as it attempts to satisfy both its economic and identitarian wings, in the run-up to the 2020 elections. While the majority of the left and center—and a significant part of the right—hope that a reasonable, electable presidential candidate will emerge from within the Democratic Party, they’re forced to stare wild-eyed as the vast majority of the current and past hopefuls catalogue their pronouns in their Twitter bios and declare that “the future is female” and “the future is intersectional”.

Meanwhile, the activist base—the only ones interested in these displays—write articles fixated on the identity politics surrounding these candidates. Joe Biden is just one more old, white man who needs to step aside (even though he has tremendous support among black Americans, as does that other old white man, Bernie Sanders, who is polling in second place). If you don’t support Elizabeth Warren, even as she panders endlessly to the far-left fringe, it’s because you’ve bought into systemic misogyny (or condone Trump’s allegedly racist mockery of her as “Pocahontas”). Pete Buttigieg, who would be America’s first openly gay president if he were elected, isn’t gay enough. He may be married to a man but, we’re told, he isn’t really gay because he’s straight-passing and not a queer activist. …

Note of possible relevance: Pete Buttigieg’s father, Joseph Buttigieg, translated into English the works of no less a Communist Superhero than Antonio Gramsci himself.

This leaves left-wing parties in a quandary. They need to move with the times but are currently unsure where those times are going.

“The times”, aka History, is seen by theLeft as an agent with a purposeful will. It – not human thought and action – shapes events. Human beings are the tools of History – though its ultimate purpose is their perfection. A Marxian thesis which still lingers with the Left.

Marx believed his envisioned revolution was inevitable – though also in need of action by the “revolutionary class”.

A contemporary Labour MP, Jess Phillips, believes the working class needs a Labour government, even if it is not revolutionary. She writes in the Guardian:

The truth is, there are corners of our party that have become too intolerant of challenge and debate. The truth is, there is a clique who don’t care if our appeal has narrowed, as long as they have control of the institutions and ideas of the party.

We’ve all got to discover the courage to ask the difficult questions about the future of our party and the future of the working-class communities who need a Labour government. Because the alternative is that the working-class voters who, in despair, lent the Tories their votes on Thursday, never take them back.

It is time for the left to acknowledge this wake-up call. If the election of Donald Trump in the US and the catastrophic collapse of Labour in the UK haven’t made it obvious that we have a problem, it is unclear what will. The left cannot continue to try to impose a set of ideological values held by only a tiny minority of the left-leaning public and then blame that public for not electing a left-wing government. While trying to find its footing in today’s society and address the injustices and concerns of most of its natural base, the left has fallen into the trap of listening to noisy ideologues rather than average liberal and leftist working people. How much more evidence do we need that this does not work? When will we start listening to what people overwhelmingly want—a society that meets their material needs and feels fair and ethical? When will the left commit to being liberal again?

We ask: for what do “working class communities need a Labour government”? If the (somewhat) right-wing governments elected in the United States and Britain meet their material needs – and in the US at present the Trump administration is amply doing so – and if that seems “fair and ethical” to the voters, what can a reformed right-shifted left-wing government do for them? Can such a government, with redistributionist welfare policies designed by “noisy ideologues” to achieve fairness as an ethical ideal, meet material needs more amply?  No. That’s the whole point. Planned economies do not work. Equality of wealth, equality of power, equality of talent, equality of achievement, all that is meant by “social justice”, will never be brought about by History, nor can it be made to happen by ideologues, whether noisily by revolution or silently by their gaining control of the institutions of democracies.

The Left is failing because Leftism as such, whether “liberal” in the contemporary sense (“combating climate change, securing our place on the world stage and within the global economy, and fostering a cohesive multiculturalism … meeting material needs and feeling fair and ethical”), or uncompromisingly socialist, or defiantly “identitarian”, cannot succeed.

The law, by treating all sane adults equally, may sometimes be “fair”; but nature will not be, nor History, nor any political party.

In an article at Front Page, Bruce Thornton celebrates the overwhelming vote in Britain to elect a government that will restore “national sovereignty and citizen political autonomy”.

He sees it as the fulfillment of a movement begun in 2016, when “the Britons voted to take England out of the EU” and Donald Trump became president, causing “a stunning upset” that reflected a similar desire among American voters. Both events were “political earthquakes” that upheaved “the establishment consensus”. And “both events were met with concentrated and passionate resistance by each country’s ruling elite”.

He sees this conflict between the popular will and what he calls “illiberal technocracy” as “the latest iteration of the fundamental question of political philosophy for the last 2600 years: should the masses be allowed political power?”

He goes on:

In both countries, elites refused to honor the results of legal elections [to be accurate, a referendum and an election], then turned to media, academic, and celebrity calumny of voters, along with judicial and political skullduggery, to undo the outcome and hamstring their political enemies, the Brexiteers and Trump.

Last Thursday [December 12, 2019] came the voter backlash in the UK.  PM Boris Johnson and the conservative Tory party won a majority of seats in Parliament, their biggest majority since Margaret Thatcher, while Labour suffered its worst defeat since 1935. This means that finally Britain will be leaving the EU on January 31. In the U.S., however, we still have eight months before the voters can make their displeasure known. That election will be as critical as the Brits’, but the stakes will be even higher for the most powerful and consequential nation in the world: pushing back on the progressive ideology that for a hundred years has sought to undo the Constitutional order that protects the freedom and autonomy of the states, civil society, families, and individuals––the very bulwarks against the tyranny that the Founders feared.

We may, however, be on the cusp of a paradigm shift away from illiberal technocracy. The Tory victory means that the UK will indeed leave the EU, weakening it considerably and perhaps encouraging other disgruntled members to depart as well. But the more important event will be the reelection of Donald Trump, and the continuation of policies that lessen government interference in the economy and that push back against the tyranny of political correctness and its subversion of our freedoms …

Right now, it seems that absent a significant economic down-turn, Trump will prevail. The Brexit vote should concentrate the minds of the Democrats, since it was fear of the hard, nasty socialism of Jeremy Corbyn that helped turn many Labour voters to the Tories. The current dominance of socialist policies, illiberal identity politics, and extravagantly costly policies being promoted by the Dems’ primary candidates suggests that they will suffer the same fate as the Labour Party in the UK. The preposterous articles of impeachment, which include nothing close to “high crimes or misdemeanors”, is likely to backfire …

Also, voters have not forgotten the Dems’ hysterical, hyperbolic, fabricated Mueller investigation, the corruption of the FBI and DOJ, and the unjust, Salemite treatment of Justice Kavanagh during his confirmation hearing, a performance they have repeated with impeachment hearings. These have violated Constitutional norms and displayed, as law professor Jonathan Turley pointed out during Rep. Nadler’s hearing, a very real “abuse of power”. And don’t forget that Trump has brutally and relentlessly in word and tweet fought back against the entitled, smug, self-righteous, hypocritical celebrities, Democrats, and academic “experts” who lecture us about “social justice”, “racism”, “Islamophobia”, and “open borders” from the opulent safety of their walled mansions, armed guards, and not very diverse tony neighborhoods. …

He lists some of President Trump’s achievements, impressive in themselves and all the more remarkable for being accomplished against unremitting harassment and obstruction. Above all, a spectacularly thriving economy:

Record stock-market highs, low unemployment rates, high workforce participation, fewer people on food stamps, more cash in people’s pockets, fewer growth-killing regulations, and record oil and natural gas production: all point to an electorate eager to keep the good times rolling. Things will get even better now that a revised trade agreement with Canada and Mexico will finally become law, and China is close to signing a trade agreement that will end for now the tariff war and stop China’s blatant violations of World Trade Organization rules.

And the appointment of judges who will uphold the Constitution:

There is Trump’s transformation of the federal judiciary by appointing a record 174 federal judges, including two Supreme Court justices, with the likelihood that if he wins a second term, he will appoint at least one more. And just in his first term, now more than one-quarter of appellate court justice are originalists. His pick of relatively young jurists faithful to the Constitution as written means that for decades the progressive agenda will be slowed, and in some cases reversed.

But, the writer asks, despite all that, is it too late to save personal freedom and national sovereignty?  

Even if Trump is reelected, will the country return to the Constitutional order of unalienable rights and limited government power? Or are we too far gone? The latter may be a more defensible conclusion. Progressivism’s Leviathan federal government, and the redistributionist policies it has created, are pretty much accepted by most Republicans––as they are by today’s Tories, who campaigned on more social welfare spending rather than less. On that front the progressives have won. Then there is demography. The Greatest Generation is nearly gone, and the Boomers are right behind them. The Millennials who will follow have been marinated in political correctness and progressive ideas their whole lives, as indicated by the pluralities and sometimes majorities of Millennials who approve of socialism and despise capitalism. Perhaps, like many Boomers, they will outgrow their juvenile utopianism. Perhaps not.

And there is this:

Most important is the looming debt, deficit, and entitlement spending crisis. Few people, politician or citizen, have the inclination or political nerve to address a problem that in a few decades will eat up every dollar of the budget. When that reckoning comes, we may see social disorder that will make the antics of Antifa look like an unruly Cub Scout pack.

In his view, reason favors pessimism. The socialist “progressive” agenda (which has caught up the terrifying ideology of Islam) will continue, Brexit and the astonishing achievements of Donald Trump notwithstanding. These are interruptions, temporary barriers to a tide of history that cannot be permanently held back. Not only will it break over us in full force, but it will be worse than we have experienced or can even imagine.

We are not convinced that it has to be so. We think that the era of Socialism is over. As a dominant political creed it lasted a hundred years, from 1917 (the Russian Communist revolution) to 2017 (the inauguration of President Trump). Over now, the socialist century that included Nazism and the fascism of Italy and Portugal as well as the Communist regimes. Some of those will continue, and will die hard. But they will die. And no new regimes like those of China and North Korea and Cuba are likely to be established. Welfare, which could be called “socialism light”, will not be affordable by any state.

Of course, no prediction can be depended on. The unforeseen occurs.

The Times (UK) reports:

Boris Johnson has pledged to lead a “people’s government” and spread opportunity to every corner of the country after securing an emphatic election win.

Conservative victories in a string of former Labour heartland seats meant that the party secured a majority of 76, the biggest at a general election since Margaret Thatcher’s in 1987.

Jeremy Corbyn conceded defeat at 3.20am.

Hugely important question:

Is the Conservative pro-Brexit victory a symptom of a popular swing away from socialism and globalism in the West generally?

May it be so!

The fiercest, most intense and most extensive war ever fought is raging now. The battleground where no blood is spilt, no corpses buried, is the abstract sphere of ideas. The weapons are words.

The sides are Globalism versus Nationalism.

The issue is the future of the human race.

The question is, should there be separate self-governing nations or world government?

The Cold War was about the same question. International communism with its world government aspirations sought to conquer nation states defending individual freedom. The communist side lost, but its ideologues lived to fight another day.

Many of them lived in the nation states whose governments opposed the spread of communism. They fight now for their world government ideal from within their free countries.

John Fonte writes at American Greatness:

In 2008, Robert Kagan, then advising the presidential campaign of Senator John McCain, declared that the “United States . . . should not oppose, but welcome a world of pooled and diminished national sovereignty.”

The social-material base of the transnationalists [the globalists – ed] is housed in many institutions and organizations. For example, in the leadership of the United Nations; with bureaucrats from the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank; with judges from the World Court in the Hague, the International Criminal Court, and the European Court of Human Rights.

The social base certainly includes the leadership of the European Union (which is a model for supranational governance) and its administrators in the European Commission, judges in the European Court of Justice, and other EU officials. It includes international non-governmental organizations (e.g. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Greenpeace, George Soros’s Open Society foundations, etc.); and it includes “the Davoisie,” the global corporate leaders who attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. …

[T]he Obama Administration [promoted] transnational progressivism and diminishing democratic sovereignty. As Obama told the United Nations in 2016:

We’ve bound our power to international laws and institutions . . . I am convinced that in the long run, giving up freedom of action—not our ability to protect ourselves but binding ourselves to international rules over the long term—enhances our security.

With the Brexit referendum, the election of Donald Trump, and the rise of conservative democratic nationalists throughout the West, the global governance project has been seriously challenged for the first time. It appears that the “arc of history” has been altered.

So, what is this conflict between democratic sovereignty and transnational progressivism (or globalism) all about?

It is about the oldest questions in politics, examined by Plato and Aristotle: who should rule and on what basis? Who makes the rules by which we are governed? What is legitimate and what is not?

The program for the National Conservative Conference states that since the fall of the Berlin Wall, many American conservatives have “grown increasingly attached to a vision of a ‘global rules-based liberal order’ that would bring peace and prosperity to the entire world while attenuating the independence of nations”.

Wait! Conservatives have done that? Which conservatives? Why? When? And in what way, then, are they conservative?

So, let us examine this post-1989 “global rules-based liberal order”.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many conservatives embraced President George H. W. Bush’s call for a “new world order”. It appeared to be a consolidation of the West’s Cold War victory and, thus, the building of a Reagan-Thatcher global order based on expanding liberal democracy and free markets.

Ah! Phew! A Reagan-Thatcher liberal order would be just fine.

But the “rules” in this “rules-based” liberal global order began to “evolve” (as academics like to say).

“Evolve” to the “academics” means change into a totally different, in fact an opposite concept.

In the 1990s, the United Nations Landmines Treaty and the establishment of the International Criminal Court were enacted by globalist forces (including European nation-states, American NGOs, and foundations) against the concerns of American sovereignty.

Recognizing this new transnationalist challenge in September 2000, John Bolton, in a University of Chicago law journal article, portrayed a coming conflict between “Globalists and Americanists.” At that time, 19 years ago, Bolton warned that we must take global governance seriously as a threat to democratic sovereignty.

A decade later, the Obama Administration in the name of the liberal global order was strong-arming democratic nation-states into adhering to progressive social policies concerning radical feminism, abortion, LGBT, and gender issues.

Meanwhile, the EU forced the removal of democratically elected leaders in Italy and Greece, and, led by Germany, facilitated mass migration from the developing world without the consent of the people of Europe’s democratic nation-states. It appears that the “rules” have changed as the liberal global order envisioned by Reagan-Thatcher conservatives has morphed into the transnational progressive order of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel.

In a “rules-based” global order the crucial question, of course, is who makes the rules? We are always reassured by the foreign policy establishment, dominated by self-styled “liberal internationalists” (who are, in reality, transnational progressives)—“don’t worry, Americans and their democratic allies will be making the rules”.

Yes, it is true that American elites will play an oversized role in the formation of global “rules”. Therefore, we should take a close look at what American elites are saying.

A leading international relations specialist, and supporter of global governance, Princeton University Professor G. John Ikenberry asks how do nation-states “reconcile the international liberal vision of increasing authority lodged above the nation-state—where there is a sharing and pooling of sovereignty—with domestic liberal democracy built on popular sovereignty.” He admits, “This is the unresolved problem in the liberal international project.”

Ikenberry’s answer is buried in several footnotes in his book, Liberal Leviathan. He cites American international relations scholars, Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye. Their argument is that national democracies cannot be relied upon to formulate the global “rules” because they disregard the interests of foreigners (Keohane cites the United States and Israel explicitly as major transgressors in this regard.)

Given the “limitations” of democratic sovereignty—of democratic self-government—American international relations specialists contend that the legitimacy of the rules-based order lies with “external epistemic communities” and “external epistemic actors.” You got that? “External epistemic actors.” In other words, for American transnationalists, global experts in international law, human rights, the environment, gender equity, and the like, would have greater legitimacy in the creation of “global rules” than democratically elected officials. This is a prescription for post-democratic rule.

Unelected dictators – among them no doubt some Americans – will be the world’s rulers as they are now of the EU. And like the rulers of the EU, they will be redistributionists, Socialists, collectivists. Their world order will be ruled much as China is. By force and coercion. By the imposition of an orthodoxy of ideas. Heretics will be removed before the contamination of an unauthorized opinion can spread.   

Without a doubt, the American leadership class is crucial to the success of the post-democratic global governance project. Because of the power of the American nation-state, U.S. submission to global authority would have to be voluntary. And that, indeed, is the dream of American transnational progressives (including our corporate elites)—America would provide what they would loudly hail as “leadership” in first creating and then submitting to the “rules” of a supranational legal regime.

This is what the American Bar Association means when it advocates the “global rule of law”. This is what Robert Kagan meant when he asserted that the United States “should not oppose but welcome a world of pooled and diminished national sovereignty”.

This is what President Bill Clinton meant when he told his confidant Strobe Talbott that “we have to build a global social system” for a world in the future in which America was no longer the leading power. Talbott noted that Clinton was “careful not to broadcast” these beliefs “while in office”.

And this is what President Obama meant when he told the United Nations in 2016 that by “binding ourselves to international laws and institutions” and that by “giving up freedom of action” and “binding ourselves to international rules over the long term” America would actually enhance its security. …

For decades conservative thinking has ignored the globalist challenge. The good news is that the Trump Administration is taking the conflict between democratic sovereignty and global governance seriously.

During his U.N. speech in 2017, President Trump mentioned sovereignty more than 20 times. He began by declaring “In foreign affairs we are renewing the principle of sovereignty”. He stated, “Our success depends upon a coalition of strong and independent nations that embrace their sovereignty to promote security, prosperity, and peace.”

The following year, President Trump told the United Nations:

[S]overeign and independent nations are the only vehicles where freedom has ever survived and democracy has ever endured . . . so we must protect our sovereignty and our cherished independence above all . . . We reject the ideology of globalism, and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism.

So of course the globalists – aka the Left, the Progressives, the Communists, the Democratic Party, the EU, the UN, and namely Merkel, Putin, Xi Jinping, Corbyn, Pelosi – hate him. Hate him. The savior of freedom.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, speaking in Brussels, declared “our mission is to reassert sovereignty, reform the liberal international order, and we want our friends to help us and exert their sovereignty as well.” The speech was called, “Restoring the Role of the Nation-State in the Liberal International Order.” …

Months later, Pompeo told the Claremont Institute:

Countries all over the world are rediscovering their national identities, and we are supporting them. We’re asking them to do what’s best for their people as well. The wave of electoral surprises has swept from Britain to the United States and all the way to Brazil.

Today, we are witnessing the awakening of a national conservatism that might have been dormant, but has always been with us. …

The old conservative formula, that essentially ignored the transnational progressive challenge externally—and the identity politics-multiculturalist challenge internally—is not adequate to face the contemporary threats from global progressive left-liberalism.

National conservatism (in our country, we could call it Americanism) is needed to frame the two core issues of our time: the external challenge from globalism that I have examined, and the closely related internal challenge from identity-politics, multiculturalism, intersectionality, political correctness, social justice, woke-ism, whatever you want to call it—that the Claremont Institute and several speakers at the National Conservatism Conference have identified as the major adversary facing our nation today.

On both fronts, externally and internally, we are now involved in a conflict that will determine, not simply the direction of politics, but the existence of the democratic nation-state in America, Britain, the West, and throughout the world.

The British government is failing to accomplish Brexit – the country’s exit from the European Union, for which a majority of Britons voted in a referendum.

Why? Because the government and the Civil Service consist of people who want Britain to remain in the EU. They know the EU is undemocratic, deeply corrupt, and intent on Islamizing its member states, but that’s what they like about it.

The voters who put in the Tory [Conservative] government are angry. So angry, that when they were asked in a recent poll, “would you vote Tory or for the Brexit Party in the potential Euros (European Parliament elections]?”, 92 % said they would vote for the Brexit Party.

James Delingpole writes at Breitbart:

92 percent is a significant majority of Conservative voters who will be seeking to punish their own party in the likely Euro elections by voting for one of their more strongly Eurosceptic rivals — either Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party (the only other option offered in this ad hoc poll) or UKIP [the United Kingdom Independence Party].

The Conservatives are going to get creamed if and when the next Euro elections happen, of that there’s no question. Their natural constituency won’t easily forgive the party for betraying Brexit in the way that [Prime Minister] Theresa May and her Cabinet of Remainers have done.

But the bigger question is: what will happen when Conservative voters’ loyalties are tested in a general election?

It’s a very important question because on the answer depends the fate of Britain. …

Is there a terrifying possibility that the Labour Party, led by the Communist Islamophiliac Jeremy Corbyn, could be voted into power?

Delingpole fears the answer may be yes:

In normal times, there’s not a snowball’s chance in Hell that a terrorist-supporting, anti-Semitic, hard-left loon like Jeremy Corbyn would ever get voted into power by the generally sensible British electorate.

But these are not normal times. Various clever rich people have already made sure to move their assets offshore in preparation for the massive confiscatory spree and capital controls which will instantly follow the election of Corbyn’s socialist regime.

I used to think they were just being paranoid. Now I’m starting to worry they may have been prescient.

The now-far-left Labour Party might win not because the British want what it’s threatening them with, but … what? Because the Conservatives are threatening them with much the same thing?

There is no general appetite for our broadly free market democracy to be replaced by Venezuela-style collectivism. But collectivism, nonetheless, is what Britain may get because of what political analyst Matthew Goodwin correctly identifies as the “perfect storm” threatening the Conservative party with its greatest existential crisis in living memory:

Today, the dark clouds that are swirling above Britain’s most successful party are visible to all; the government’s disastrous handling of Brexit; a Cabinet that is deeply split; a parliamentary party that has fractured; a Conservative electorate and membership that are at logger-heads with their leaders; a rebooted and well-funded populist Right under a re-energised Nigel Farage; and a fundamentally damaged Conservative brand. At no other point in Britain’s post-war period has the Conservative Party looked so vulnerable.

You may say the Conservatives have brought this disaster on themselves. And you’d be absolutely right. To my mind this goes far beyond Brexit — which merely brought matters to a head.

The rot set in a long, long time ago when the Conservatives decided that they no longer wanted to be conservative. …

This tectonic shift has been building for some time, driven on the one hand by the forces of Fabianism and cultural Marxism, on the other by the Conservatives’ surrender of their core philosophies in favour of “pragmatism” (i.e. drifting leftward to shake off the “nasty” tag, which of course they’ll never lose because the people who dictate the terms are their even more left-wing opponents).

For a forensic analysis of what has gone wrong, I recommend this must-read essay by David Eyles at Country Squire titled Post-Brexit Tory Doom::

The result of the Conservatives having abandoned conservatism is the unintentional creation of a philosophical void. It has meant that the Conservatives, upon taking office, have found themselves unable to forge political direction for the country. Indeed, David Cameron almost prided himself upon this by describing himself as “pragmatic” – in other words he blew with whatever wind direction was prevailing at the time. Into this void has stepped the Civil Service, which instead of being politically neutral as it always used to be, is now heavily politicised towards the Left. In addition, the rest of the élites which oversee so much of our public life have ensured that the Westminster Conservative Party have been softened up socially and culturally over dinner party tables. The Civil Service has thus successfully guided the Conservative government into territory that is now firmly occupied by the Leftist Clerisy.

As in the US, the administrative state is a swamp in which reptiles of the Left work to transform the nation into something nearer to their Socialist ideal.

No doubt the forces of Fabianism and cultural Marxism have contributed to the turning of the Conservative Party into a party of the Left. No doubt the treason of the civil servants has worked to make the change. But what must have done more harm than anything else to the nation as a whole, wrecking its ability to govern itself is – the EU.

Britain’s membership of the EU has been one of the worst mistakes in the islands’ history. Perhaps the very worst. It was like an abusive marriage. Europe debauched Britain not by violence, not be rapine and plunder, but by psychological corruption. The British got into bad company and were led astray. Britain has caught the morbid sickness of Europe.

The British were never Europeans. They are greatly different from the continentals. Their kind live in North America and Australia. Regardless of what the maps contend, psychologically speaking the Atlantic Ocean is much narrower than the English Channel.  

The European states – at least those in the south –  never could govern themselves well. Could never get the hang of it. Their elected governments changed so often, the representatives who had far to come to the capital cities where the parliaments sat, barely had time to get unpacked before they were on their way home again. Unless they fell under tyrannous dictators.

The British had a talent for governing (even though they messed up with the American colonies).

And the British used to have contempt – healthy or inexcusably racist according to your point of view – for Europeans. They called them by abusive names: Frogs, Krauts, Spics, Wops … “Wogs”, originally a rude word for Africans, came to be applied to all foreigners generally. The expression “Wogs begin at Calais” was a common refrain. When Britain joined the European Union, many lamented, “Now Wogs begin at Land’s End” (the westernmost point of England).

The British became, or tried to become, Europeans. They caught the lethal European sickness. Can they recover? If Brexit is finally accomplished, will the nation start to heal?

We share James Delingpole’s worry that it might not.

James Delingpole predicts mutiny in the British army.

We hope he’s right. It cannot come too soon.

He writes at Breitbart:

Sooner or later there is going to be a mutiny in the British Army.

As exhibit a) I present this essay  — titled The Army Needs More Feminists — by some brown-nosing major, presumably written with a view to ingratiating himself with his PC superiors.

British Army Centre for Army Leadership@Army_Leadership

‘The Army Needs More Feminists’. Intrigued? Read our latest #Leadership Insight by Maj Tim Towler available for you to read now. https://www.army.mod.uk/umbraco/Surface/Download/Get/6840 …

Picture a hall with a stage. You are part of an audience consisting mostly of women. You don’t know how you got there, but now you are there you’ll stay for the entertainment. .

Enter Major T. of the Royal Scots regiment. He stands center stage. He smiles and nods acknowledgment of polite applause.

He is dressed in black pantyhose and red high-heeled shoes. A pink tulle tutu. His fingernails are painted blue. He has shaved carefully, and put on red lipstick. He is buttoned into the jacket of his regimental formal wear, with medals. They remind you that he is a member of the armed forces of a country that once ruled over the greatest empire in history, whose soldiers won famous battles on all inhabited continents. Let martial music sound in your memory, the drums, the pipes. And attend to Major T.

In a small high voice – put on for the occasion – he delivers his speech, the text of the article.

A Good Time To Be A Girl [by Helena Morrissey] is not a title that will immediately draw soldiers to grab this book off the shelf. Ashamedly, I would not have read it a couple of years ago. Perhaps it is this shame that is forcing me to write now, or, the shame that previously I might not have acted when I should have done; a guilt knowing that I have let objectifying and discriminatory comments go by unchallenged in the past. As an infantry officer, my experience of working with women is limited, a poor excuse, but my recent roles alongside diplomats and business leaders have been a turning point. They have opened my eyes to some of the challenges and biases that still exist and have made me feel empowered and duty bound to act. I had not considered feminism a leadership issue before, but if 2 leadership is truly about enabling others to succeed, then feminism (and diversity more broadly) is critical. Embracing diversity, standing up for what is right, and maximizing everyone’s potential is vital to leading at all levels, and especially to leading through change. …

If leadership is truly about enabling others to succeed, then feminism is crucial … I felt ashamed … I felt guilty … now I feel empowered and duty bound to act … work towards a truly inclusive modern society …

Burble, burble, burble.

Feminism is a fight for equality … equal but different … celebrate the difference between genders … we need to embrace diversity  … change the patriarchal society … for the good of us all …

He raises a shoulder and looks at you coyly. He sways his hips.

He does not know that he is clowning. He is serious. He believes that what he is doing is virtuous. Very, very virtuous because politically correct and à la mode.

Do you leave feeling ashamed, guilty, determined to do better, to become a feminist? Or shaking your head, laughing bitterly?

Let’s return to Delingpole.

He comments on the article:

After [the first paragrpah, quoted above], it gets worse. Much worse. Apart from being badly written (“Ashamedly”??), it is simply not the kind of wheedling, breast-beating milquetoastery one would expect of an officer charged with defending Britain from her myriad enemies.

What, in heaven’s name, is this pantywaist pillock doing reading feminist tracts anyway? Surely, if he’s going to be remotely effective at his job, he should be reading Clausewitz. Or Sun Tzu. Or Churchill. Or Napoleon. Or, if he’s not up to those, tattered copies of War Picture Library and Commando.

That essay — or, more to the point, the fact that the Army’s PR department felt it was worth boasting about on Twitter — embodies so much of what is wrong with Britain’s armed forces. (And the United States’s, and Australia’s and the rest — for they’re all susceptible to the same social pressures): their emasculation and near-ruination by political correctness.

He proceeds to his “exhibit b)”:

As exhibit b) I present this video of a bunch of squaddies protesting at the fact that one of their ex-comrades has been chucked out of the Army for the ‘crime’ of posing for a selfie with Tommy Robinson. 

Please go there and watch the 30 second video. The laughing happiness of Tommy and the soldiers is wonderful to see.

Mutiny is not something you associate with the British Army and its proud traditions of discipline and loyalty to the Crown. But I see after a quick search that there was one as recently as 2013 when 16 soldiers of the Yorkshire Regiment were court-martialled for “disobeying a lawful command” after staging a sit-down at a parade.

Their complaint — apparently in response to an unpopular captain and colour sergeant — was that they were being “led by muppets”.

Since that incident, the number of muppets in senior positions in the Army has increased exponentially.

Hence, for example, the toe-curling recruitment ad the Army released earlier this year showing soldiers on exercise in the mountains pausing reverently, mid-patrol, to observe a Muslim comrade ritually wash himself in a stream, whip out his prayer mat, don his prayer hat and bow down in prayer. “Keeping my faith”, the ad was titled.

This rampant PC is causing huge damage to Army morale (not to mention operational effectiveness) and may go some way to explaining why the Army is having such problems attracting new recruits.

After all, who wants to sign their life away for a minimum of four years service if it’s going to entail endless lectures from [officers] on the vital importance of racial sensitivity and the valuable contribution to society made by women? You join the Army to be the best, prove your manhood and see the elephant. Everything else is for the birds.

You join the army to kill your country’s enemies.  

At the weekend, I attended a panel event on this very subject at the Battle of Ideas. It was called The Military: Muscle or Mindfulness — and one of the panelists was an obviously very pissed off ex-soldier called Beverley Henshaw. She clearly had no truck with all the New Age, touchy-feelie nonsense which her superiors think is the way forward. She wanted the Army to get on with its core business: defending the realm and — I’m guessing — killing the nation’s enemies.

A senior officer on the panel — Lt Gen Sir Simon Mayall — clearly sympathized with this view. But when I asked which of the top brass were to blame for the Army’s cuckolding he was too politic to name names. (I’m told privately that the rot goes right to the top with Sir Nick Carter, the Chief of Defence Staff, who apparently can’t get enough of all this PC stuff. He was educated at Winchester, the school which traditionally trains all our diplomats to suck up to and sell out to foreigners, so that explains a lot.)

The problem, of course, is that the people who get to the very top of the military tend to be creatures of the Establishment. And the current political Establishment, as we know, right now, is very, very squishily PC and excruciatingly risk averse.

This would explain the Army’s massive overreaction when some of the squaddies posed for photos with Tommy Robinson. The Army felt compelled to issue the following statement:

Far-right ideology is completely at odds with the values and ethos of the armed forces. The armed forces have robust measures in place to ensure those exhibiting extremist views are neither tolerated nor permitted to serve. Anyone who is in breach of the army’s values and standards will face administrative action.

But this says more about the Establishment’s prejudice than it does about who the real Tommy Robinson is or what he stands for. He is only “far right” or “extremist” in the Guardian sense of “anyone to the right of Jeremy Corbyn”. But it suits the Establishment — led by his arch nemesis Theresa May — to pretend that Tommy Robinson is representative of some terrible far-right threat to Britain. In this, he performs the function of Emmanuel Goldstein in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – as the state’s officially designated hate figure on whom everyone can pour their righteous scorn in order to show their virtue and cement societal solidarity.

Ordinary people aren’t buying this. They just can’t see what’s wrong with a working-class lad making a fuss about all the Muslim gangs which, over a period of twenty years or more, have been raping the girls in mostly working-class areas. Also, they think he’s right to stand up for our troops and right to express his disgust when those troops come back from active service in hellholes like Afghanistan and Iraq only to be jeered at by the kind of jihadist sympathizers who, given half the chance, would be blowing up little girls at pop concerts or massacring kufar in shopping malls. They know what Britain’s enemies look like — and they don’t look like Tommy Robinson.

Since it’s ordinary people from whose ranks Britain’s soldiers are mostly recruited you can see why there’s a problem. The Army’s Top Brass are where the rest of the Establishment are: terrified of doing anything that might upset the Religion of Peace; painfully eager to give the Army some kind of post-conflict-era relevance as an agency for diversity and gender outreach and mindfulness.

And the squaddies are all thinking: sod this for a game of soldiers — I didn’t join the Army for this bollocks.

Moral clarity is needed on the question of whether the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad can be allowed to get away with using gas against the Syrian people in the civil war over which he presides year after year.

The answer is NO. He cannot be allowed to.

Gas was delivered on to the Syrian town of Douma from the air. No rebel faction has aircraft. It could only have been delivered by Assad, or his Russian allies at his behest.

There is no defense against chemical and biological weapons. They can be used against large numbers of civilians. That is why they are called “weapons of mass destruction”.

So yes, it is worse to kill off whole populations with gas or anthrax than to engage an army with conventional weapons.

If Assad or anyone else in a position to develop and deliver mass-murdering gas gets away with doing it, others will do it too, such as the mullahs of Iran, the despot of North Korea.

And if gas is re-introduced as a weapon of war, no one anywhere will be out of its reach.

Bad actors hesitate to use biological weapons – the spreading of diseases, such as anthrax – because the stuff can kill the attackers as easily as the attacked. Disease is wholly impartial and no respecter of persons. But gas, dropped from the air as it was over Douma, kills only those below, not those who drop it or send it. It is the cheapest weapon of mass destruction an immoral government with an air force can use.

Elliot Friedland writes at the Clarion Project:

[President] Trump was on the phone with the leaders of France and Britain, the only two other Western powers with serious force projection capabilities, although their militaries pale in comparison to that of the United States. …

The question is whether the United States and her allies will wage war on Syria.

Many pundits and politicians from both sides of the aisle feel the question has already been decided. Of course the President should act in the face of such immorality. America has a responsibility to lead, to not let tyrants commit atrocities with impunity. Despite the partisan rancor that normally characterizes Washington, there is remarkable unity around the idea that Trump ought to authorize at least some military action in Syria.

There are many good reasons to support such a position. Clarion Project’s Ryan Mauro forcefully argued the case against Assad on Fox News, highlighting the vital importance of maintaining deterrence against chemical weapons attacks.

But opposition to the war is bringing a strange medley of personalities from across the political spectrum together.

Tucker Carlson, one of the most watched right-of-center talk show hosts on American television, delivered a blistering rebuke of the pro-war crowd on his show. He said that even if Assad did order a chemical weapons attack that killed children (which Carlson acknowledges he is perfectly capable of doing), to remove him would only bring further chaos at the expense of American lives and billions more dollars.

In this opinion, he is joined by none other than Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain’s Labour party, who called for restraint and a multilateral solution brought by the United Nations.

The iniquitous United Nations, that does much harm and no good! (It must be abolished.)

Corbyn has links to Islamist figures, has called Hamas and Hezbollah his “friends” and is embroiled in an on-going anti-Semitism scandal. In the UK, Corbyn’s position was supported by none other than Nick Griffin, former leader of the far-right British National Party. Griffin tweeted that he would vote Labour and support Corbyn if he stopped U.S. airstrikes in Syria.

Left-wing journalist and self-described “anarcho-psychonaut” Caitlin Johnstone wrote in Medium “We All Need to Unite Against War in Syria Regardless of Ideology.” She cites Intercept founder Glenn Greenwald, who got famous breaking Edward Snowden’s Wikileaks as also being against the war.

Patriarcha, an ultraconservative Christian Facebook page even shared her article, calling it “compulsory reading”, despite that page’s longstanding visceral hatred for anything emanating from the left.

The prospect of war is uniting people who normally couldn’t stand to even be in the same room without screaming at each other. The conventional partisan alignments are breaking down in the face of the ever-changing political reality.

Fortunately, the person who will decide what to do is not Tucker Carlson, or Jeremy Corbyn, or Nick Griffin, or Caitlin Johnstone, or Glenn Greenwald, or some “ultraconservative Christian” …

Muslims are forming political parties in Europe, and are succeeding in getting candidates elected to parliamentary seats.

Long before they have enough seats to form governments, they will have turned West European states into full-blown tyrannies. The process has begun with the suppression of free speech (criticizing Islam) in Germany, Austria, the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Italy.

Judith Bergman writes about some of the Islamic parties at Gatestone:

Sweden’s brand new first Islamic party, Jasin, is aiming to run for the 2018 parliamentary elections. According to the website of the party, Jasin is a “multicultural, democratic, peaceful party” that is “secular” and aims to “unite everyone from the East … regardless of ethnicity, language, race, skin color or religion”. Jasin apparently knows what the Swedes like to hear.

In an interview, the founder and spokesperson of the party, Mehdi Hosseini, who came from Iran to Sweden 30 years ago, revealed that the leader of the new political party, Sheikh Zoheir Eslami Gheraati, does not actually live in Sweden. He is an Iranian imam, who lives in Teheran, but Jasin wants to bring him to Sweden: “I thought he was such a peaceful person who would be able to manifest the peaceful side of Islam. I think that is needed in Sweden,” said Hosseini.

The party does not, however, fit the description Hosseini gives it. He uses the vocabulary of tolerance to deceive Swedish voters. It is deliberate deception – taqiyya – which is not just permitted but prescribed by Islam.

But the lies he tells for the ears of Swedes won’t do for Muslim voters who don’t want democracy and tolerance of other religions. They want a party that will do what the Koran and the hadith say  it must do. So for those who don’t like that description of his party, Hosseini has another:

The purpose of the Jasin party, however, does not appear to be either secular or multicultural. In its application to the Swedish Election Authority, the party writes – with refreshing honesty – that it will “firstly follow exactly what the Koran says, secondly what Shiite imams say”. The Jasin party also states that it is a “non-jihadi and missionary organization, which will spread Islam’s real side, which has been forgotten and has been transformed from a beautiful to a warlike religion …”

In mid-September, the Swedish Election Authority informed Jasin that it failed to deliver the needed signatures, but that it is welcome to try again. Anna Nyqvist, from the Swedish Election Authority, said that a political party with an anti-democratic or Islamic agenda is eligible to run for parliament if the party’s application fulfills all formalities.

And what does it matter if the leader of a party which might in time form a government in Sweden lives in another country? (Government of one country by another used to be called “colonialism”.)

Nyqvist considers it unproblematic that the leader of the party lives in Iran. “This is the essence of democracy, that all views should be allowed. And it is up to them to choose their party leader,”  Nyqvist said.

Can any literate person raised in the West be as stupid as that? Oh, yes. Many.

Islamist parties have begun to emerge in many European countries, such as the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, and France.

In the Netherlands, two Dutch Turks, former members of the Socialist party, founded a new party, Denk, only six months before the Dutch parliamentary elections. Despite the short timeframe, they managed to get one-third of the Muslim vote and three seats in parliament. The party does not hide its affinity for Turkey: Criticism of Turkey is taboo just as is their refusal to name the Turkish mass-slaughter of the Armenians during the First World War a genocide. The party ran on a platform against the integration of immigrants into Dutch society (instead advocating “mutual acceptance”, a euphemism for creating parallel Muslim societies); and for establishment of a “racism police” that would register “offenders” and exclude them from holding public office.

In Austria, Turkish Muslims also formed a new party, the New Movement for the Future (NBZ), established in January 2017. According to its founder, Adnan Dincer, the NBZ is not an Islamic party or a Turkish party, despite being composed mainly of Turkish Muslims. [Yet] several of the party’s Facebook posts are written only in Turkish. [And] Dincer has made no secret of the fact that his party strongly backs Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan … 

Who is taking Turkey back from the secular democracy it has been for nearly a century, to Islam-flavored autocracy.

In Belgium, several Islamic parties are preparing to run in the next elections. Dyab Abu Jahjah, apparently behind one of them, while not having presented a formal platform yet, has said he wants to “be part of an egalitarian radical renaissance that will conquer Brussels, Belgium, Europe and the whole world, with new politics of radical equality… defeat the forces of supremacy … of sustained privileges … of the status-quo … in every possible arena”.

Jahjah is a Lebanese immigrant, who emerged on the European scene, when he founded the now defunct Brussels-based Arab-European League in 2001. It was a pan-European political group aiming to create a Europe-wide “sharocracy” – a supposedly sharia-based “democracy”. In 2001, after the September 11 terror attacks, Jahjah said that he and many Muslims had felt a “sweet revenge feeling”. In 2004, Jahjah said that he supported the killing of foreign troops in Iraq. “I consider every death of an American, British or Dutch soldier as a victory.” He has also been opposed to the assimilation of Muslims, which he has described as “cultural rape”.

Jahjah used to be considered a Hezbollah-supporting extremist, and, although he describes himself as a “political friend” of Jeremy Corbyn, he was banned from entering Britain. In Belgium, however, he is seen as a respectable activist, leader of a group called Movement X, and formerly with his own weekly column in the Belgian daily De Standaard. The Belgian political magazine Knack named Jahjah the country’s fourth most influential person, just behind Manchester City footballer Vincent Kompany. In January 2017, however, De Standaard fired Jahjah after he praised a terror attack in Jerusalem. “By any means necessary, #freepalestine,” Jahjah had tweeted after a Muslim ISIS-affiliated terrorist plowed a truck through a crowd of young Israeli soldiers visiting Jerusalem, killing four and injuring countless others.

Jahjah will likely experience fierce competition from the “I.S.L.A.M.” party, founded in 2012, and working to implement Islamic law, sharia, in Belgium. The party already has branches in the Brussels districts of Anderlecht, Molenbeek and Liege. The party wants to “translate religion into practice”. …

The party has put forth a mayoral candidate for the Brussels municipal elections in 2018: Michel Dardenne, who converted to Islam in 2002. In his program, Dardenne speaks mainly of how much the party respects Belgian democracy and its constitution, while simply wanting to help an undefined populace against “the elites”. He may have found it easier to appeal to “progressive” non-Muslims that way. Brussels, 25% Muslim, has enormous potential for Islamic parties.

In France, several Islamic parties are also preparing to run in elections. One party is the PEJ, established in 2015 by French-Turkish Muslims and reportedly connected to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP. … The PEJ has already approved 68 candidates and wants to abolish the separation of church and state, make veils mandatory for schoolgirls in public schools, introduce halal food in all schools and fight “Islamophobia”.

Do Europeans want Islam to replace their own political systems and cultures? Are they aware that that is what is happening? Hard to tell.

Judith Bergman can’t tell. She asks –

How many Europeans are even paying attention to their [the Islamic parties’] agendas?

And who opened their paths to power?

The short answer is, the Left. Governments that are socialist in fact even when the parties in power are “conservative” in name. Bureaucrats who saw their populations shrinking to a point where it would become difficult to maintain their socialist welfare states, so in order to have people, lots and lots of people to pay into the welfare system, they imported millions of Muslims from the Third World, without a moment’s consideration of what values, what laws, what customs, what antagonisms the masses of newcomers brought with them. And, ironically, the majority of them are takers from the state rather than contributors to it. (For instance, 90% of immigrants to Austria are wholly dependent on state welfare.)

There’s nothing in the Koran about social security, free education, or national health services. Or democracy. Or the equality of women. Or same-sex marriage. Or against slavery.

But that will be just fine with West European leaders as long as the application of the Islamic party in power “has fulfilled all formalities”.

Note: Germany has allowed a terrorist organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), to register as a political party and – on a joint list with the Marxist-Leninist Party – nominate candidates for the federal parliament. See our post A strange, ironic, and tragic historical moment, September 9, 2027.

The Left hates gays and wants them to be killed. The Left believes women should be the slaves of men. The Left wants a world-ruling totalitarian theocracy. The Left wants the Jewish state to be wiped off the face of the earth, and all Jews ditto unless they humbly pay the theocrats protection money. The Left wants to forbid free speech. 

Of course the Left does not SAY it wants all that. It SAYS it really likes gays. It SAYS it believes in women’s equality and self-determination. It SAYS it wants religion kept out of politics. It SAYS – sometimes? occasionally? okay very occasionally – that it is against anti-Semitism. It SAYS it is for free speech.

Yet it protects, cossets, excuses, adulates, fawns upon, grovels to, and promotes Islam which wants all that.

Present proof:

The leader of the so-called Conservative Party of Britain hastened to recruit the 10 members of the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party to her side in order to have a (barely) working majority in Parliament after she lost many seats in a recent unnecessary general election. But no sooner did she think she had secured a life-saver, than furious protestors, including some Scottish members of her own party, tried to snatched it away. Hundreds took to the streets to demand that the DUP be kept out of government.

Mark Steyn writes about this new maelstrom set swirling in the ever more turbulent waters of the government in which Prime Minister Theresa May is flailing.

According to the slogans, the Democratic Unionist Party is a “hate” group because it is “anti-gay, anti-green, anti-women”. That’s to say, they’re opposed to same-sex marriage, abortion, and take a relaxed view of the impending climate apocalypse.

Oh, my.

Even worse, such views have made them Ulster’s most popular political party … Still, you can understand why the mob has briefly roused itself from Google to take to the streets to protest this week’s designated haters. It’s certainly unfortunate that Theresa May’s grip on power depends on such “anti-gay” and “anti-women” types, isn’t it?

But surely it’s also unfortunate that Jeremy Corbyn’s grip on power in the resurgent Labour Party depends on “anti-gay” and “anti-women” types, too. As Brendan O’Neill points out:

And all the while we have Labourites like Jeremy Corbyn mixing with Islamist groups that share all these same social views, except in an even more extreme form. Yet the people beating the streets over the DUP say nothing.

That’s true. Theresa May’s more recalcitrant friends in the DUP think gays are godless sodomites who’ll be spending eternity on a roasting spit in hell. Jeremy Corbyn’s more recalcitrant friends are disinclined to wait that long and would rather light them up now – or hurl them off the roof. Hamas, which Mr Corbyn supports, is fairly typical. Sample headline from Newsweek:

Hamas Executes Prominent Commander After Accusations Of Gay Sex

Doesn’t that make Hamas an anti-gay “hate group”? Well, no. You can bet that 90 per cent of the Google activists in the street protesting Theresa May’s ties to people who think men who love men shouldn’t be permitted to marry are entirely relaxed about Jeremy Corbyn’s ties to people who think men who love men should be burned alive or tossed off tall buildings.

This contradiction exists all over the western world. Today’s progressives cling to the most cobwebbed cliches: Polygamy? That’s something Mormons do in Utah, not Muslims in Canada, France, Britain, Sweden, with the not so tacit connivance of the state welfare systems. First-cousin marriage? That’s something stump-toothed Appalachians do after a bunk-up with Cindy Mae and a jigger of moonshine, not 75 per cent of Pakistani Britons in Bradford, and some 58 per cent throughout the rest of the country.

As for gays, forget Hamas and consider Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters in the United Kingdom: Fifty-two per cent of Muslims told Channel 4 they believed homosexuality should be illegal. Yet Mr Corbyn’s Labour Party has so assiduously courted these “haters” that it’s now electorally dependent on them. Mrs May didn’t court her haters in Ulster, and she’s wound up depending on them merely as an unintended consequence of her own ineptitude on the hustings.

Just to spell it out even more plainly, last year YouGov polled Britons in general on their attitudes to the aforementioned sodomites. Seventeen per cent thought homosexuality was “morally wrong”. If that sounds unnervingly high to you, what’s the reason? Over-sampling in East Belfast? A few rural backwaters not quite up to speed on the new gayer-than-thou Britain? No. In most parts of the country about 15 per cent declined to get with the beat. But in diverse, multicultural London, 29 per cent of the population regarded homosexuality as “morally wrong”.

So all those ninnies in the streets of London protesting 300,000 haters they’d never heard of twenty minutes earlier are surrounded by two-and-a-half million haters every day of their lives – in the Tube, in the restaurants, in the shops and offices of their supposedly vibrant, progressive metropolis.

Now why do you think that is? Could it possibly be connected to the fact that London is more “diverse”? As Douglas Murray points out in his soberly provocative new book The Strange Death of Europe, by the 2011 census in 23 of the capital’s 33 boroughs so-called “white British” people were in a minority. (You can bet it’s even more boroughs now.) And you can’t help noticing, sauntering around, say, Tower Hamlets, that the more “diverse” the community gets the fewer gays you see, and uncovered women, at least after dusk and walking about unaccompanied. It’s not quite the “Gay-Free Zone” promised by the posters of the Sharia Patrols, but it’s getting there.

So, if you think Ulster’s homophobic now, wait till its population is as multicultural as London’s. Boy, that’ll be a vote bonanza for the DUP haters, right? Except that, by then, Jeremy Corbyn will be posing in Fermanagh and Tyrone villages beaming next to body-bagged crones and full-bearded imams.

Thirteen years ago in The Spectator I wrote the following:

A few weeks back I was strolling along the Boulevard de Maisonneuve in Montreal when I saw a Muslim woman across the street, all in black, covered head to toe, the full hejab. She was passing a condom boutique, its window filled with various revolting novelty prophylactics, ‘cum rags’, etc. It was a perfect snapshot of the internal contradictions of multicultural diversity. In 30 years’ time, either the Arab lady will still be there, or the condom store, but not both. Which would you bet on?

We are not yet halfway through that thirty years, but the condom boutique has gone. And in Canadian citizenship ceremonies the Muslim woman can now take her oath of allegiance wearing the full body-bag – while Justin Trudeau marches in the LGBTQWERTY Pride Parade. Like I said: In the medium run, which would you bet on? Forty per cent of five-year-olds in Germany are of “non-European” extraction: What do you think their attitudes to gays and women will be in twenty years’ time? Or are you hoping you can hold the line on the “anti-green” thing and they’ll still support the Paris Accords? …

The fools prancing in the London streets denouncing a benign and harmless Democratic Unionist Party are auditioning to be Islam’s prison bitches. But they’ll be obsessing about the last socially conservative right-wing redneck on earth even as the haters all around consume them.

Theresa May, Prime Minister of Britain by some facetious quirk of fate, stupidly called a very early general election, and lost the support of millions of voters. Her wild action resuscitated the Labour Party, which was almost defunct under the leadership of the Member for Hamas, Jeremy Corbyn.

She must form a government to keep Britain from prematurely becoming the Islamic land it is destined to be. She can only do so now by entering into a coalition with a smaller party.

Then she needs to be replaced. By a man, we hope. There are far too many women – of both biological sexes – in European governments. (Margaret Thatcher was one of the very rare exceptions among biological women who could think politically like a man.  She was often and rightly called “the best man in the Conservative Party”.)

(We also except the two women on the four-member editorial board of The Atheist Conservative.)

Which brings us back to our deliberately provocative statement, made from time to time on these pages, that “the human race consists of adults and women”.

What Britain needs is a true conservative, an adult in the patriarchal tradition. He should also be fiercely anti-Islam. (But would a militantly anti-Islam politician be allowed to live?)

Raheem Kassam writes at Breitbart:

There may be a silver lining for small-c conservative voters following the shock results of the UK General Election. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) — whom the Conservatives will seek a coalition government with — is far closer to conservative philosophy than Britain’s Tories have been for decades.

Formed in 1971 by Dr. Rev. Ian Paisley, now deceased, the party grew out of the Protestant Unionist Party.

Built upon the resistance to Irish Republican terrorism and a pro-UK, unionist mindset, the DUP also represents staunchly social conservative values.

Well, on the plus side for small-c conservatives, the DUP may remind the Tories what they are supposed to believe, philosophically.

The DUP forms the largest bloc in the Northern Ireland Assembly and has a far stronger socially conservative record on matters such as same sex marriage and access to abortion.

So to us the DUP is not the ideal modifying force on the British Tories. We ourselves have nothing against same-sex marriage, and though we are against abortion in general we know there are times when it is a necessary recourse.

We also regret that the leader of the DUP is yet another woman. But many of their policies are sound:

Now led by mother of three Arlene Foster, the DUP were staunchly pro-Brexit at the UK referendum on membership of the European Union, with some of their activists and leaders joining UKIP leader Nigel Farage on his Brexit tour ahead of the vote. …

During the referendum, the DUP allied with the Leave.EU and Grassroots Out campaigns, and their manifesto states:

The DUP sees no value in the attempts by some to keep re-running the referendum. Instead, we want to get on with the work to make it a success; to write our own laws; to deliver on the vision of a Global UK with new free trade deals; to control immigration; to deliver policies for farming and fishing shaped to our needs; to lift the burden of unnecessary regulation.

… The party’s MPs hold an array of views on climate change, though many believe the DUP to be “climate change sceptics”.

The former finance minister Sammy Wilson has said: “…we are already paying through the nose for electricity because we go down the route of the dearest electricity possible through renewable energy” and are “putting our agricultural industry in jeopardy because there is no greater producer of greenhouse gases than cows”.

He has referred to climate change legislation as a “con”.

So of course the Left hates them:

Hard leftist groups like OpenDemocracy have already begun sharing articles packed with fake news about the DUP.

The Soros-funded group, which claims to represent “independent” media, claims the DUP had some sort of definitive links to a post-“fascist turn” Enoch Powell, the former Conservative Member of Parliament who warned over mass migration into the United Kingdom.

Such a “fascist turn” is a myth in itself, and Powell’s only link to the DUP was via his campaign manager who was in a different party at the time. …

The Soros site refers to the DUP as “Irish terrorists”, though the campaign of terrorism was waged by the DUP’s opponents, with the Ulster Resistance usually being referred to as a paramilitary group. The IRA, which targeted civilians, infrastructure, the British Army, and British unionists, are commonly regarded as the most influential terrorist outfit, and believed to be linked to DUP opponents Sinn Fein. The IRA killed around 1,700 people during the Troubles.

The Resistance was never implicated in a major incident that took place, with most civilian deaths attributable to the IRA — perhaps the only group alongside its political partners who would refer to the Ulster Resistance as “terrorists”. …

The DUP has said: “The party’s stance is consistent, that anyone involved in illegal activity should be investigated and face the full weight of the law.”

Sources close to the DUP have suggested to Breitbart London that “all they’ll want is cash”, but between Arlene Foster’s need to form a new executive in Northern Ireland, and the socially conservative views of its members, the DUP will likely be thinking carefully about what they can get the Conservative Party to compromise upon from the centre-left manifesto issued by Theresa May.

A “centre-left” conservative party! If the DUP can make it genuinely conservative, and further enrage George Soros the earthly Satan – then this election has not been a disaster after all but the means to better government and more victories over the evil Left.

But under new, male leadership, we hope.