Throughout Europe, there seems to be radical polarization of politics taking place, with relatively new and surging ethnonationalist parties emerging on the right and good ‘old fashioned Communist parties on the left. In “Communism’s Comeback?“, Václav Klaus conjectures. Of the successful transition to democracy & capitalism in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union, Klaus writes:
In Czechoslovakia we rapidly succeeded in establishing the framework of a fully-fledged parliamentary democracy. It proved that it was not necessary to create a political system: it was sufficient, to use economic terminology, to begin the process of entering the political market.
This favourable political structure lasted until the end of the last decade, and the outbreak of the 2008-09 financial and economic crisis. Different political tendencies then started to prevail. It led to the shift from standard politics to post-political, post-democratic arrangements, from authentic, ideologically well-defined political parties to ad hoc political projects based more on marketing than on ideology or party membership.
“It was not a consequence of the economic crisis; the crisis only accelerated it. I am afraid this is a more general European trend. It is the consequence of the increasingly destructive weakening, if not destruction, of the nation-state by the European Union and of the strengthening of global governance. It is also a result of the gradual replacement of traditional European and Western values with politically correct norms based on new ‘isms’ — cultural relativism, human rightsism, multiculturalism, NGO-ism, feminism, homosexualism, environmentalism, juristocracy and mediacracy. Classical political democracy is, I am afraid, finished.”
The same thing, to a much lesser degree, appears to be happening in the U.S. political scene. There is an ‘implicit Whiteness’ to the Tea Party and a growing silent majority of whites, while the Democratic Party (after suffering a historic loss last month) is moving not to the middle, but further to the left.
Imagine, if you will, a Presidential race involving Pat Buchanan (circa 1992) and, say, Elizabeth Warren… or Bernie Sanders.
