John Hinderaker [1]
Tonight there was a rather large demonstration against Boris Johnson and the Tories in central London, I believe near Downing Street. Of course, Johnson hasn’t done anything since yesterday to justify the angry demonstration. Basically, the leftists were protesting the fact that they lost the election. Any outcome other than a left-wing victory is, to them, unacceptable.
Of course, this is a rather familiar situation.
And as Richard Fernandez over at PJM [2] points out:
The decisive defeat of the British Labour party strongly suggests that a fundamental shift in the politics of the world has taken place — that the non-ideological wave of unrest sweeping the world really has deeper roots than Donald Trump or Fox News. Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, the founders of Fusion GPS, tried to blame the fall of Labour on Putin.
Britain needs its own Mueller report: a full, independent and public accounting of Russian efforts to interfere in its politics. Few people will look forward to this process in a country already exhausted from fighting over Brexit. But it’s essential to halt Russia’s attack on Britain’s democracy and restore confidence in its politics.
But it’s no use. Something tectonic has shifted. It is correct but not enough to say, as Andrew Sullivan observed, that “one lesson from the UK: if the Democrats don’t stop their hard-left slide, they’ll suffer the same fate as Labour. If they don’t move off their support for mass immigration, they’re toast. Ditto the wokeness. Left Twitter is not reality.” Beyond this, it is essential to recognize that the age of giant state projects, unelected global organizations and millennial endeavors is over.
Not just the giant State projects, but the Giant State itself has been lessened in power.
The thing is, this is directly on line with what I said yesterday [3]:
I’ve noted before that this is a worldwide trend we’re dealing with, involving the rejection of the establishment. The election of Trump is a symptom of that, as is Boris Johnson winning in the UK… and what else can we call the humiliation French president macron has been suffering in France? What else can we call the protests in Hong Kong? What else can we call the rejection of the politics of Angela Merkel in Germany? I suggest these are all part and parcel of the same thing… A rejection of socialism.
Fernandez, again:
The future, far from being a stately progression of Five-Year Plans presided over by elites, has turned out to be a flood of destabilizing development, technology and discovery. Current institutions can’t control the future; they can barely cope with it. The voters realized this before the elites did. We will have our hands full just answering the question: “what did we just learn?” “We live in a world whose unfoldings we often cannot prevision, prestate, or predict— a world of explosive creativity on all sides.”
Here, I think, Fernandez starts going astray a bit.
The fact of the matter is, government of any stripe, much less the big government that he describes, never had that capability.
Do not misunderstand me here. I am not suggesting that this is the end of advocacy for big government, particularly from the more metropolitan types among us. There will always be useful idiots, striving to achieve their social goals by use of the coercive power of government.
That said, the rejection of that coercive power is heartening to see. The question has become, however, how long the movement in this direction will last. How long it will be before we fall victim once again to the phrase:
“The government should…”