Statist's Thunder Clap

Big government is not just a problem, it is the problem. As Debbie and I complete our month-long visit in France, it is clear that this condition applies even more strongly in France than it does in America. Politicians across not only France, but also all of the EU, are about to feel the wrath of the new populism. As Pat Buchanan correctly writes, there is a visceral hostility to further immigration from Third World countries, the Islamic world and Eastern Europe. The Swiss People’s Party referendum has already called for a re-introduction of immigration quotas. To add icing to the populist cake, Scots, Catalans and Venetians are talking separation. The EU elections are likely to provide the hard-right populist forces across Europe with the leverage needed to force change. Big government politicians in Washington take heed—the tide has turned!

Memorial Day will likely bring alarmist headlines in the elite media about a populist fever raging in Europe, and manifest in the shocking returns from the elections for the European Parliament.

Marine Le Pen’s National Front may run first in France, and Nick Farage’s UK Independence Party first in Britain.

What is happening in Europe?

In his unpublished “Leviathan and Its Enemies,” my late friend Sam Francis wrote of the coming crisis of the “soft managerial state,” of which the European Union is a textbook example.

Oswald Spengler used the word “Civilization” to describe “the terminal phase of a cultural organism,” wrote Francis. In 1941, Pitirim Sorokin described the characteristics of a Spenglerian “Civilization”:

“[C]osmopolitanism and the megalopolis vs. ‘home,’ ‘race,’ ‘blood group’ and ‘fatherland’; scientific irreligion or abstract dead metaphysics instead of the religion of the heart; ‘cold matter-of-factness’ vs. reverence and tradition and respect for age; internationalist ‘society’ instead of ‘my country’ and state (nation); money and abstract values in lieu of earth and real (living) values; ‘mass’ instead of ‘folk’; sex in lieu of motherhood … and so on.”

Between the managerial state and the civilization and culture that preceded it, the polarities are stark.