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At The American Conservative, Pat Buchanan explains that people around the world are upset with their leaders because neither democracies nor authoritarian regimes have been able to cure their problems. He writes (abridged):
The riots in Chile were started to oppose a small hike in train and subway fares in a country with the highest per capita income and least inequality in all of Latin America. Yet the protesters have succeeded in forcing the elected government to capitulate and write a new constitution.
Bolivia’s uprising was over an election stolen by longtime president Evo Morales, who fled to Mexico where he was welcomed by the foreign minister.
Among the issues dividing Bolivians are economic inequality and tribalism—indigenous peoples living alongside a European-descended elite.
In Hong Kong, the struggle is ideological and political, between believers in democracy and advocates of authoritarianism.
President Trump’s America wants to secure the Southern border against an ongoing invasion of Latin American and Third World people, who could soon create here a new majority that votes reliably Democratic.
Europe resists with growing alarm a decades-long invasion of the Old Continent by desperate people fleeing the failed states of Africa and the Mideast.
In Spain, a nationalist party, Vox, vaults to third place to resist a leftist regime in Madrid that is seen as too accommodating to Catalan secessionists and refugees from across the Mediterranean.
Americans are not at actual war with one another, but our divisions are as wide and deep as they have been since the 1960s, if not since the Civil War.
We have Republicans standing united against the impeachment and removal of a president they overwhelmingly elected—by a united Democratic Party dominated by implacable ideological adversaries.
Neither authoritarians nor the world’s democracies seem to have found a cure for the maladies that afflict our world’s unhappy citizens.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.
Read more here.
