The lights are burning late in Davos tonight.
At the World Economic Forum, keynoter Joe Biden warned global elites that the unraveling of the middle class in America and Europe has provided “fertile terrain for reactionary politicians, demagogues peddling xenophobia, anti-immigration, nationalist, isolationist views.”
Evidence of a nationalist backlash, said Biden, may be seen in the third parties arising across Europe, and in the U.S. primaries.
But set aside Joe’s slurs — demagogues, xenophobia.
Who really belongs in the dock here? Who caused this crisis of political legitimacy now gripping the nations of the West?
Was it Donald Trump, who gives voice to the anger of those who believe themselves to have been betrayed? Or the elites who betrayed them?
Can that crowd at Davos not understand that it is despised because it is seen as having subordinated the interests of the nations and people in whose name it presumes to speak, to advance an agenda that serves, first and foremost, its own naked self-interest?
The political and economic elites of Davos have grow rich, fat and powerful by setting aside patriotism and sacrificing their countries on the altars of globalization and a New World Order.
No more astute essay has been written this political season than that of Michael Brendan Dougherty in “This Week,” where he describes how, 20 years ago, my late friend Sam Francis predicted it all.
In Chronicles, in 1996, Francis, a paleoconservative and proud son of the South, wrote:
“[S]ooner or later, as the globalist elites seek to drag the country into conflicts and global commitments, preside over the economic pastoralization of the United States, manage the delegitimization of our own culture, and the dispossession of our people, and disregard or diminish our national interest and national sovereignty, a nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form when it arrives. The sooner it comes, the better.”
What we saw through a glass darkly then, we now see face to face.
Is not Trump the personification of the populist-nationalist revolt Francis predicted?
