From the time I began this blog I have been concerned, and have written a great deal about, the danger of Societal Regression under stress. Historically, the greatest threat of Societal Regression has been under the impact of severe economic distress and/or during and after a lost war, when the basic tenets that hold a society together are most frayed. Germany in the 1930's is often used as the poster child of Regression to totalitarianism in the face of severe economic stress and a lost war. However, there are also countervailing processes in relatively healthy societies that can mitigate or protect against the kinds of regression that lead to fascism and genocide. A healthy society has self-correcting processes and procedures; as long as the government retains legitimacy society can tolerate a fair amount of stress without dissolution into violence and authoritarianism.
The major sources of stress on Western societies are economic stagnation and our current War with Sharia Islam. Our leaderships' responses in both areas are failing.
From Europe to the Untied States the elites have been racing to surrender their legitimacy. They do this in blind obeisance to unproven theories of governance and dated ideology, and by doing so, risk fracturing their societies in dangerous ways.
Consider a few data points from Europe and America:
September was a turning point in European attitudes towards immigration. On September 14, the French Senate followed the National Assembly in banning the public wearing of the burka. Before the dust had settled, France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was already embroiled in controversy on a wholly different matter: France’s expulsion of homeless Romanian gypsies, or les Roms, which European commissioner Viviane Reding attacked as a “disgrace” that reminded her of the Second World War. There was broad public support for Sarkozy when he suggested at a dinner at the Elysée Palace that Reding welcome the gypsies to her native Luxembourg, if she felt that strongly about it.
Last week, the Sweden Democrats, a xenophobic party with far-right antecedents, took 20 seats in Sweden’s Riksdag, after airing an extraordinary ad. It explained that all politics is about setting budgetary priorities and then showed an old lady pushing a walker getting trampled by burqa-wearing women with baby carriages running to the front of a welfare line.
But the most important development, over the long run, will have been the publication in Germany of a taboo-breaking book which touched on immigrant themes. It is by Thilo Sarrazin, a member (but not for long, as it turned out) of the Bundesbank’s board of governors. Sarrazin’s book is Deutschland schafft sich ab (roughly, “The Abolition of Germany”). The controversy it has unleashed resembles the one that America had in 1994 over Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s book The Bell Curve. That was a book about the role of intelligence in society that wound up being read as a book on race. Sarrazin’s is a book about Germany’s economic future that detractors have cast as a book about how immigration is ruining Germany’s “stock.” The widespread criticism the book has received from establishment politicians has not blocked—and may even have spurred—its success. It has been a number-one bestseller for a month. Stores have been sold out for days at a time.
In Europe, the growing consensus is that recent immigrants, overwhelmingly Muslim, have failed to assimilate and become Europeans, and that such failure to assimilate is threatening the character of the European states in which they now reside. The European elites, on the other hand, continue to insist that there is "nothing to see here", even as more and more evidence accumulates. A parent can force a child to not see what the parent cannot tolerate recognizing, but the cost is a damaged child. A government can only force its population to close their eyes by using force. In Europe hate speech laws and libel laws are used everyday to silence uncomfortable depictions of reality. Such efforts leach legitimacy and worsen the tendency toward regression that is already occurring in the face of significant economic stress.
In America, there is a similar insistence by the government, at all levels of bureaucracy, that what we see with our own eyes is illusion and only approved words have meaning. As Michael Goodwin notes, our government has accepted a victim narrative for Islam from our enemies; as a result we do not need to actually do anything for them to leverage this narrative as a weapon to be used to recruit and attack us:
Let's be kind. Let's say it was a coincidence that, at about the same time the Iranian madman was at the UN spewing his nonsense that 9/11 was an "inside job," the Pakistani terror mom was in a downtown courtroom claiming Israelis destroyed the Twin Towers.
Now let's be honest. The only coincidence was the timing. The similar content of the two claims illustrates a growing menace in the Muslim world.
The myth-making about 9/11 is spreading, and so is the danger. Nine years after the mass murder by Islamic terrorists, conspiracy theories are deflecting Muslim guilt and inflaming a new generation of jihadists, many of them living in the West.
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To many Muslims, the belief that Islamists are being blamed for an atrocity carried out by Americans or Israelis fits into a larger theory that the West is oppressing Islam.
As I have written, firm opposition by New Yorkers to the Ground Zero mosque is another piece of "evidence" to believers. In short, anything and everything we say and do is proof Islam is under attack.
Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, identifies the wide acceptance of the victimization narrative as a major factor fueling terrorism. As he writes in his memoir, "A Journey," actual terrorists "are small in number, but their narrative . . . has a far bigger hold."
He says Muslim political leadership often "feels impelled to go along with this narrative for fear of losing support."
Or their heads.
Blair sees President Obama's outreach to the Muslim world as ambiguous at best. Writing of Obama's Cairo speech last year, he says, "It was in part an apology, and taken as such. The implicit message was: We have been disrespectful and arrogant."
However, he adds: "The trouble is, respectful of what, exactly?" Respect for Islam "should not mean respectful of the underlying narrative."
What the Obama administration is doing is bleeding their own legitimacy (whatever is left of it at any rate) by denying reality; who are we to believe: The Obama administration insisting, as the Bush administration did before them, that Islam is the Religion of Peace, the Saudis are our friends, and anyone who questions the violence constantly done in their name is an Islamophobe or those who believe that the Islamists should be confronted and that we should insist upon adherence to our own most cherished values?
While the Republicans spent the first 6 years under Bush squandering their legitimacy, the Democrats in only two years have gone much further. Unfortunately the Obama administration seemingly has insisted on accelerating their loss of legitimacy; a story ignored by the MSM for the last 2 years can be ignored no longer:
Obama Justice Department Rocked
The former head of the Justice Department’s New Black Panther trial team, Chris Coates, testified Friday before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. See here and here and here (subscription required). Before Coates broke his silence, the commission’s critics, a minority of the commissioners, and the mainstream media insisted that the dismissal of a slam-dunk voter-intimidation case had no significance beyond the single incident on Election Day 2008. However, Coates’s account of the administration’s hostility to race-neutral enforcement of voting laws and refusal to enforce Section 8 of the Voting Rights Act (requiring that states clean up their voting rolls to prevent voter fraud) blew that assertion to smithereens.
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As the [Washington] Post conceded, Coates’s testimony will “carry greater weight because he worked decades ago as an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, has won awards from civil rights groups and lacks the partisan GOP resume of the department’s harshest opponents.”
Read the whole thing. One word for the psychological process that fuels selective enforcement based on ethnicity is splitting, a prominent feature of regressed societies. Splitting actively fostered by the government threatens the concept of equal before the law, a bedrock assumption (even if often breached in practice) of our society.
The next two years are likely to be extremely dangerous. Beyond the obvious dangers of an Iranian nuclear weapon, a high casualty terror attack on American or Europe, and the risk of not only a double dip recession but worse [HT: Instapundit], the greatest danger is that our political class and our information class (the Media, Academia) have become so cut off from the majority of the population that their legitimacy is collapsing. Two years of gridlock should the Republican make the projected gains will be tolerable if the Republicans and Democrats act in a minimally responsible manner and make a genuine effort to put the country's fortunes ahead of their personal gain; if the passions in Washington lead the leadership of both parties to intensify their partisan invective, what little is left of their legitimacy may vanish. A governing ethos which attempts to split the opposition is tenable when there is moderate stress; at times of intensified stress on the system, attempts by the government to enhance regressive splitting is dangerous and irresponsible.
The gulf between Washington and the country is as large as it has been in my life time. During the Vietnam war, despite the fact that we were protesting against an insular government and thought we were fighting the good fight against war and violence, the stakes were actually quite a bit more modest than now. The economy was basically sound, though the attempts to have both guns and butter proved damaging. Today, we are faced with a potential disaster if we do not find a way to rein in borrowing and spending. This will require genuine entitlement reform, problematic in the best of times, perhaps impossible unless we actually hit the wall.
Our leadership has lost a great deal of its legitimacy. A good start on regaining legitimacy would be to start dealing with reality instead of denying it. It is almost certainly true that the majority of Muslims in America and Europe are not actively trying to install Sharia, but almost everything the Western governments do enhances the power and prestige of the Islamists at the expense of true moderates. The effect of such fecklessness is to paradoxically empower those forces in Islam and within the reaction against radical Islam that are most likely to devolve into Manichean splitting.
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