Centrists need to take responsibility for
the monsters they helped create
Paul Mason wisely notes:
“The international
order is collapsing because popular discontent is placing in power politicians
prepared to pursue national over multilateral objectives. We’ve known this
since around 2013, when Recep Tayyip Erdoğan brutally suppressed the globalist
half of his own population, and since Germany smashed Greek democracy and
risked the integrity of the Eurozone to get its taxpayers off the hook of an
unpayable €300bn debt. Brexit and the election of Trump, Matteo Salvini in
Italy and Viktor Orbán in Hungary only confirm the pattern.
China refuses to take global responsibility because the West built a system which precluded it, assuming instead that the unipolar dominance of the US would act as a proxy world government. After Vladimir Putin cut loose from the old order – declaring a “multipolar world” after trouncing Georgia in the short war of 2008 – no section of the global elite showed any interest in designing a new system to accommodate and contain the rising independence of Russia and the rising power of China.”
China refuses to take global responsibility because the West built a system which precluded it, assuming instead that the unipolar dominance of the US would act as a proxy world government. After Vladimir Putin cut loose from the old order – declaring a “multipolar world” after trouncing Georgia in the short war of 2008 – no section of the global elite showed any interest in designing a new system to accommodate and contain the rising independence of Russia and the rising power of China.”
Fukuyama notes:
“The inability to
agree on the most basic facts is the direct product of an across-the-board
assault on democratic institutions – in the US, in Britain, and around the
world. And this is where the democracies are headed for trouble. In the US,
there has in fact been real institutional decay, whereby powerful interest
groups have been able to protect themselves through a system of unlimited
campaign finance. The primary locus of this decay is Congress, and the bad
behavior is for the most part as legal as it is widespread. So ordinary people
are right to be upset.”
Trump’s chickens may be coming home to
roost. But the system has already failed.
Paul Waldman notes:
“But even as talk
of Trump’s impeachment gets louder and Republicans scramble in panic, something
tells me that the president is telling himself that he can get away with this
one, too.
From where he sits,
it isn’t a crazy thing to believe. Just think of everything he did and said in
2016 that would have sunk another candidate, up to and including being caught
on tape bragging about his ability to sexually assault women with impunity. He
survived it all. But more fundamentally, that Trump got within 100 miles of the
White House to begin with represents a massive failure of the system.”
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