Strange Things Happening Every Day

Political paradigms are shifting in the United States and throughout Western Europe, suggesting a retreat from a suicidal course.

For all of Western civilization’s “progress,” a lot of our intelligence is (indeed) artificial. Turning that phrase around, we must recognize that myriad contemporary assumptions are swindles, despite our smug arrogance. After generations of societal life in many places and varied conditions, we of the 21^st century believe that our world has evolved to a place where families are no longer sacred foundation stones; where men and women do not have essential characteristics and functions; where faith must not play a vital role in people’s lives; where respect, sexual fidelity, and civility are irrelevancies; where traditions are not valuable tools for moving forward.

A dangerous paradigm has provoked a shift

This nonsense is palpable and dangerous. When we review history – which is a taskmaster, not merely a teacher, certainly not a gentle persuader – we see that every civilization that has veered toward these heresies has perished. Often in an ugly and brutal fashion. Seldom has a culture chosen to embrace these suicidal tendencies as lustily as ours is doing.

Some other things are happening in our world. Quietly but quickly, there are changes afoot. Microcosms or coincidences? They might be harbingers of a revolution of redemption; or they might be blips on the screen of the cultural decline; or they might be the death throes of a world doomed to join past civilizations on the trash heap of history. As foundations are threatened, reactions inevitably are strong, and many.

In the major Western nations, there are extreme shake-ups in politics and, ultimately, governance. During the current election cycle, former Democrats named Trump and Kennedy and Musk and Gabbard are now the panjandrums of the Republican Party, or at least its presidential campaign. The Blue-Collar Billionaire and his new allies (and supporters) largely have embraced an agenda of traditionalism, neo-isolationism, religious values, conservative priorities, and, perhaps most significantly, a new form of Populist-Protest anti-corporatism. The Cheneys, Kinzingers, and other RINOs, meanwhile, are not merely biding their time or patiently waiting for the pendulum to swing back their way. They have reported for duty in the campaign of crypto-Marxists.

And in Europe…

In the United Kingdom, a four-month-old party named Reform garnered almost as many votes as the victorious Labor Party in recent Parliamentary elections. Nigel Farage’s movement is, like the new GOP, small-government, low-tax, anti-immigrant in its focus and is built on the rotting bones of the venerable Tories. The rise of the National Rally in France, led by Marine Le Pen and allied with her niece Marion Maréchal of the affiliated European Conservative Reformist movement, tells the same story.

In Germany, in recent days, the rise of new parties – AfD (Alternative for Germany) and the months-old party of Sahra Wagenknecht (Bündnis) – have captured almost half of the votes in two large states, Saxony and Thuringia. The new movements are in certain aspects right and left, respectively, yet they share general free-market, anti-woke, anti-migrant, and foreign policy views (including skepticism about Ukraine) that have observers foreseeing an eventual alliance. Wagenknecht, a Bundestag member previously associated with extreme left and Marxist groups, now warns more of wokeism than capitalism.

As the leaders of these parties have split from the mainstream and are political renegades, so does the popular leader of Hungary, Viktor Orbán; he shares their platform views and is a former ally (protégé, now renegade) of George Soros. And he has counterparts in Portugal, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Poland, and thorns-in-the-side of the European Parliament.

Strange things happening

“Horseshoe Politics,” it is being called – where right and left ultimately and nearly meet. New labels are applied – Protest, Populism, Common Sense. There are strange things happ’nin’ every day, as the old spiritual goes. Returning to the United States, the starkest evidence of paradigm shifts can be seen in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s positions and repositions on the political chessboard.

There is not a “new” Bobby Kennedy in the sense that Richard Nixon re-branded himself “the new Nixon.” Kennedy’s positions – unorthodox, extreme, and what-have-you – have moved with him, and they are frequently compatible with those of Donald Trump. Otherwise, they have rapidly recruited Trump and the Trumpublican Right; for instance, receptivity to rather radical views on healthcare orthodoxy. Kennedy’s recent and frequent God-affirming testimonies about his personal journey are surprising evidence of paradigm shifts. Similar to the unlikely figure of Alan Dershowitz, virtually everything RFK Jr would have said to the Democrat National Convention would have been censored, canceled, prevented, held as anathema.

Is the paradigm of redemption real?

These realignments carry strong evidence of being more than convenient (or in many cases inconvenient) change-of-addresses for political expediency. Western civilization’s headlong rejection of traditional values, and its attendant disorder and threats of dissolution, might be finding emergency brakes. When social decay accompanies the machinations of the Dark State and malign enemies of Western values, physical and ideological invasions, we may question whether redemption draweth nigh, or can.

But there are strange things happening every day.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.