RUTHFULLY YOURS

The desire of many British citizens to leave the European Union is being assailed by American cultural elites as hysteria: a cancerous growth from the blighted soil of nativism, nationalism, and Islamophobia. New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, for example, finds it “unimaginable” that most Britons would vote “yes” in the June 23 referendum, known as Brexit: “I believe that reason will prevail over derangement.”

Only a degraded form of liberalism, however, fails to see why Great Britain might view the European Union with dismay. Whatever its noble intentions, the EU has come to embody a set of values fundamentally at odds with Britain’s historical ideals and institutions. Put simply, British exceptionalism will never make its peace with the secular and leftist assumptions of the European project.

Liberals on both sides of the Atlantic have conveniently forgotten the decisive role played by Great Britain in setting the foundation for the modern democratic state. Like no other country in Europe, Britain developed a tradition of natural rights, the rule of law, trial by jury — all informed by its Christian culture and institutions. Even Montesquieu, the French theorist most associated with the separation of powers, looked to the English example. “He was an ardent admirer of the English constitution,” says Russell Kirk in The Roots of American Order. “He finds the best government of his age in the constitutional monarchy of England, where the subject enjoyed personal and civic freedom.”

Britain’s political and social institutions, nourished by these ideas, stretch back centuries. “Where French kings relied on authority and force, the English sought consent and co-operation at every level, from Parliament to parish,” writes John Miller, professor of history at the University of London. “Louis XIV’s success owed much to the fact that the ruling elite and the king’s officials generally accepted the principles of absolutism. There was no such acceptance in England.”

That’s right — long before Madison, Jefferson, and Rousseau, English revolutionaries were rejecting political absolutism. They proclaimed man’s natural and inalienable rights and reimagined the purposes of government in light of these rights.

At the heart of their argument was the doctrine of consent: the God-given freedom of the individual to choose his political and religious commitments. As John Locke put it in his Second Treatise of Government (1690), political authority remains legitimate only if it retains the consent of the governed. “Men being, as has been said, by nature all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent.”

In Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman’s “Vision 2030” it is totally identified with his leadership. If it succeeds, he will harvest the praise; on the other hand, many in the Saudi elite will latch on to any sign of failure of his policies in order to block his ambitions.

Mohammad bin Salman’s social-political agenda to broaden the power base of the regime to include the young and educated — and to a great extent relatively secular or moderate — will certainly be seen by the Wahhabi clerics and the tribal social conservatives as geared towards reducing their control over the populace and hence their weight in the elite.

Another serious risk is that the economic plan entails reducing the Saudi welfare state. The economic and social fallout of weaning the Saudis away from entitlements will be exploited by domestic opposition elements and by Iran.

In Iran, the electoral process within the Assembly showed what was not evident during the parliamentary elections held in February, namely that even a formal preeminence of moderates does not and cannot influence the decision making of the Iranian regime and that Khamenei succeeds to pull the strings despite seemingly democratic procedures.

After having won the chairmanship of the Assembly, Jannati delivered a speech demanding total loyalty to Khamenei, which can be considered as targeting the moderates.

Following the announcement of Saudi Arabia’s “Vision 2030” Economic Plan by Deputy Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman on April 25, King Salman announced a reshuffling of the government. The reshuffling was clearly orchestrated by the Deputy Crown Prince and reflects his agenda. This shuffle probably is not the last word even in the near term; the changes in the government strengthen the political position of Mohammad bin Salman, because the new ministers owe him their posts, and through them he will strengthen his hold on the levers of government, especially in the economic sphere. His next step may be to move to neutralize Prince Mitab bin Abdullah, the minister in charge of the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG) and a close ally of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Nayef. He could do this by absorbing SANG into the Ministry of Defense.

In essence, my 2007 book, The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization, was an extended rumination on the cultural factors that made Americans unable to talk about, study, teach, debate, let alone face and ward off Islam like “grown-ups” — honestly, logically, fearlessly. It is a cultural history of how Americans and other Western peoples evolved into the perfect dhimmi.

Today, the taboo against telling the truth about our Islamic crisis, just like the Islamic crisis itself, is far worse because it has been institutionalized, deeply rooted, selected for, and otherwise set in the postmodern equivalent of stone.

After Orlando, after Trump’s response, unique in the annals of national politics for its discussion of protecting the nation from mass Muslim immigration, and after the predictable anger directed at Trump (not the Orlando jihadist and this latest cycle of Islamic conquest that spat him out), I thought it might be interesting to look back not at the beginning, of course, but at a beginning. The first post-9/11 Western counterattack — on the West.

Chapter 8 of The Death of the Grown-Up includes the question:

Who can forget the storm of censure that rained down on former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for illuminating the differences between Western and Islamic culture, and for finding- for stating out loud – that Western culture was superior?

A decade after writing that, I wonder if anyone can remember.

It was less than two weeks after 9/11 on “our civilization,” when he spoke out, in Italian, about the superiority of Western civilization due to its principles of liberty.

The BBC translated his remarks this way:

“We have to be conscious of the strength of our civilization. We cannot put the two civilizations on the same level. All of the achievements of our civilization: free institutions, the love of liberty itself–which represents our greatest asset–the liberty of the individual and the liberty of the peoples. These certainly are not the inheritance of other civilizations such as Islamic civilization.”

And the AP wrote:

“We must be aware of the superiority of our civilization, a system that has guaranteed well-being, respect for human rights and–in contrast with Islamic countries–respect for religious and political rights, a system that has as its values understandings of diversity and tolerance. [Western civilization is superior because] has at its core, as its greatest value, freedom, which is not the heritage of Islamic culture.”

Versions vary somewhat, but the gist is clear. Maybe the bilionaire media-mogul-turned-politician was an unlikely champion of the virtues of Western civ–or anything else for that matter. After all, the almost operatically buffoonish and scandal-ridden Berlusconi was in the public eye practically as much for his outrageous financial maneuvres as for his political programs. Nonetheless, this Italian prime minister was the lone ranger on the international horizon to seize on and uphold the essence of Western civilization-liberty, prosperity, human rights-and point out the obvious: Liberty, prosperity, and human rights are not part of Islamic civilization. We have to be conscious, we must be aware of this distinction. It was something worth fighting for, Berlusconi presumed, against Islamic terrorists and the Islamic nations and networks that openly, secretly, tactically, financially or religiously support them. Some reports included Berlusconi’s additional point-strangely overlooked–that just as Western liberty had defeated communism, so, too, would it vanquish Islam.

In a pre-PC time, such remarks would have been regarded as boiler-plate bromides, the platitudes of a politician trying out new applause lines at the outbreak of war. But back to real life. According to the “international community” circa September 2001, Berlusconi couldn’t have said anything more horrifying. …

If the looming vote endorses the rejection of the EU, it will be Britain declaring, as it always has, that it is open to the world. More than that, it will be a statement of confidence, an affirmation of history and a declaration that it it is not scared nor has reason to be.
The current government is in a unique position to change Britain. While there seems to be a rise in socialist movements in both the UK and America, they are in no way mainstream. Despite Senator Bernie Sanders success in the Democratic primaries, an analysis of his supporters shows they are not the poorest, who have been voting for Mrs Clinton.[1]. Similarly in the UK, the movement that has recently taken control of theLabour opposition is an unholy alliance of unreformed hard-leftists and younger affluent voters attracted by the fresh smell of musty old ideas, the sport for whom its but a short step from social media to socialism. However the left is intellectually bankrupt, their ideas disproven by the history the right forgot to teach.

The old New Labour faction is reduced to clinging to the Big Government statists on the Continent while the new Old Labour group see the EU as corporate menace and wish to rewind the European clock to the 1970s. In the 2015 General Election the public revolted at the thought of a socialist-light party, never mind a socialist one. This is not to assume that the opposition is unelectable. There are political cycles, just as there are economic ones, and for all their faults Labour is still the alternative government. The Conservative Party made itself electable, but that is not to say it is particularly loved. A vote to leave would unquestionably be a vote for self-determination, and you cannot have political freedoms without economic ones. A radical move by the government could entrench lower tax rates for good, to paraphrase Milton Friedman “the important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically unprofitable for the wrong people to do the wrong thing.”

The reason the left can get any traction is due to the perceived failures of capitalism. One can make an argument for nationalised utilities or railways on the basis that no one is offering to build a new pipe into your home or introduce new tracks for mag-lev trains. The competition principle underpinning the free market gets no suction here. However this is to forget that nationalisation stymies innovation. It is an acceptance of the status quo. An acquiescence to the idea that this is as good as it gets. A surrender to managed decline.

The Answers

In recent times, putting one’s trust in the free market has been given a bad name. Whether it is for the 2008 crash or the behaviour leading up to it, capitalism has been under attack. Yet it was not the free market that crashed the world economy but government interventions. In both Britain and the US, the economic gains of the free market governments of Lady Thatcher and President Reagan were squandered by those that followed. While President Clinton governed as a centrist and was moderated by a Republican-controlled House, the Bush Administration that succeeded ended up spending in a most un-Republican way. The size of Mr Blair majorities effectively made him an elected dictator. After following the economic plans of Conservative Chancellor Kenneth Clarke in their first term, New Labour went on a very Old Labour spending spree in their subsequent ones. The results were to entrench crony capitalism in oligopolistic markets while government spending and regulations grew. By interfering in the markets they created bubbles. Addicted to high tax receipts, assured that all their regulators had everything in check and convinced they could manipulate the markets to solve domestic housing policy, they allowed firms to become too big to fail, then encouraged them to lend and spend like it was 1999 and we were all at the end of history. When the market tried to correct itself the systemic risk panicked policy makers into the biggest transfers of debt ever, yet seemed to absolve anyone of responsibility.