The structures of the Western world are trembling. Greg Sheridan at The Australian is one of the first in the Australian media to say much that is obvious. Western electorates are demanding change:
[The Brussels] attacks were not unique but they represent a damn burst. Politicians across the West are struggling to respond. Isolationism has been given a great boost in the US … nationalism will roar in Europe, and meanwhile the politically correct of Brussels and the EU demonstrate their complete inability to deal with the growing terror movement. …
Almost every Western nation now has dysfunctional politics and is contemplating radical change in part because of terrorism. … The structures of the world are trembling.
Sheridan rightly damns European immigration policies:
For years European nations pretended they weren’t even nations of immigration, that their guest workers would go home one day, that the asylum-seeker inflows — in processes that were routinely scammed — would stop coming. So they never developed an ethos or a set of institutions to support integration.
Their economic model was a disaster. … In Europe the insiders prosper in their over-regulated environment, the outsiders never get a look-in. In practical terms this means there are no entry-level jobs for people with poor language skills and low educational attainment.
So a big Muslim underclass, alienated, idle and hostile, developed. Suburbs in Brussels and Paris are no-go areas after dark for the police. This is a monumental failure of European statecraft. There are no parts of Indonesia that are no-go areas for the Indonesian authorities.
Immigration from North Africa and the Middle East was never properly controlled. Whole family groups, whole villages, moved intact from North Africa into European slums determined to maintain their old life at the expense of the European taxpayer.
Sheridan then talks about the rise of “extremist” parties in Europe. The “extremist” label rather depends on where you sit: while those parties are proposing policies that seem “extreme” to the PC elite and Sheridan, those policies were common sense for centuries until a few decades ago. Let’s now see if democracy works — will the out-of-touch, well-upholstered PC elites now buckle to the popular will?
Sheridan trots out the meme that we non-PC people are just being “emotional” (see Ferguson on who is “being emotional”):
But the rise of Trump, like the rise of the far Right in Europe, reflects not only an emotional response to terrorism, it also reflects the failure of mainstream politics. …
Isolationism … [is] evident in the demented responses of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz… What all this amounts to is a massive boost for a retrograde and extremely dangerous, militant isolationism in America. …
Clinton … alone in this race acknowledges that US international strategic leadership is central to the world, as well as to the US itself. On the evidence so far, Clinton is the candidate who would be best for Australia.
Sure Greg, it’s your newspaper.
