Why Can't We Explain It?

In the last 4 years, the far Left, allied with powerful and wealthy people, has seized control of the West, starting with the US and now extending to Britain and probably France. And no one knows why.

Consider this recent interview between Tucker Carlson and journalist Matt Taibbi:

Carlson: “I don’t see a rational explanation for any of this behavior at all.  I don’t think it advances anyone’s aims including their own.  I don’t believe that Larry Fink is, like, orchestrating all this so that Black Rock can get even richer…the defense contractors-- That’s all true on one level, but that’s not the explanation.  No, its way deeper than that.  It think it’s a spiritual thing.” . . .

Taibbi: “What other explanation is there? … I’ve kind of run out of…  I made the mistake I think for years of trying to think, well, What’s the angle on this?  There’s got to be some end game that they’re going for.  And the only way to make sense of this is to give that up, I think, because there’s something darker going on in the culture of people who run this country that is inaccessible if you’re trying to…find motives.”

Thus two of the more thoughtful and independent-minded journalists express the frustration shared by many in the US and Western world about the destruction being wrought by the Democratic Party and it European counterparts. I could quote similar expressions of perplexity from all my favorite commentators: muckrakers like Alex Jones, commentators on the Ukraine war like John Mearsheimer, Douglas Macgregor, Scott Ritter, Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou of The Duran, various dissident doctors and medical researchers speaking against the Covid measures. All do a brilliant job of reporting and analyzing the catastrophic, even murderous policies of the Biden administration and its European enablers. But as Dylan Thomas said of books about the wasp, they tell us everything except why.

These men are experts at gathering and analyzing information: journalists, scholars, researchers. They are professionals with information sources not available to the rest of us, and they are skilled at interpreting the information they gather so that it makes sense to us. And yet listen to the last 5 minutes of almost all their commentaries. Whether they are concerned with the Covid virus and the lethal “vaccines”, or the power grab committed by Joe Biden and his entourage, or the senseless killing in Ukraine, or the indefensible “lawfare” operations and civil liberties violations against Donald Trump, his supporters, and ordinary Americans, no one seems to know why this one administration is able to perpetrate so many disasters at once.

And these are the best commentators. The few principled leftists who dissent from the Democratic Party powermongers are hopelessly confused and befuddled. As for the Republican Party and the right-wing establishment, they have made almost zero effort to explain it, because they do not want anyone probing too deeply into the reasons for their failure. If you start asking why the Left triumphed, after all, some people will start asking why the Right was defeated, and that opens up a lot of questions that powerful people in the conservatocracy would rather not have answered: like what are they doing with their time, with their fancy news organizations and think tanks and all the new colleges and universities they keep founding, and with the donations they keep demanding we send them? So we blithely carry on, doing more of the same things that got us into this mess in the first place.

In short, we cannot explain this disastrous turn in western politics because we do not want to explain it. Explaining it means having to face the fact of our own failures. The political class (right as well as left) has too strong a vested interest in perpetuating and pandering to our ignorance. And most of us go along without too much fuss.

One consequence of this is that, for all the talent available and all the valuable information that some of them do provide, no one can propose a plausible way out.

Some call on Americans to “wake up” and speak out against all this, which seldom works.  (And an ironic choice of words it is, given that they identify the problem as “Woke” ideology.)  They call on Americans and Europeans to rise up and “resist” their governments, but this too is unlikely. 

Less effectual pundits simply compose wish lists of all the right measures they believe we “should” or “must” take, none of which have the slightest chance of being enacted.

Put Not Your Faith in Elections

Recently, as Donald Trump’s dramatic and defiant survival of a assassination attempt sent panic through the Democratic Party, which pushed Joe Biden out of the presidency, the whole enterprise started to seem destined for a crashing defeat at the next election, and we had hopes that all this would soon be behind us. That is what many thought in a surge of naive optimism preceding the election of 2022, and yet the results of that election did little to check the junta’s power. Now they are bankrolling and rehabilitating what even the Democrats not long ago saw as the pathetic figure of Kamala and remaking her into a serious contender. They will certainly be plotting how to undermine or overturn a Donald Trump presidency, as they did last time. The Left’s coup is hardly finished, and it may well get worse before it gets better.

Now that we may have some breathing space, it is time to step back and ask why this happened in the first place, how to avoid a further descent into political madness, and how to prevent it happening again.

The answer will not come by dwelling on the Left’s latest outrages, as reported in this morning’s sensational headlines by a conservative media eager for subscribers or in today’s email alerts sent by conservative pressure groups seeking donations.  We will not get out of it by doing more of what got us into it.

The Essential Questions

The next time you see an article or news segment in the conservative media, perhaps quoting some academic “expert”, or the next time you receive an email appeal to contribute to some new campaign against the latest shenanigans from the radical Left, I suggest you ignore whatever they are saying and instead demand that they answer this question and this question alone:

What did you do wrong that permitted this to happen in the first place, and what are you going to start doing differently in order to get us out of this?

You might also add:

And why are you not asking this question yourself?

If they evade this question, then ignore them. They are not worth your trouble.

Stop Clicking “Like”, Stop Sending Money, and Let’s All Start Acting Like Citizens and Men

Effective understanding and a remedy will come by stepping back and examining not only our government and its opponents but also ourselves and understanding some things we all should have done – and things that we can still do now – to extricate ourselves from this debacle.  

It is not necessary to right every wrong, rectify every injustice, eradicate every inequality. It is only necessary to identify those that provided the avenue for tyranny to seize hold of, first, our fellow Americans, and from there to the rest of us.

This requires thinking “outside the box”. It requires that we venture outside our “comfort zone” and examine some things that, most of the time, we simply assume and prefer not to examine.  It requires that we re-assess some things that we either accepted too quickly or neglected for too long, and that have now come back to haunt us: things we permitted without thinking about it too much, things we have forgotten about and allowed to fester, things we do not want to be bothered with because we do not understand them or find them distasteful, problems that seem intractable and without any solution (or so we are told), or where the cost of rectifying them would require too great a sacrifice. 

But above all, it requires confronting serious abuses of government power that truly oppress our fellow Americans but that most of us, thinking the hardship would never touch us, could not be bothered to notice.

This is the task I have set for myself in my new book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went "Communist” — and What to Do about It. It is not another narrative that describes events you already know.¹ It is not another wish list of the impossible. Instead it pushes you where we all need to be right now: outside our “comfort zone”.

Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw.  His books and recent articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.

1. For extremely detailed narratives, see: Christopher Rufo, America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (Broadside, 2023); Kevin Slack, War on the American Republic: How Liberalism Became Despotism (Encounter, 2023). Others are mentioned in the Introduction to my book.