
“Optimism is cowardice,” said Oswald Spengler. We shouldn’t have false hopes. French President Emmanuel Macron will probably win this Sunday’s runoff election against the National Rally’s Marine Le Pen. Bookies in London give the incumbent a better than 90 percent chance. After the first round, President Macron’s lead grew. I have yet to see a...
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The Gilets Jaunes in 2019
Paris, France, 9 January 2019 French Democracy Dead or Alive? Or perhaps one should say, buried or revived? Because for the mass of ordinary people, far from the political, financial, media centers of power in Paris, democracy is already moribund, and their movement is an effort to save it. Ever since Margaret Thatcher decreed that...
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Remember when the War on Terror ended and the War on Populism began? That’s OK, no one else does. It happened in the Summer of 2016, also known as “the Summer of Fear.” The War on Terror was going splendidly. There had been a series of “terrorist attacks,” in Orlando, Nice, Würzberg, Munich, Reutlingen, Ansbach,...
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Regime Change in Budapest?
CNN recently discovered a paradox. How was it possible, they asked, that in 1989, Viktor Orban, at the time a Western-acclaimed liberal opposition leader, was calling for Soviet troops to leave Hungary, and now that he is Prime Minister, he is cozying up to Vladimir Putin? For the same reason, dummy. Orban wanted his country...
Read MoreA Political Movement’s Violent Pursuit of “Enemies”
In 2016, something extraordinary happened in the politics of diverse countries around the world. With surprising speed and simultaneity, a new generation of populist leaders emerged from the margins of nominally democratic nations to win power. In doing so, they gave voice, often in virulent fashion, to public concerns about the social costs of globalization....
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