Barrel Strength

Peter Hitchens, the Christian and conservative brother of the propagandist of atheism, had these doleful thoughts on the election of Obama. He was in Washington DC, at the time, crossing from the white area into the Spanish and black zones.

“As I walked, I crossed another of Washington’s secret frontiers. There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.

“They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.

“Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.

“These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America’s conservative party – the Republicans – to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.

“They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?”

I wish I could say with complete assurance that this was not so, that Peter Hitchens is entirely mistaken. Yet I cannot agree that this truly describes the situation. Power shifts from party to party in transitions that are felt to be momentous at the time. Obama’s election may may mark such a decades-long shift to the Democrats. On the other hand he may be the Hoover and not the Franklin Rooselvelt.

Obama has inherited a mess. But the European banking system is in far deeper difficulties. The US banking system fell under the malign influence of a ratio of bad debt to GDP of 6%. I have heard tales that many European countries have ratios of bad debt to GDP of 30, 40 and even 80%. If this be true, and I see no reason to doubt my informant, then terrible times are in store for the enxt several years as these delayed fuze bombs explode, and governments react with inflationary measures.

As to confronting left wing professors, it is difficult to see how it could be done without a thought-control commission and explicitly politcal firings, which, however welcome, might just as well threaten conservatives. (Vide Ezra Levant’s struggles with the Alberta Human Rights Commission). And sexual revolutionaries are not worth shutting down political liberties for either. Liberal society – one governed by rational discourse – will survive Obama as it has survived Bush.