... In a discussion I had with someone who had just been influenced one of [Nial] Ferguson’s apocalyptic “America is dead” lectures my answer was “and who shall live? Europe? Australia? China?” They are all in the same case and further along the feckless path.
What distinguishes American crisis and marks its particular character is that the millions of people are considering answers to questions that are only now being understood by Europeans. It has gone so far in the understanding of the disease that it is at the point of contemplating cures. And because the possible cures are so basic, and so much at odds with the current of the last hundred years they boggle the mind. My guess is that when the answers are finally supplied and if they are successful they will reorganize the world. Not just the United States.
While this sounds hopelessly vague, let’s consider this: can the current political memes now rising in America remain exclusively American? If Washington is diminished by grassroots reassertiveness can the EU be far behind? I think the PC brigade understand things better than the Tea Party Movement. If PC cannot survive in America it is threatened everywhere. The Left has supplied the prototype of the Global Meme. Is there any way of not paying it back in its own coin?
But it is too early to fill in the details. All that can safely be said is that the old order is in crisis. What will replace it — for good or ill — has not yet shown its “external facts”. We do not see its face yet. And it is also likely that we are in the midst what Adams called the “revolution in the minds of the people”. That is the task at hand. What follows, well, we shall see
I think he is right that americans have, at least partially, awoken and begun to consider solutions to the problems that the europeans have not even acknowledged (and they are clearly further down the path).
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