March 3, 2022
Ukraine and the new populism
By J.R. Dunn
We have clear evidence of a major change in human circumstances in that during the past half-century, the most consequential leaders in the western world have been a former actor, a storekeeper’s daughter, a real-estate developer, and a standup comic.
That’s not the way it was previously. The great figures of the West of the early and mid-20th century – Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Churchill, to mention a few – were products of the upper class, groomed for leadership and expected to take the reins eventually. While it’s true that revolutionary upstarts from the working and middle classes such as Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin took over numerous countries worldwide, their impact was swiftly curtailed and they can’t be called “great” in any real sense, each having slammed his country into a brick wall before he was finished.
It could be argued that the same processes are in operation with Reagan, Trump, Thatcher, and Zelenskyy. The mid-century social-nationalist tyrants (to use John Lukacs’ coinage) were products of completely decadent imperial systems no longer able to function in any meaningful sense. The same can be said for the western liberal “democracies” in the 21st century. (Ukraine can be considered an attempt to transplant such a governing system. Remember, it was Democrat political operatives who raced east following the Cold War to lecture the poor ignorant muzhiks on how to form a “real democracy.”) Like the totalitarian states, the liberal/left states were based on the same outmoded principal of privileged elites overseeing the benighted masses – though in this case, for their “own good.”
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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/ukraine_and_the_new_populism.html
