The Great Sovereignty Reclamation MovementFor Americans who seek forward-looking inspiration, the lesson is simple: The nation-state, and the tangible flourishing of the nation-state's people, must always come first.
By Josh Hammer
April 8, 2022
The great debates of our time are not exclusively those hard-hitting ones affecting human anthropology and political community—how many genders exist, what criteria we should look for in prospective immigrants, and so forth. Certainly, many of our most notable debates do implicate those most foundational rifts. But some of our other most politically urgent and galvanizing disputes revolve less around substantive questions, such as the nature of justice, than they do around one of the oldest procedural questions in the history of political science: “Who decides?”
A look around the world at this present juncture suggests an emerging consensus: Through our own internal deliberations and our own political processes, “we, the people” should decide the fate of our own nation-states. Recent or ongoing examples in Hungary, France, Ukraine, and Israel are instructive. For political actors paying attention here on the American homefront, there are clear and compelling lessons to take away.
In Hungary last Sunday, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who had been facing relatively tight polling in the lead-up to the national election, cruised to a fourth term. Orban’s defiant national-conservative Fidesz party utterly dominated the unified opposition, which had included everyone from outright communists to full-on anti-Semitic fascists in a ham-fisted—and ultimately ill-fated—attempt to topple the government. Fidesz was wildly successful everywhere outside Budapest itself, and even gained seats in the parliament—this despite the sustained, yearslong campaign to decry Hungary’s alleged “democratic backsliding” from the New York Times, George Soros-funded nongovernmental organizations, and the other usual suspects.
The key lesson from Hungary: A proud nationhood is one that fights to secure its customs, folkways, and traditions from the overweening, heavy hand of the liberal imperium (here, the Brussels-based European Union).
In France, the world’s seventh-largest economy and an anchor of the modern European integration project, current polling for the presidential runoff election that will follow this Sunday’s initial round of voting is genuinely eye-opening. According to an Atlas Politico poll from April 4 through April 6, President Emmanuel Macron, who, despite his occasional anti-woke musings, is pro-European integration and firmly center-left, finds himself in a political dogfight. Per Atlas Politico, in a runoff election between Macron and his most likely challenger, the right-wing Euroskeptic Marine Le Pen, Le Pen leads by the shockingly small margin of 50.5 percent to 49.5 percent. Le Pen has likely benefited from the Overton window-shifting effect of Eric Zemmour’s own further-right-wing presidential run, which has had the effect of normalizing Le Pen.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/08/the-great-sovereignty-reclamation-movement/
