Bankrupt at the core.

The great fraud of socialism, redistributionism, class envy, and virulent minority and post-colonial racial hatred is now reaching its inevitable climax. At the heart of our difficulties that have been coming to a head for so long is the belief that our political wrecker class could ever deliver on its utopian fantasies.

Westerners believed for decades that tomorrow will be like today. It was not an unreasonable belief in view of our technical and medical advances, capitalist productivity, entrepreneurial innovation, and astonishing military power. However, this belief is rapidly becoming unreasonable. New powers rise with decidedly hostile intent and capabilities no Westerner even imagined 40 years ago. And these powers are rightfully encouraged by Western weakness on all fronts. In terms of utter political, social, cultural, and military sappiness, the West has no peer.

Western political leaders have failed in their most basic duty and Western peoples will soon be forced to reexamine some basic truths. I fear we are about to get a new education in the depravity of human kind. Our new reality will not be about crafting political, social, cultural, and economic drivel to scroll up anyone's teleprompter. It will involve huge numbers of us facing the basest, truest aspect of man's nature. As we seem to be unable to grasp the reality of our political and cultural failure, we are about to experience the divine retribution Mr. Neal writes of below or what Solzhenitsyn described as the "pitiless crowbar of events" (a/k/a "reality"):

I believe that man is a fallen creature, that the source of the suffering and evil that afflict man lies in the depravity of human nature, that this depravity is the result of our own twisting and corrupting something that was itself good, i.e., the Free Will our Creator gave us, that God has graciously made salvation from sin and depravity available to man in the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, but that the fullest experience of this salvation can only be found in the Kingdom of God that transcends the spacial and temporal boundaries of the world in which we live, and the attempt to create that salvation here on earth through political means is a blasphemous attempt to retake Paradise by force, or in Eric Voegelin’s words, to “immanentize the eschaton”, and that such attempts are doomed to failure and invite divine judgement.

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If market capitalism and free trade are not the means of salvation, neither is socialism in any of its various forms. . . . If capitalism . . . is a dynamic force that dissolves the things Tories or conservatives cherish – tradition, local communities, order – socialism is no better. A person can believe in private property and enterprise without seeing them as being the way of salvation but this is not so of socialism. Socialism is by its very nature a doctrine of political salvation. It falsely places the blame for evil and suffering on the private ownership of property and promises political solutions to evil and suffering, identifying its demands with those of justice itself. If liberal capitalism dissolves the things conservatives cherish, socialism had declared outright war on them. I therefore regard socialism as being utterly and irredeemably repugnant.

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The Modern Age is not the only age in which men have been tempted by schemes of political salvation. As the late Thomas Molnar put it utopia is the perennial heresy. It is the Modern Age, however, that has made the idea of [man-made] political salvation its defining characteristic.

I am not religious but I have great regard for Christianity. While Original Sin is an awkward concept, the fallibility of man most definitely is not. The idea that man is perfectible is ludicrous, as are the political and economic opinions of wise Latinas and insufferable utopians and naifs everywhere.

Similarly, the notion of Heaven and a hereafter do not resonate with me but I consider Heaven to be a far surer bet than a functioning government-run health or retirement system.

In fact, there's far more objective evidence for the existence of Satan. After all our genius president's favorite book is dedicated to him. But that's another story entirely.

"The Reflections and Ruminations of a Right-Wing Reactionary." By Gerry T. Neal, Throne, Alter, Liberty, 1/3/14. I highly recommend Mr. Neal's blog. He is a most thoughtful man with an ability to write with great clarity.