Natives are restless.

All the abiding normality of the past seventy years is slipping away into flux. Modernity is finally yielding – to what? Nobody knows.^[1]

And the natives are restless for good reason. The lessons of the last century about enormous state power have been unlearned or were never absorbed in the first place. In America, all pretence of adherence to the Constitution has been abandoned and in its place is the massive, unaccountable, unrestrained central state the Framers and Ratifiers sought so artfully to prevent. More than a century of horrific, industrial scale warfare and yet more fearsome weapons entering nation state arsenals have not been understood by Western national leaders in even a superficial sense.

Nor have Western elites been such as to inspire confidence. Chief executives and legislatures of most Western nations have often enough come across as obtuse in assessing national interests, actively hostile to their own citizens or indifferent to their needs, psychotically devoted to the needs of minorities, freaks, and foreigners (and primitive foreigners at that), or stunningly reckless in handling spending, debt, and the fundamentals of all that makes for political legitimacy.

It's not so much that modernity might be yielding to something frightful as that decency and rationality have yielded to modernity, the putrid and obscene nature of which gushes down our street, into our schools, into our media, and throughout the culture.

The rotten plutocracy that has commandeered our great civilization is failing at every task that makes for peace, decency, and prosperity. Modernity has become rank stupidity and malevolence.

Notes
^[1] "Unsettled Weather." By James Howard Kunstler, ZeroHedge, 9/6/19 (emphasis removed).