The controlling fatal Western flaw.

And then there is the problem of the European welfare states: compared to a hundred years ago, today's Europe is a socialist continent: all the demands of the socialists of that time have been met. Yet socialist parties still exist, and succeed in convincing us that our current political and economic systems are still “capitalist” and that more state intervention is needed to “curb the excesses” of free enterprise. In other words: for socialists there is never enough socialism. Only when utopia is established, will socialists call the system “socialist”.

. . . Communism lures us with the prospect of a return to the garden of Eden, where people survive automatically, like animals, and their livelihood is provided for them by a benevolent God . . . .^[1]

Mr. de Jong identifies yet another curious disconnect in current political speech – that the current political system is "capitalist." Never mind that every aspect of the economy is burdened by crushing taxes and suffocating regulations. For Westerners, it's still the Wild West, a rapacious free for all of brother against brother, bank against widow, landowner against sharecropper, and despoiler against the environment. This certainly applies to the U.S. although from this side of the Atlantic it seems a bit of a stretch to believe that Europeans still might think of their countries as capitalistic. De Jong surely is better informed.

The other disconnect I have in mind is the bizarre – and duplicitous – effort to paint National Socialism as "right-wing." For reasons I've mentioned before, that's ludicrous where the spectrum at issue is the one with total government on the left side and the total absence of government on the right.

Both conceptual disconnects are dishonest and deliberate attempts to conceal the nature of the left. Western nations are hopelessly socialist, regulated, controlled, and abused by government and the "right wing" in actual fact is the home of people devoted to limited government, free markets, the rule of law, freedom of speech and conscience, and voluntary association. The ideal "rightist" state is a far cry from the coercive police states uniformly desire by the left.

The second point by de Jong is most interesting – the state as a new benevolent God. It brings to mind P.J. O'Rourke's witticism that Democrats are like Santa Claus and Republicans are like, well, a fearsome God. Dems will deliver free stuff and Republicans will deliver condemnation, muesli for breakfast, and cold showers.

Even more interesting on this point is Gerry Neal's insight^[2] that traditional English thinking had been that man is a fallen being from whose inevitable secular criminality the state existed to protect us. The church existed to aid man in dealing spiritually with his sinful nature. However, in the unfolding of the English Reformation, the Puritans rejected the limited thinking of state and church that neither could bring about paradise on earth, as only Christ Himself could do that upon his Second Coming.

The Puritans, however, saw state and church as corrupt institutions whose corruption showed them to be enemies of God. The Puritans, however, as the exalted Calvinist, perfected Elect, endeavored to order life according to a tendentiously literal interpretation of Scripture leading to out-of-control shining-city-on-a-hillism, the search for the perfect, uncorrupted earthly community.

You can see how De Jong's insight -- that communism holds itself out as being to provide for human needs in the manner of a benevolent God -- would appeal immensely to people enamored of the idea that traditional institutions are all that stand between mankind and earthly paradise. Please read for yourself Neal's take on who the heirs of the 17th-century Puritans are in America today.

There are no easy answers to why so many Westerners seem so grossly out of touch with the realities of an imperfect world. People who hate us and whose thinking is fundamentally at odds with our most basic values and institutions are hailed as brothers and as equals with no recognition whatsoever of all manner of contrary evidence.

Dealing with the cold realities of human existence is difficult under the best of circumstances and the human desire to find mental and spiritual refuge in fanciful doctrines and foolish assumptions about human nature and cultural and racial differences is understandable.

Alas, it appears to me that the desire of humans to avoid facing the plain and sometimes unpleasant facts of life is simply too strong. That powerful urge to seek false refuge can be seen most starkly in the complete absence of outrage or repulsion with respect to the 20th-century crimes of the left, so strong is the human desire to believe the socialist-progressive lies.

Only catastrophe -- Solzhenitsyn's pitiless crowbar of events, Ben Franklin's dear school, or the wrath of God -- appears likely to break through the armor plate of Western delusion.

Notes
^[1] "Marxism Is Still Alive." By Nikolaas de Jong, The Brussels Journal, 12/24/14.
^[2] "Puritanism, Theocracy, and Social Conservatism." By Gerry T. Neal, Throne, Alter, Liberty, 12/12/14.