When democratic countries jail populist candidates, favor foreigners, and provide lousy living conditions, don’t be surprised when a strongman takes control.
A while back, Tucker Carlson interviewed Vladimir Putin. After his stay in Moscow, he published a video that showed very clean and apparently safe subways and city streets. And while nobody wants to live under a dictator, the facts remain the same: there are autocratic countries where the trains appear to run on time and public spaces are clean, quite the opposite of what we see in the U.S. and much of Europe.
My wife and I decided to pick up our grandson from kindergarten. What we did not know was that in trying to bring him back to our place—normally a 15 minute ride—it would take 90 minutes to get home. The continuous anti-Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu protests continued and we ran head first into them. We took the normal turn to go home. Then we found police—and a huge truck—blocking our way home. We had to turn around and try the next turn right. No success there. We were shunted back to where we had been and had to work our way out again. Things were changing so quickly that Waze could not keep up: it showed open roads that the cops had closed and the opposite. We had to go around again and on the third turn right we slowly found ourselves moving towards home. We got to the final turn left and then a policeman told us to stop. As we waited for him to wave us on, a batch of protesters arrived. There were maybe 100 of them tops. They all were in their 60’s or 70’s, they had identical flags and chanted the same mindless drivel that has propelled them for nearly two years. There was nothing organic about the group: a bunch of pensioners no doubt recompensed for their time complaining about their issue of the day. These people have finished the main course of their lives and are now enjoying an extended dessert. They can interchange their kvetch, depending on what their paymasters want to hear:
*Stop Judicial Reform
*Get the Hostages Home
*Examine Bibi’s ties to Qatar
*Stop Bibi from firing people who work for him
*Add New Complaint Here
For ages, those on the left have fantasized about having absolute power and not being bothered with multiple branches of government or checks and balances. Thomas Friedman opined at The New York Times that he wished that Barack Obama could have the power of Chairman Xi for just one day—so as to ram through every Democratic bill, wish, spending priority that they could imagine. Those on the right tend to be more into following the rules in democratic societies, including the great American republic. What happens when life is made so miserable that a strongman seems a lot more appealing?
Marine Le Pen joins the ranks of populist leaders charged, tried and found guilty of crimes against the state. Mark Steyn said a long time ago that if you do not let people vote for the candidates they want, they will find alternative ways to express their political will. When one stands back and looks at the political landscape of Western countries, some themes come out:
*Whether it be the U.S., France, Romania, or Brazil, the populist leader will get a free, all-expenses paid trip to jail.
*Western armies are a joke. The British and French think that they can fight Russia? They can’t even get their aircraft carriers to work. The Canadians walked in formation; drunk monkeys could show greater military precision than those Canucks displayed.
*Western countries are overrun with foreigners who often enjoy preferential treatment. Whether it is in the U.S. where illegal aliens receive benefits well beyond those given to veterans and other Americans or in England, where they have now formalized that non-Brits will receive preferential treatment in the justice system—people are noticing that their leaders hate them.
*Cities and infrastructure are in tatters. One does not have to be a dictator fanboy to simply notice that Moscow, Dubai and places in Beijing look a heck a lot cleaner, safer, and better than their corresponding locations in the U.S. While Americans are being pushed onto subway tracks or lit on fire in New York, Dubai has closed, air-conditioned stations for its citizens. Drive in California and meet every pothole the state has. Even in Germany, the autobahn did not look nearly as clean or kept up as I remembered it from the 1980s.
So you are Joe Citizen. Your candidate is sitting in a jail cell. Squatters took your house and now you have to fight through the justice system to get it back. Your wife will not take the subway any longer out of pure fear. Illegal aliens have taken over the local park, so your kids have no place to play after school. If a Hitler-like figure comes along and promises that he will not be bogged down by the Congress or democratic niceties and return things to the way people remember them from the 1980s and 1990s, don’t be surprised when he finds great support. Those on the left think that they are geniuses for indicting Trump, bringing in ten million illegal aliens, releasing criminals, and letting cities go to pot. Sure, lots of people are ditching California and New York for Florida and Texas. But, the left’s social engineering is dangerous. Here in Jerusalem, add to the gridlock from astroturfed protests the construction of four light rail lines and over thirty skyscrapers, all at the same time. When life looks better in Moscow or Dubai, people might give up on democracy that gives worse returns than the banks. People will stick with the system as long as they benefit from it. If life is too expensive, too dangerous and too unpleasant, people will look for alternatives for a better life. Hitler promised to restore order after a chaotic Weimar, and he democratically shut down democracy. If the left keeps jailing Trumps, Le Pens, and Bolsonaros, then an alternative outside of the acceptable political realm will come in their place.