The Anglosphere faces a crisis of leadership. The West is now ruled wall-to-wall by second rate ideologues and/or chancers, either determined to change the global order or powerless to prevent the revolution we now face.
When the Western world needed leadership, virtue and courage, we got – Jacinda, Justin, Joe, Boris and ScoMo. A busted flush for the Anglosphere? Well it certainly isn’t a full house. Nor a bunch of aces. Five of a kind, perhaps, is getting warmer. Jumping from poker to five hundred, with this hand one might well be inclined to call “open misere”.
Polities with democratic traditions going back centuries are now all ruled by careerist buffoons or leftist ideologues. Or both. Facing national and global challenges that demand the likes of Henry the Fifth, John of Gaunt, both Elisabeths, Wellington, Disraeli, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Churchill, Attlee, Thatcher, Menzies, Howard, Roosevelt the Second and Reagan, we have not come up – no pun intended and sticking to the card games theme – trumps.
With the election, barring legal mishaps, of the decrepit Joe Biden in the USA, the Anglosphere now has achieved perhaps the most awful collection of non-leaders it has ever had at any one time. And we are stuck with all of them for quite a time. And with so much on our plates, too.
We have Boris (or, now more likely his, no doubt equally awful, successor) till 2024, currently with a healthy majority but little competence, unity or purpose in the face of challenges demanding, well, leadership.
The same with Biden, or in his almost inevitable further mental decline, Ms Harris, a likely president chosen for her skin colour and her chromosomes rather than for any noticeable ability. In any case, America will be run at the national level by a bunch of leftist thugs who came to power on the back of Covid 19 and ballot rigging. Biden was the accidental candidate, and prospered by hiding in his basement and doing almost nothing, in an election year where the economy tanked as a result of a virus rather than a president, and where most important policy decisions were taken not in Washington but in the fifty state capitals.
https://thefreedomsproject.com/item/595-mourning-in-america
Canada goes back to the polls in 2023. Justin has been relatively quiet of late, at least from the perspective of an outsider at some considerable distance. His buffoonery and almost comical wokeness exhibited over many years continues to survive, of course. He has faced a series of political opponents who have failed to land a glove on a truly modest political operator.
The boy prince’s political philosophy was once defined thus:
Justin Trudeau after taking office as Prime Minister in 2015 tried to define what it means to be Canadian, saying that Canada lacks a core identity but does have shared values: There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada....
Que? The Washington Post noted in 2017:
At a state visit to Ottawa last month, Vice President Biden called out Trudeau (and Germany’s Angela Merkel) as lonely defenders of the “liberal international order” on a planet increasingly hostile to it. Glowing tributes to Canada as an island of liberal sanity in a world gone mad, which have appeared everywhere from the Guardian to the Economist, invariably cast Trudeau in a starring role.
But not all were and are convinced. Trudeau the Second might be the ScoMo of the left. A sheep in leftist wolf’s clothing. A B-grade fool pretending to play in the big league. A pretender. Clueless. But politically persistent, and a bulwark against common sense and tradition. And not remotely a leader.
J J McCullough of WaPo concluded:
But anyone seeking a leader bearing a more thorough perspective on the challenges of the modern West — markets vs. management, trade vs. protectionism, racialism vs. egalitarianism — should probably keep looking.
New Zealand is fresh off the back of an election, and so its Government, for the first time since New Zealand adopted the crazy German system of mixed member proportional representation in the late 1990s, has a majority government. There is no upper house in NZ, and there are no states. So it will be plain sailing towards a woke, socialist nirvana for the old Blairite staffer and former office bearer of the International Union of Socialist Youth, Adern. There is little opposition in either the parliament or the media. The Opposition has had three leaders in the last six months, none of whom created even a modicum of excitement among the punters or landed a blow on the Sainted One. And no election till 2023. The darling of the international globalist left appears unassailable.
The Aussies are stuck with Scott Morrison at least till 2022. With an Opposition led by the Invisible Man (Anthony Albanese – who?), it could, alas, be much longer.
You might think, well at least two of these Anglosphere governments aren’t leftist. You would be wrong, unfortunately.
Boris runs a government that acts like totalitarian thugs, sooling its woke police forces onto innocent demonstrators, harassing and fining dissents up to ten thousand pounds, destroying employment and wealth creation, smashing small businesses, creating a socialist utopia of government guaranteed incomes, banning overseas travel in effect to all sorts of countries, printing money and spraying it around like it is confetti, and doing its best to botch Brexit. It is populated with Cameroons like Commandant Hancock, who would never be mistaken for a right-of-centre type. When one finds oneself cheering a speech in the Commons by Theresa May, well …
Perhaps worst of all, and revealing his true colours, Boris is a climate change nutter determined to carpet bomb "this royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars ... this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England" – with useless, subsidised windfarms. Playing to the green crowd.
Meanwhile, down under, Scott Morrison, or ScoMo to his half a dozen committed, convinced fans, is more Chauncey Gardiner than anything else. No one has ever been able to locate an ideological pulse in the man. He is like that ice skater Steven Bradbury who won a Winter Olympics medal when all his competitors fell over. The earlier war between felled Liberal leaders Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull, petered out and we were left with a leader of D team quality. Abbott was the last great hope for pragmatic, decent and honourable Howardism. Turnbull, the globalist, republican progressive from central casting who most people believed should have been in the Labor Party, was, indeed, the Malchurian candidate. Both perished at the hands of the regicide prone Liberal Party.
That is how ScoMo attained high office.
He is also known affectionately in Australia as “Scotty from Marketing”, a hat dip to his original career and sole expertise. Yes, he did win a “miracle” election in 2019, but that was against a Labor Opposition of, to be extraordinarily generous, modest ability. Led by an idiot. And proposing lunatic policies that the cautious Aussie electorate just wouldn’t come at. Morrison’s instincts are solely directed to occupying the Treasury benches, for purposes that even he probably doesn’t comprehend.
Morrison’s Government has been effectively sidelined and rendered impotent by Covid-federalism and lunatic state premiers like Daniel Andrews, Australia’s own Jim Jong Dan, who has become infamous the world over as an exemplar of thuggery and government by executive fiat, and the border closing guy in Western Australia who seems to think they are a country rather than a state of the Commonwealth. Morrison has been parked, in effect. Merely cheering from the sidelines. He has had to resort to abusing exemplary corporate citizens like Christine Holgate, former CEO of Australia Post, to stay on the front political foot.
Still, Morrison has done his bit for leftism.
Printing money in the style of Boris, rewarding the non- employed – non-employed by the Covid hysteria he helped create – with welfare so generous it has deterred many from working at all, preventing Australians from travelling overseas, in the manner of only Cuba and North Korea, and spinelessly refusing to join the one and only legal challenge to the border closures, ScoMo has revealed his impotence. He is simply not up to it. Clueless and moronically inept, and with no “bottom”, as FU (fictional British prime minister Francis Urquart) would have said. No moral fibre, not a hint of understanding of freedom and its import. Infamously, Morrison once opined that freedom of speech “doesn’t create a single job”. At least Boris is said to have an understanding of the importance of freedom. He just chooses not to deploy it.
Most alarming of all, neither Boris nor ScoMo understand the culture war the West is in. Even if they did, neither would have the spine or the wit to know how to push back against the ascendant cultural marxism, and to prosecute a campaign to confront it. Careerists and chancers are pathetically insufficient for the task of prosecuting a war.
In summary, all five leaders of the Anglosphere are leftists, either intent on overturning the traditional social order, or powerless either to understand or defend it. So what are the five men and women of the apocalypse all about? What is the moral standing and moral intent of our current crop of Western leaders?
Biden is the Catholic who doesn’t believe in Catholicism. Lives a lie. He is a crook. He doesn’t understand the seventh commandment, clearly. Thou shall not steal elections. He believes in infanticide on demand, and making taxpayers pay for it, and exporting it to the world. He abides Tammany Hall Democratic Party history, and, indeed, actively prosecutes its methods in a modern context. He protects family members in the pay of the ChiComms and the Russians. He is a crony capitalist who professes … well, what exactly does he profess? He steals words from others for his speeches. Whose words will populate his inaugural speech, one wonders? He destroys good men like Robert Bork, in order to rig the US Supreme Court. He sniffs the hair of women of any age.
Boris is a man of multiple wives and lovers, a serial liar (as detailed by his recent biographer, Tom Bower) and a philanderer, the procurer of an abortion for an inconvenient mistress back in the day.
Morrison is a professed Christian who throws innocent, falsely accused Catholic cardinals to the wolves in the face of patently concocted charges. (Seduced and rendered powerless by metooism, the sex abuse moral panic of the day generated by the Julia Gillard Royal Commission, and the opportunity to appear on-message to the elites, Morrison threw George Pell under the bus at a time when it counted). A hypocrite. A man who goes all quiet when his state colleagues introduce abortion laws that are the envy of the leftist world. (He goes quiet on most things that matter, like Israel Folau’s purgatory, for example). A man who prioritises holding office over governing with integrity and purpose. A man who refuses to defend the Australian constitution against gauleiter state premiers who think we are still nineteenth century colonies. And who defends dwarf fascists like Daniel Andrews, all in the cause of falsely presumed national unity.
Jacinda Adern doesn’t even pretend to be anything other than a woke, radical feminist, an abortion loving champion of euthanasia determined to destroy traditional Kiwi values. One who can hold a pose for the cameras, and appeal to the clueless, vacuous classes of the day. One who would destroy an economy in order to show she can “defeat” a virus, simply to win an election.
Justin is, well, Justin. Occupying space and consuming oxygen wastefully, while Canadians attempt to figure out what he is, and they are, on the planet for.
In the face of this line up, one fears that the elites who actually run the world, the globalist corporates, socialist CEOs, Big Tech oligarchs, media moguls and deep state operatives who gather each January in Davos to set goals and strategies for the rest of the world to follow, are not the least concerned, post-Trump. The last great hope is gone. The one guy who understood the game being played and who was willing to get in their faces, batting for the common man. The carbon spewing corporate jets that will all make their way to Davos for the Great Reset in January 2021 will now only encounter either acolytes or useful idiots.
How do the current lot measure up to the great leaders of even the recent past, say of the so-called Great Generation?
Readers with me so far will not be surprised to conclude – not very well. There was a seriousness, a sense of national purpose, of global duty and a sense of virtue bred in former generations of leaders that has gone AWOL in the twenty-first century. They were all flawed men, as all humans since The Fall are. But they all had a deep sense of right, and of meaning. Now, we just have managers and ideologues. Men such as Churchill and Attlee could work together to defend the things that mattered. Likewise Churchill and Roosevelt, who, between them, saved our world from tyranny.
The current lot have simply delivered a new (Covid) tyranny where freedom no longer has a safe haven, and a world that none of the great men of the mid twentieth century would remotely understand.
The American conservative writer Rod Dreher famously came up with a strategy for Christians and conservative fellow travellers to deal with life in a secularist, post-Christian world of, at best, discomfort, and at worst, persecution. He called it the “Benedict option”. St Benedict simply retreated to the caves in the face of godlessness and hopelessness, and, to his surprise, was joined by a band of brothers equally seeking a simple, moral life far away from the world’s madness. They then built a movement of renewal.
In the face of an Anglosphere now in the hands of the enemy, the cave plan has some appeal. Alternate strategies for survival are thin on the ground.
The prospects for the West in the coming years do not bode well, to put it very mildly. Clint Eastwood, playing Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Highway in Heartbreak Ridge, might (colourfully) describe the current state of the Anglosphere as a “cluster f…”
Who among us would demur?
