When I was a lad back in my high school days, Brother Columbkille would lecture us on the Age of Enlightenment and the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution as separate phenomena. But ultimately, they were the various manifestations of Europe getting its feet under itself again after the various crises of the “Dark Ages.”
Probably one of the biggest disruptions was the chaos that resulted from the Rise of Islam in the south and east and the expansion of the Scandinavian and Slavic peoples in the north. The wars and disruptions from all this jostling around kept stability from taking hold everywhere from the British Isles to the Iberian Peninsula to the Balkans for almost six hundred years.
But once the Spaniards, English and French finally got their domestic problems ironed out they pretty quickly got with the program and began modernizing their commercial and military methods and before you knew it, they were even modernizing their governments. Well, some of them did. The Spaniards lagged behind, the French went mad and burned their government to the ground and the English found a relatively balanced approach that experimented with revolution while maintaining the trappings of tradition.
But here we are, six hundred years into Renaissance civilization and something is changing. European civilization has overwhelmed every other culture, scientifically, militarily and economically. It created a global network that exported the humanist “creed” to every corner of the planet. But in its latest iteration humanism has become nihilistic, anti-human and specifically anti-European.
This can be seen in the latest wave of self-hating anti-white propaganda that has swept across Europe and North America. And in the effort to flood the countries that had a majority of European population with third world refugees and declaring that this was a necessary and desirable outcome, regardless of the chaos and hardship this inflicted on the citizens of these places. Apparently, these people needed to be punished for being prosperous and law-abiding.
It can be claimed that Donald Trump is a reaction to this policy that the Left has instituted. He is the clearest symbol of a resistance to this desire by the Left to destroy the people who build the modern world. He seems to have been the only one in the elite class to speak the truth about what those in power in both the Democrat and Republican parties were intent on accomplishing. And because of that they did everything they could, up to and including assassination to stop him.
Hopefully they’ve failed and Trump will get a chance to reverse as many of the nihilistic policies as he can. Here’s hoping he takes a chain saw to the FBI, CIA, IRS, the Departments of State, Justice, Education and Defense and altogether shuts down things like NPR.
But even if he does all that he wants to do, there is something genuinely wrong with our culture. The people who teach in our schools and colleges, run our corporations, and preach in our churches look at the world in a nihilistic way. They think there is no difference between a family where a man and a woman raise their biological children and an arrangement where two men adopt someone else’s children and try to convince them that all of that is normal. They believe that people whose skin color happens to be white but whose ancestors only arrived in this country a lifetime after slavery are somehow responsible for any disparity in economic condition between them and the descendants of slaves, one hundred and sixty years after emancipation. Social Justice has become a religion and the teachers in our schools are the evangelists. That’s got to stop.
What seems clear to me is that the most important change going forward is one of education. The stranglehold that the teachers’ union has over public education must be broken and alternative schools must be given equal funding to that provided to the public schools to break the spell that public education has cast on the young people of this country. If Trump can repurpose the Education Department to provide real school choice he will have performed a great service to the nation’s children.
I see the beginnings of this with states providing vouchers for school choice. And I see that Texas and Florida both have some higher education choices that avoid DEI and other anti-white discriminatory programs that abound in most colleges.
It’s hard to know if things are turning around yet. I think Trump’s term will be the test. If he fails, I think we will see resistance at the local and state level become the only solution and that may involve open defiance of the federal government. But I’m just speculating because a failure of Trump to turn around the Left’s agenda would be a terrible blow to conservatives everywhere. It would herald a dark time for us.