Lightning Flashes
and reveals the landscape
Truckers rolled into Ottawa. The prime minister of Canada fled: withdrew to an undisclosed and highly secure location to hide from the event and its organizers. The prime minister of Canada hid from Canadians engaged in peaceful protest, because they honked their horns and parked illegally so he thought they were dangerous.
Russians rolled into Ukraine. The president, and the mayor of Kiev, and a former president, and other political leaders went down into the street with weapons and announced their intention to fight, personally, even if meant that they had to die.
Imagine an invasion of the United States, or any form of sudden widespread danger. Picture Barack Obama and Joe Biden picking up their rifles and going down into the street to fight side-by-side with Gavin Newsom and Eric Garcetti. “We may not see the morning, brothers, but here we make our stand.” And then Kamala Harris walks up, racks one into the chamber, and says…
Okay, yeah. So.
What Ukrainian leaders are doing is what we’ve expected of our leadership classes for most of the history of the world. The young lady who would go on to become Queen Elizabeth II spent the Second World War in uniform; George Washington had horses shot out from under him on the battlefield. A young congressman named Lyndon Johnson infamously forced himself to go on a single combat mission as a navy officer so he could tell voters he was a combat veteran, the end result of that mission having become…interesting. The expected performance of high-status people is to look cool and calm as the bombs fall, and to tell everyone else to stand strong. That’s the role.
The complete disappearance of that social role in the United States and the Commonwealth countries — affluent societies led by highly credentialed people — is the result of the incredibly destructive process (famously described by Christopher Lasch) by which our notional elites have defined themselves against the low and degraded population that they’ve deigned to try to fix: whatever local version of “the stupid Trump people in their trailer parks out there in flyover country” applies. Woodrow Wilson gave birth to Justin Trudeau; so did settlement houses, and so did the New Left of the 1960s. The “thinking classes” don’t lead by mixing in with the trash; they lead it from above, and from a careful distance.
I’ve written about these people and this posture many times, starting here. Here’s a really good version of this discussion from N.S. Lyons. And of course, the late Angelo Codevilla wrote this, twelve years ago, and showed us where we were headed.
Societies led by a Justin Trudeau are in for a whole lot of pain. This separation can’t persist. It’s fascinating to watch Ukrainian leaders remind us of the thing that we’ve lost.
