For centuries, liberal European polities fended off all manner of political opponents, and if the states themselves did not always survive, liberalism itself demonstrated remarkable stability. It was a great filter that excluded all rivals, until it found one it could not sort out. Marxism and its successor movements proliferated as the one disease that liberalism could not defeat, in much the same way that antibiotic-resistant MRSA emerges from the antiseptic environments of hospitals. It is an opposition politics uniquely suited to liberalism, for it exploits the liberal impulses for equality and freedom in favour of a quite different, and far more terrible, project. In Western countries, the leftists took aim at the traditional institutions and culture of the European middle classes. There, they still struggle to impose not a socialist utopia, but a never-ending industrial and financial serfdom.
The leftist system is not meant to produce political stability or prosperity, and it feels a lot like it’s entering a death spiral. Getting these lunatics out of power, before they crash the entire West with no survivors, is the most urgent problem we face. Here MKH has the right idea: Respectable conservative politicians have failed above all, in neglecting those people who have suffered the most at the hands of globalisation, renewable energy, immigration, lockdowns and all the rest of it. We must defeat the leftist elite, not win them over; and to do this we must deprive them steadily of popular support, beginning among the lower classes and at the periphery, where the greatest gains are to be made, and working inwards. From the hysterical, crazed opposition men like Trump, Orbán and Salvini have inspired, you can measure the power of this approach.
If Corona restrictions return in the fall, populist political upsets will become our only hope.
Liberalism was susceptible to (neo)-Marxism because it lacked Christianity.