Time Immortal

Leave it to a British journalist to catch the deeper significance of the electoral victory of Barack Hussein Obama. The sane Hitchens brother notes:

I was in Washington DC the night of the election. America’s beautiful capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided city in the world, with 15th Street — which runs due north from the White House — the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, like so much of America, it also now has a new division, and one which is in many ways much more important. I had attended an election-night party in a smart and liberal white area, but was staying the night less than a mile away on the edge of a suburb where Spanish is spoken as much as English, plus a smattering of tongues from such places as Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan.

As I walked, I crossed another of Washington’s secret frontiers. There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.

They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.

Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.

These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America’s conservative party – the Republicans – to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.

They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?

The main problem with a progressive demagogue taking office is that the changes he brings about tend to be of the sort not easily dislodged from the public scene. Think of Pierre Elliot Trudeau and how he gave Canada its Charter, which purports to defend the rights and freedoms of Canadians but which, in effect, does almost the opposite. Think of nationalized , or nationalized Education, or the welfare culture extant today in most Western democracies. Think of the irregularities and insecurities that plague Immigration laws in many nations, Canada and the U.S. included.

Now imagine how it might come to pass that those things could be undone again? It’s impossible to envision, isn’t it? Or, at least, nearly so?

Even in what could be called the best-case scenarios (either a disastrous Obama presidency that swings the American populace strongly back toward an invigorated, staunchly conservative Republican party, or an Obama presidency in which Obama himself is forced by circumstances to channel the spirit of Ronald Reagan), the social changes that the Obama administration is (if only at first) going to be anxious to implement will be of the same lasting character.

And who knows who will then pay the price for such progressive excess? The unborn almost certainly will, but I doubt it will be just they who suffer.