Moment of Truth?

Michael Lumish



Without plunging head-first into the muck which is this presidential campaign - or is that inescapable? - I want to make note of this Pat Condell video wherein he compares Hillary and Trump.

It is highly likely that we are looking at four to eight years of Hillary Clinton and Condell's analysis of the consequnces are worthy of consideration.

He stresses that Hillary will continue Obama's push toward a European-style social democracy as developed in recent years by the EU. Condell, however, considers the EU to be a non-democratic disaster and warns Americans away from making the same mistake.

Condell, in fact, is so disenchanted with the EU that he sees it - not unreasonably - as a step toward a world without borders. This world without borders, he suggests, will be controlled by a centralized global corporate government.

He stresses the significance of the upcoming election by suggesting that it is really a choice between American-style secular democracy versus European-style social-democracy. He characterizes the latter as obsessed "with open borders, mass migration, and a remote unaccountable government dominated by large corporations."

{Think James Caan in Rollerball... except with Jihadis.}

Condell suggests that Brexit was an expression of the will of the British people to not live under the domination of a foreign capital, Brussels, that is beholden to the corporate world. He is also displeased that the EU has forced the immigration of millions of non-democratically-inclined people into Europe, great numbers of whom refuse to integrate, as they set up their own systems of jurisprudence within sovereign nations.

Condell's piece caught the eye of Israeli columnist Martin Sherman who differed in his analysis.

Sherman does not believe that it is America versus Europe so much as a contest between "traditional Western values" with "Judeo-Christian foundations" versus... something else.

He described this something else, in a 2012 article, as displaying “the same strains of resentment and envy, suspicion of others’ achievement, the belief that the success of some was necessarily the product of exploitation pervades much of the anti-colonial, anti-American – and yes, anti-Zionist – philosophy of many members of the Non-Aligned Movement.”

I prefer Condell's view on the matter and see it as a contest between a more traditional American political culture that stresses individuality and freedom versus a European political culture that is concentrating power in the European Union.

What's important in Sherman's argument, to my mind, is this:

As Obama’s perceived successor, Clinton will be bound to preserve and promote—whether of her own volition or not—these political perspectives, simply because of the political milieu in which she will be compelled to operate, the political interests she will be compelled to serve and the political allegiances she will be compelled to maintain.

Every four years we are told that this is the election of a life-time.

Every four years the US newsmedia stresses over and over and over how crucial to all of humanity the upcoming election is.

And every four years I dismiss this notion as nonsense.

This year I am less certain.