Ronald Reagan famously said, “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” If he could see what the West is becoming, the poor man would be terrified. Our freedoms keep shrinking, while our dependence on the arbitrary decisions of politicians and—worse still—the elites behind them keeps increasing. This is not a concession to conspiracy buffs; it is the realisation of what is happening at the same time in the EU, at the UN, in Davos, in the U.S., and in every corner of the West. Those who still have doubts should look for political leaders wearing the Sustainable Development Goals pin, and consider that the head of TikTok has more power of influence than the prime minister of any nation.
The pandemic—when globalist interventionism stepped on the accelerator like never before—should have been our vaccine, but there is no evidence of that having occurred. Perhaps it’s because we like to repeat the same mistakes, or perhaps it’s because of what H. L. Mencken said: “No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.” Be that as it may, it is becoming increasingly difficult to escape from the web of public tutelage, and we, the people, are becoming ever more submissive to the various forms of power that oppress us. The denial of individual liberties during the pandemic, at the whim of politicians-turned-scientists or vice versa, seems to have been a small-scale experiment of what lies ahead, even if an exceptional threat like a virus doesn’t exist. Although, it does exist: climate change, for example, endows rulers with an even more perfect exceptionality than COVID-19, because it is ultimately even more mysterious, intangible, and malleable.
Globalism is weakening not only the sovereignty of nations, but also our sense of belonging. More and more people identify with the progressive slogan from the end of the last century, “I am a citizen of the world.” Globalism dissolves everything that is ours into some kind of foreign magma. Without roots in our homelands, and with the EU and the UN completely sold out to the globalist cause, societies are less free, and much more susceptible to manipulation.
Let me recommend an experiment that I have already carried out: every time you read in the newspaper a new idea or policy proposal that is clearly aberrant or insane, see if it originates from Davos and, more specifically, from the WEF. Many of the ideas that are presented on the WEF website are then subsequently debated in the European Parliament. Some have been integrated into the controversial UN Agenda 2030 against which European farmers have been fighting. There we find strange questions (“Are we overlooking the untapped potential of women of colour in sustainable finance?”), almost esoteric statements (“Climate change impacts women more. We must legislate to protect their health”), bloody headlines (“What is the relationship between abortion access and women’s economic freedom?”), and even proposals that would make a goat retch (“Why we need to give insects the role they deserve in our food systems”).
What this means is that our democracies and our votes are worth less because globalist hegemony in the West means that many of the norms and impositions come from outside national governments, in the form of pressure by supranational bodies, which continually conditions local policy on environmentalism, gender law, economics, and democratic health.
The victories of Trump in the uMeloni in Italy and—further away but no less relevant—of Milei in Argentina remind us that there is a disconnect between the people and the globalist ideas that the Left has clumsily adopted: people who live in a democracy want to be close to those that are to blame for their problems—their leaders—either to thrash them or to embrace them.
No one has ever voted for Bill Gates or George Soros. Their power to interfere in local governments and international bodies is significant; and they condition local policies while serving, at the global level, their own particular interests. Gates, for example, is doing so with his constant campaign against meat, while investing in making synthetic meat (which we can be certain is synthetic, but not meat). Soros is doing the same with his self-serving bid for uncontrollable multiculturalism, dissolving the Christian West into a kind of New Al Andalus, an operation in which he also has numerous vested interests.
This situation is opening up a new space for conservatives, which is also their natural space: the cause for the sovereignty of nations and the demand for a restoration of the freedom which has been usurped. Actually, the future of European and American conservatism lies along these two axes, to which I would only add a third that is now more necessary than ever: tradition.
One of the main problems of the uprooted post-modern man—the globalised man who does not feel that his country, or consequently his region, neighbourhood, city, or family is his own—is that he loses contact with the cultural wisdom accumulated by his ancestors. One of the traditional objectives of progressivism has always been to destroy tradition, because it is the anchor that can allow men to discover what is right, that which remains unchanging or eternal, or what worked best in the past. In other words: tradition is an antidote to the main driving force of the Left, which is revolution.
They have almost always failed in their attempt to annihilate our ties to tradition, because most people have a strong emotional attachment to the preceding generations, as well as a debt of gratitude to them. In a way, we carry on their struggle for survival and prosperity, and we feel that we are heirs to the principles and values for which they fought, to the extent that we, too, are willing to continue to fight for them.
However, we must admit that globalism has managed to deal a severe blow to this customary reverence for tradition, generating the aforementioned uprootedness that has been festering for generations and that, perhaps, the young people who are now rebelling against the globalist elites will succeed in reversing. In fact, Italy, France, Spain, and even Argentina are all already experiencing a revival of national sentiment amongst the youth. The average age at Meloni’s rallies in Italy, or Abascal’s in Spain, or Milei’s in Argentina suggests a generation of new patriots who are a hope for conservatism.
It is not about undoing what works well on a global level. Nor is it about waging war on international free trade. The key is to reestablish the balance between sovereignty and the global world. The best way to be European is to be Spanish, German, Italian, or whatever one is. But the Europeanist model that leaders like Ursula von der Leyen have been imposing—even by going so far as to meddle in other nation’s elections and threatening those who dare to vote for something she doesn’t like—must go.
In these days when European farmers are for the first time winning the battle against the totalitarian Green Deal, it is a good time to rethink the conservative program, and to support first of all what is closest to us, so that never again can it be decided in the Davos Club what should be on the menu of a restaurant in Madrid, what fuel a car should use in Berlin, what a citizen can vote for in Poland, what animal species can be hunted in Greece, or at what temperature the air conditioning may be set at a house in Rome.
