THE COLUMN: 'A Tide in the Affairs of Men'

Michael Walsh03 Jul, 2024 5 Min Read
Happy Fourth of July, America.

A week can be an eternity in history, yet also one that changes the future in the blink of an eye. The trick is to recognize it, and then seize it. The Bard, of course, said it best:

There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;/ Omitted, all the voyage of their life / Is bound in shallows and in miseries. / On such a full sea are we now afloat, / And we must take the current when it serves, / Or lose our ventures.

The lines are from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, given to Brutus, urging his co-plotter Cassius to take advantage of their strategic position and attack the forces of Octavian and Mark Antony while they are at their strongest. Then came the plains of Philippi, and that was the end of Brutus and Cassius. Nevertheless, the truth of Brutus' speech remains; call it "strike while the iron is hot." Consider:

  • In the European Parliament elections last month, Green parties all over the Continent were soundly thrashed. This cause French president to call a snap election on Sunday.
  • The first round of those elections unceremoniously demolished Emmanuel Macron's center-left party, now masquerading under the name "Renaissance,"  and put Marine Le Pen's National Rally in the driver's seat heading into the next round on July 7. Already the left, hard left, and the anti-Semitic far left are maneuvering to block le Pen from reaching a governing majority of 289 seats. Should that happened, Macron -- who still has three  years left on his presidency -- would be effectively neutered, and replaced either by by Le Pen herself or her wunderkind, Jordan Bardella, who turns all of 29 later this year and may well soon be the country's prime minister.

The Left's worst nightmare.

  • Meanwhile, U.S. voters were treated to the spectacle of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., incinerating himself on national television in his CNN debate against Donald Trump on June 27, making it clear to everyone except perhaps Karine Jean-Pierre, the hapless press secretary, that the superannuated, lifelong hack politician has finally come to the end of a long road of blustering, bullying, boasting, and generally bullshitting his way into the Oval Office.
  • At a single stroke, Biden not only destroyed his own campaign and presidency, but thoroughly pantsed the Corporate Media hacks who've spent the last three years telling everyone to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, and that Joe Biden is just fine. Now, they've changed their tune, to such an extent that most of them, starting at the top with the New York Times have turned on a dime and are calling for him to drop out of the race.
  • To top things off, the Supreme Court rounded out this term with a series of beneficial rulings against the hard Left and its Regulatory State, including overturning its own dreadful Chevron decision from 1984; demolishing one of the principal charges being used against the Jan. 6 protestors by Biden's own personal Beria, Merrick Garland; telling the states that the homeless do not have the right to camp in public spaces; outlawed the regulatory agencies from using their own in-house courts and restoring the constitutional right to trial by jury; and giving the embattled former president, Donald Trump, a big win in the Democrats' ongoing lawfare against him, clarifying his absolute immunity from lawsuits while carrying out the core functions of the Executive, thus putting an end to a possible unending series of legal reprisals every time the White House switches hands.

What this all boils down to is simple: across the Western world, there is an ongoing war not only between Left and Right, but more fundamentally between those who believe in the power of the State versus those who defend and cherish the rights and prerogatives and histories of their Nation. For countries begin not as political entities -- political entities called States -- but as Nations, rising up from a people united by blood, faith, languages, culture, and philosophy. Some leftists refer to America as a "notional" nation, but that is historically untrue: the United States was founded in principle and practice almost exclusively by white Protestant men from the British Isles, sons of the Enlightenment who cherished right reason, Christianity, English culture, and who spoke the English language.

What no one foresaw, however, was a government-induced mass migration from radically different cultures, generally one technologically backward and lacking the hard-won considerations of personal rights that had taken centuries to develop in the West. Mostly homogeneous European countries, now shoehorned into the European Union, became flooded via a movement of peoples on a scale not seen since the late Roman Empire, trailing social instability and, often, violent crime, in their wake.

In opposition has arisen populist-nationalist movements in places such as the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, Germany, and now France, where the National Rally has campaigned on an explicit campaign promise of expulsion of its burgeoning radical Muslim minority and closing its border to further immigration from Africa and the Middle East. And even Canada, a definitionally bicultural nation, has had enough of Justin Trudeau's campaign to destroy the country's strong national identity. Despite the Left's insistence, "Nationalism" is not a dirty word.

All of the social changes pushed through by the far left over the past few decades, including expanded abortion, open celebration of exhibitionistic sexual fetishism, decriminalized drug use, weakening national militaries, turning a blind eye to street crime, and the constant propaganda drumbeat of political correctness (as they define it), have finally occasioned a Newtonian reaction, including here in the U.S. Despite their best efforts to criminalize him, Trump is not only leading in the polls but widening his lead as the Biden campaigned has hit a brick wall.

High tide of the South:  July 3, 1863

The only question now is whether the Democrats -- who are always bleating about "our democracy" -- will do the profoundly undemocratic thing and depose Biden in favor of Kamala Harris or Your Name Here after an open convention in August. That Biden already has won enough delegates to claim the nomination matters not one whit to the party that mastered the Torricelli Maneuver in 2002 and whose motto is, "by any means necessary." Who would be surprised if they junk "their democracy"? If you're looking for a historical parallel, we're nearing the moment politically when, with the aged emperor Tiberius nearing his end, his successor Caligula was reaching for a handy pillow.

On this Fourth of July, we are in another civil war (dubbed by me more than a decade ago as the Cold Civil War), this one a duel to the death between the Nation and the State. Here, and all across Europe, the Nation must win, regain control over the State and, if necessary, dissolve it. As history shows, it's easier to disestablish a form of government -- the French are on their Fifth Republic in the same amount of time that America has had only one -- than it is to kill a nation. But make no mistake: that's the goal the International Left has set for itself since Lenin was a pup. The tide is now running in our favor; celebrate our national birthday by acting accordingly.

Michael Walsh is a journalist, author, and screenwriter. He was for 16 years the music critic and a foreign correspondent for Time Magazine. His works include the novels As Time Goes By, And All the Saints, and the bestselling “Devlin” series of NSA thrillers; as well as the nonfiction bestseller, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace and its sequel, The Fiery Angel. His new book of military history, A Rage to Conquer, was published in late January.

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6 comments on “THE COLUMN: 'A Tide in the Affairs of Men'”

  1. Michael, this is the best succinct description of where we began, who we are, why we achieved so much, and the risk of loss. You cover 250 years in 1,ooo words. Put to music it could be our National Anthem. Simply put; a group of Europeans founded a nation with a culture, language, religion, and more. those men were intelligent learned reasoned inspired and proved successful, if not perfect. Now tribes of cretans try to bring us to pre-civilization levels. Yet 49% of US population say history is meaningless.

  2. Yet in the UK the result of this Reaction has been the installation of a radical totalitarian government determined to crush the last vestiges of individual liberty and English identity.

  3. In the time of Jackson, the Democrat party was known as The Democracy. At least now they admit that is theirs and not ours.

  4. Stalinist Media Cabal's reaction to the exposure of Biden's decrepitude reminds me of Captain Rénault in Casa Blanca: " I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here."

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