After the Fall

by Michael Hanby 10 . 20 . 16

What is there to say about the abominable 2016 election that has not been said already? With the election of Hillary Clinton seemingly a fait accompli and with the transformation of the US into a one-party state all but assured, it is not too early to begin the soul-searching inevitably provoked by such calamitous events. Let us hope that it is not so late but that our souls may still be found.

The kind of “soul-searching” I have in mind is not the endless cycle of mutual recrimination between those who are alleged to have sold their souls to Hillary, those who are alleged to have sold their souls to Trump, and those allegedly cowardly souls who withdrew from the fray. Besides the garden-variety cynicism and sophistry we have come to expect from American politics, times as confusing as these are sure to produce colossal but well intentioned errors of judgment on all sides. I leave it to God and the party apparatchiks to sort all that out. It is still the Year of Mercy, after all. Besides, I do not find the question of who voted for whom all that interesting. The vices of each candidate are well-known. They do not need to be weighed and measured yet again. A Trump election would likely have accelerated our descent into chaos, fueling violent social disintegration and fragmenting the “deep state” into an ad hoc collection of bureaucratic fiefdoms unresponsive to the erratic declarations of an unstable executive whom they regarded as illegitimate. A Clinton election almost certainly means that the juggernaut of progressive Cultural Revolution will proceed unobstructed. Each of these dismal possibilities is sure to bring painful real-world consequences, and together they manifest the exhaustion of liberal order and deep civilizational crisis which we lack the wherewithal to fully recognize or understand. It is this crisis that we should reflect upon.

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