OPINION:
President Xi Jinping believes China’s ascent to global dominance is inevitable, because its authoritarian government and socialist-market economy can better deliver technological progress and prosperity than decadent Western democracies. Established elites in the West may be proving him correct.
The euro is overvalued for the Mediterranean region and undervalued for Germany and other northern states. Consequently, Italy and others must run large trade deficits with Germany and pile up foreign debt or accept perpetual austerity and high unemployment.
Eurozone rules strictly limit national deficits. When the League and Five Star Movement won enough seats to form a coalition government that would break Italy loose from those rules, Sergio Mattarella — president and de facto protector of the establishment — refused permission to form a government unless the coalition effectively pledged not to implement policies that could eventually exit the country from the euro and EU.
That effectively canceled the mandate of a democratically elected government. When the coalition proposed a budget deficit outside EU guidelines, Brussels struck it down and Italy was thrust into recession.
In France, Emmanuel Macron won office on a fraud. His program of hope and change is little different than center-left Socialists and center-right Republicans that governed in recent decades — incremental labor market reforms, high taxes on the working and middle classes to finance costly social programs in the face of flagging growth and allegiance to the EU’s strict rules on for economic, environmental and immigration policy.
A graduate of ENA — an aristocratic institution that takes very few students from the middle and working classes and produces France’s top civil servants and many business leaders — he is the very epitome of France’s metro elites. Like America’s Wall Street bankers, they grow richer by enabling the globalization that impoverishes France’s working and middle class as represented by the Yellow Vests.
By proposing another fuel tax to combat global warming, which would do diddle if China and other developing nations continue to increase emissions, President Macron unleashed more than a revolt against the high cost of driving. Yellow Vests are violently protesting the deaf greed and statist superstitions of France’s aristocrats.
In the U.K., Theresa May, who opposed Brexit during the referendum, has coyly obstructed the outcome by acceding to all of the EU demands. Instead of forcing the negotiation of a free trade agreement that would give Britons the same continental market access as Canada, she brought back a deal for a customs union that would require the U.K. to follow Brussels rules without a say in writing those.
Then Mrs. May confronted Parliament with a choice of either accepting those terms or the chaos of hard break.
In America, Donald Trump legitimately won the presidency by defeating the Bush and Clinton dynasties. He offered hope and change to America’s Yellow Vests — those away from the large coastal cities who have long suffered from jobs-destroying free trade and immigration.
The residual establishment among Democrats and center-right Republicans in Congress have obstructed President Trump’s legitimate mandate by stalling appointments. Democrats have abandoned support for Obama-era policies where those coincide with his agenda.
They forget President Obama ratchetted up border enforcement and deportations. In his 2006 “The Audacity of Hope” book, he wrote “When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”
The West faces a mass migration from collapsing regimes in the South. It threatens the cultural cohesiveness and values that made possible liberal democracy and two centuries of progress from the Age of Invention to the post-World War II middle class prosperity.
Gerard Collomb, a respectable center-left politician and Interior minister until last October, warned Mr. Macron that France risks civil war if legal and illegal immigration are not sharply curtailed.
Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, and federal judges who do their bidding, might heed those words too instead of enabling the champions of open borders, de facto naturalization and voting rights for those who enter America illegally.
The efforts of Sen. Schumer and Mrs. Pelosi, House Committee chairmen and young mischief makers among the “Ladies in White” to discredit and perhaps remove a legitimately elected president are not the work of a loyal opposition but rather a terrible sin against democracy.
President Xi must be so pleased.
• Peter Morici is an economist and business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.
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