Motus Mentis

The ground is shifting in Europe: nationalist parties, including Nigel Farage’s nascent Brexit Party, gained a lot of ground in the recent EU elections.

Meanwhile, though, the Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz — who is routinely described as “far right”, despite being nothing more than a patriot who takes seriously any government’s duty to act as the steward of a nation’s culture and traditions, and to preserve them for generations yet unborn — has been tossed out on a vote of no confidence following a pay-for-play scandal involving the leader of his party’s coalition partner. Left-leaning Austrians are happy about this, but they should be careful what they wish for: Kurz is a relative moderate, skillful in politics, and able to compromise. One of the lessons that Europeans should have learned by now is that when those who take sensibly cautious positions on cultural and demographic change (I repeat myself) are silenced, the underlying pressure only increases — and will later release itself in more extreme forms.

P.S. With a hat-tip to Gates of Vienna, here is some interesting commentary by one Steven Turley, who identifies three related “insecurities” — border insecurity, economic insecurity, and cultural insecurity — as having driven global politics into a new and more conservative order. (I’d never heard of Dr. Turley before today, but he seems to have a good head on his shoulders.) Think of Newton’s Third Law.