If the West is to stay the same, a lot will have to change

My favorite line in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard comes midway through the first chapter. The times are unsettled. The Risorgimento is sweeping Sicily. Prince Tancredi, the idealistic young nephew of the book’s protagonist Prince Fabrizo, is bantering about the political situation with his uncle. He suddenly waxes serious: “If we want things to stay as they are, everything will have to change” (Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi).

Most readers will understand that the whiff of paradox points not to a contradiction but to a profound truth. There are plenty of historical situations in which fundamental assumptions about society are disrupted and can be restored only by something like revolution. We are living through such a situation now in the West.  

I write on D-Day, June 6. Eighty years ago, just after midnight, the cacophonous invasion of Normandy began with the silent landing of a few gliders by the Bénouville Bridge over the Caen Canal. Thus began the stupendous effort at recuperation that ended eleven months later with the fall of the Nazi regime. 

The West is not occupied by Nazis now. But it is, increasingly, occupied by a congeries of hostile forces that would compass its extinction. If things are going to stay the same, a lot of things will have to change. 

For example, the phrase “mainstream,” as in “mainstream media,” must be purged of its recent infusion with systematic, ideologically fired mendacity. Do you think that is an overstatement? As I write, the trial of Hunter Biden on felony gun charges is underway. A day or two back, the FBI admitted what everyone knew: that the infamous “laptop from hell” was not a piece of “Russian disinformation” as the uniparty insisted but was, in fact, an accurate record of Hunter’s seamy life.  

But remember the “fifty-one senior intelligence officials” who swore up and down that the laptop was enemy propaganda disseminated in the last instance by Trump friendly sources? Taking a page from that proverbial bit of cynical advice, they have never apologized and never explained their lies.  

It is clear now that that testimony, organized by Antony Blinken, now, God help us, Joe Biden’s secretary of state, was part of a larger scheme to neutralize the scandal that the laptop might have sparked in the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election. As an aide memoire, remember the hysterical, flood-the-zone denials by media talking heads as news of the laptop threatened to disrupt the carefully planned orchestration of votes-for-Joe that was proceeding apace. 

If things are going to stay the same, such media mendacity is going to have to change. So is the systematic obfuscation of ghouls like attorney general Merrick Garland, who has yet to find a question he cannot subvert or avoid. When Representative Matt Gaetz challenged Garland to supply the House with all documents relating to DoJ communication with Alvin Bragg’s office during the New York prosecutor’s effort to “Get Trump,” Garland’s answer — essentially, “Go suck rocks congressman” — should trouble anyone who claims to be concerned about “saving democracy.”  

The left is now touting the fact that Donald Trump is a “felon” or “convicted felon.” I very much doubt that that dog will hunt.  The epithet has backfired against the media industrial complex as more and more people are treating the aspersion “felon” as an honorific. It didn’t help when it was pointed out that every signatory of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States was also a “convicted felon.” 

If things are going to stay the same, a lot of things are going to have to change. The teas have not yet settled from their agony, but I see some signs that beneficent change is in the air.