Fault Line
From the desk of The Brussels Journal on Wed, 2007-11-07 16:18
A quote from Rod Dreher at his Crunchy Con blog, 6 November 2007
This argument puts me in mind of a conversation I had in 2002 with a leading European academic, a man of the Right whom I judged to have been pleased by the campaign of Pim Fortuyn, because Fortuyn had finally broken through the European establishment p.c. Maginot line on Islam and immigration. I was wrong. The professor told me that Fortuyn had done Europe a favor in that respect, but that no civilization based on Fortuyn's hedonistic, individualistic principles could long last. We spoke not long after Fortuyn was assassinated, but it was clear that he believed a victory by Fortuyn – denounced as a fascist by the Dutch political, academic and media establishments, though Fortuyn was to the left of the US Democratic Party – would have been at best a Pyrrhic one.
The counterjihadist side is still pretty small and without influence, I'm sorry to say, so I hate to see the factions turn on each other. They still have far more to fear from militant Islam and the appeasing EU mainstream than from each other. Even so, the situational fusionism that has worked till now was bound to come apart sooner or later. Didn't think it would be sooner. And though “racism” is the cause of the split, the fault line runs right down the middle of the American conservative movement too. Libertarians and traditional conservatives have had a marriage of political convenience that has worked out well for both sides. But it's cracking up because while both know what they're against – communism (in the past), and liberals in power today – they cannot agree on what they're for.