The fool’s-based international order

First Biden, then Macron and next week the unfortunate Rishi Sunak. Japan’s Kishida, Germany’s Scholz and Canada’s Trudeau remain in office only because the election cycle doesn’t require them to assay the voters.

For the first time since modern European states were defined by the Treaty of Westphalia, every government of every major Western country is falling or would fall if it had to hold elections. What collective curse has befallen the leaders of the West such that all of their voters have come to despise them by enormous margins?

There is a simple explanation for the collective ruin of the governments of the West: All of them agreed to an agenda that their voters reject because it has degraded the quality of their lives. Spontaneously and simultaneously, the voters of the West are rising up to repudiate their leaders.

The damage to the world’s political class is breathtaking.

The first returns from France indicate that Emmanuel Macron’s bubble party of the center drew just a fifth of the national vote in the first round of the snap election that Macron called following the disastrous European Parliament election of June 9. Le Pen’s National Rally, tendentiously labeled the “extreme right” by the media echo chamber, came in at 34% while the leftist coalition garnered 28%.

72% of Americans, meanwhile, think that Joseph Biden isn’t mentally fit to be president (the other 28% presumably includes a large number of dementia victims). 56% of Americans disapprove of his performance.

The three parties that comprise the German governing coalition together polled just 30% of the vote in the June 9 European Parliament elections. The country’s second-largest party, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), has 16% of the vote,