The Border Crisis

On both sides of the Atlantic borders have become a big issue in the guise of the equivalent question of whether a country can restrict the entry of migrants to numbers the electorate regards as sustainable....

So great was elite prestige that fiction was sustained until suddenly it couldn't any longer. The realization, when it came, was brutal. The rapidity with which the status quo of "open borders" has been overtaken by the "populist crisis" suggests that, like the financial crisis of 2008, a bubble has burst. It went broke gradually then all of a sudden. The globalization and multiculturalism that were supposed to have delivered prosperity and security have not paid off. This failure has started a run on political capital of elites which has yet to stop.

Trump and the European populists are picking up political assets at a bargain. Glenn Reynolds observed that "the press has three main kinds of power. One is to motivate the left. Another is to swing the middle. And the third is to demoralize the right. It’s pretty much lost the last of these, and I suspect the second one is fading too." That's tragic for the press.

A status quo that used to be able to buy on the margin has lets its account fall below the minimum level and perhaps for the first time has nothing more it can deposit. The media is shrill in the way a customer whose credit is bad out must shout at the waiter to get service. But it was grand while it lasted, the idea we could live without borders, without defense or even without civilization. Money for nothing and your checks for free. The music played for so long that even now no one can even imagine it could stop. How many will really prefer reality to illusion?