The Discerning Texan

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Winston Churchill titled the first volume of his history of the Second World War The Gathering Storm. It was a characteristically apt choice of words. When storm clouds gather, as they did in the 1930s, and as they did in the United States in the 1850s, people argue about the coming threat. Some people insist that the coming storm will be a monster; others that it is nothing at all. Others insist that it is all a trick to take away our freedoms.

You can tell when a gathering storm is fixing to become The Big One.

The frightening gusts of wind start to reorder the political landscape. In the United States of the 1850s the Whig Party was divided by the issue of slavery and collapsed to make way for the Republican Party. In Israel this year, the Labour and Likud Parties have been challenged by the new Kadima Party, with future change almost certain.

Now we may see a split in the Democratic Party. It is possible that the Democrats will split over the war on terror, as the Whig Party split over slavery 150 years ago. Perhaps that is too much to hope for. But the pro-nation-state Democrats are clearly on the way out, and may soon be forced to find a home in the Republican Party, like the neoconservatives in the 1970s and the Reagan Democrats in the 1980s.

In Israel the shock of the last month will likely change the face of its politics again. The appeasement of the last 12 years, dating from the Oslo Accords of 1993, is now in ruins. Israelis will need to develop a new national will based on the new facts on the ground and find new national leaders to implement it. Already the reservists returning from the front in Lebanon are reported to be outraged and signing petitions in their thousands.

Face to face with reality, people will usually make the right decision. The problem is that in Western Europe and the United States people are not yet face to face with the reality of terror and can still afford to indulge their illusions.

The lesson from the past is that only the the shock of events changes the minds of people. In the years before the Civil War it was the brutal attack on Senator Sumner of Massachusetts on the floor of the United States Senate in 1856 that seemed to symbolize for many the irredeemable truculence of the South.

Unfortunately we yet await the event that will convince the secular elites of the West that their future and their safety lie in championing the ideas and the institutions that raised the West to glory.

Perhaps they will return to reality when a political hurricane blows them into the political wilderness and whirls their multicultural house of cards into ruins.