#35 / Collapse Of The Old Order

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Peggy Noonan, who formerly wrote speeches for President Ronald Reagan, now writes columns for The Wall Street Journal. In my blog post yesterday, I commented on a column in the Saturday/Sunday, February 1-2, 2025, edition of the paper. That column was written by Barton Swaim. Noonan had a column in that edition of the paper, too, and her column was titled, "Trump and the Collapse of the Old Order."  

Noonan's observations are sobering. She doesn't explicitly say, with Curtis Yarvin, that "Democracy is Done," but that is one logical deduction from what Noonan does say. I think Noonan, generally, has a good sense of the "mood" of the nation, and she certainly understands that our politics is "consequential." In other words, while many - on all "sides" - tend to deprecate the "political," Noonan knows that our politics is, in fact, the engine of transformation. From my perspective, this is the power of "self-government." We can, acting together, create new realities. 

We can destroy old ones, too. 

This, obviously, is what the headline on Noonan's column suggests may be happening. Noonan doesn't describe the specifics of what she is suggesting may be coming, and she is frank in saying that it is her belief that "we're living through times we'll understand only in retrospect." 

Nonetheless, if Noonan's "sense" of what is going on is at all accurate, the times in which we find ourselves are very much like those described by William Butler Yeats in his powerful poem, "The Second Coming." As you may remember, the times Yeats wrote about were times in which "the worst" were full of passionate intensity, and in which "the best" lacked all conviction. 

Here's the poem. If we want to maintain, and revivify our system of representative "self-government," we must not let "passionate intensity" sweep away the accomplishments of that flawed history which, despite all its flaws, Martin Luther King, Jr. called us to acknowledge and accept - and then bend - bend with both conviction and passionate intensity - towards a "more perfect union." 

oooOOOooo

The Second Coming
By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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Image Credit:

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trump-and-the-collapse-of-the-old-order-policy-politics-eb2fe178