If there’s any Western government that isn’t struggling now, I’ve yet to hear of it. Public debt, inflation, housing shortages, lawlessness, uncontrolled immigration, ruinous environmental regulations, and progressive ideological nonsense worry or infuriate most people. Rather than looking for solutions, governing elites condescend, berate their critics, and even resort to speech codes and censorship. The real problem, as elites see it, is not their own ill-conceived ideas but ordinary people’s failure to accept them. The German playwright Bertolt Brecht joked about this phenomenon during the East German uprising against Soviet policies in 1953. Instead of crushing the dissidents, wouldn’t it be easier for the government to dissolve the people and elect a new one?
