MC Hammer and the crisis of legitimacy

Modern Dutch political history began in 1897, with the "pillarization" of the country's politics. Each of three main groups -- Catholics, Protestants, and socialists -- organized itself around its own "pillar," and rarely operated outside this virtual ghetto; elites of all pillars worked together to prevent sectarian strife. This politics of consensus kept the country together, but it required avoiding open conflict over ideas. Joshua Livestro, 35, a political speechwriter and conservative activist, says pillarization effectively destroyed any hope of building a conservative political party because those who held right-of-center views were dispersed among the various confessional parties, diluting their strength.

And their divisions left them completely unprepared for the 1960s. It has been remarked that no society on earth was more thoroughly transformed by the Sixties than Holland's. James Kennedy, a history professor at Hope College in Michigan, wrote his doctoral dissertation on how the Netherlands went from being one of the most religious, socially conservative countries in Western Europe to being a bourgeois Babylon in a few short years. Postwar Dutch society lost faith in the old system, which the counterculture showed to have been made of straw.

"A number of Dutch religious and secular leaders concluded there wasn't a lot to be done to resist," explains Kennedy. "One thing the Dutch political culture does well, maybe too well, is to accommodate itself to new moods in society. What you don't do is try to create a 'silent majority' to resist new trends, because in this view, trends can't be bucked."

The Left captured the culture without firing a shot.

What got left out of this NR piece (for reasons of space) is a complex story about the rapid and complete collapse of the old order, especially the religious order. The war had thoroughly discredited it in the hearts of the Dutch people. In my understanding, it wasn't that people blamed the churches for the war; it was that the war -- both World Wars, actually -- were so annihilating of the roots of European order that the people simply couldn't, or wouldn't, muster the faith necessary to believe in their elites and their institutions. The elites -- especially the religious elites -- lost their charisma, or natural authority. The people turned to hedonism and individualism, materialistic pursuits that were at least credible to them. As Andreas Kinneging, a Dutch legal philosopher and godfather of the nascent conservative movement there told me at the time:

"What we are witnessing now is the very first generation who grew up without a religious background," says Kinneging. "What has happened until now is that most people without a religious background have become consumerists, materialists, and hedonists. They are still law-abiding citizens. We'll have to see what the next generation will become."

Now, to return to Jape's point: if we are about to go through another Depression, or at least a severe recession, that it will have been brought on by elites -- political and financial -- failing to be good custodians of the responsibilities granted them will likely occasion tumultuous changes in our political order. Who can predict with any confidence what form those changes are likely to take? Is the US government too big to fail? One presumes so, but given the degradation in civic virtue, the loosening of moral restraints and the fraying of social bonds in the fat years since the last Depression, who can say?

The one thing the System can do to regain legitimacy is to see to it that the elites who so badly failed in their responsibilities be punished for what they've done. They cannot be seen to suffer no consequences for their failure -- else the System is revealed as a sham that exists for the interests not of the whole, but a ruling class that has proved itself unworthy of the authority granted to it. If history teaches us anything, it's that nothing worldly is permanent. A decisive crisis brought about by misgovernment could well depose the elites we have. Which is to be welcomed: they have badly misgoverned. The greater danger, though, is that the crisis brought about by their misgovernment could be so severe as to move the masses to throw away the institutions themselves. Should that come about, we are in another world entirely, not one, I think, to be wished for.

Much depends, then, on how the System reforms itself through and after the crisis -- and, I should add, how willing citizens are to recognize our own role in this disaster, and to reform ourselves instead of merely scapegoating elites, and leaving it at that.