We have clear evidence of a major change in human circumstances in that during the past half-century, the most consequential leaders in the western world have been a former actor, a storekeeper’s daughter, a real-estate developer, and a standup comic.

That’s not the way it was previously. The great figures of the West of the early and mid-20^th century – Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Churchill, to mention a few – were products of the upper class, groomed for leadership and expected to take the reins eventually. While it’s true that revolutionary upstarts from the working and middle classes such as Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin took over numerous countries worldwide, their impact was swiftly curtailed and they can’t be called “great” in any real sense, each having slammed his country into a brick wall before he was finished.

It could be argued that the same processes are in operation with Reagan, Trump, Thatcher, and Zelenskyy. The mid-century social-nationalist tyrants (to use John Lukacs’ coinage) were products of completely decadent imperial systems no longer able to function in any meaningful sense. The same can be said for the western liberal “democracies” in the 21^st century. (Ukraine can be considered an attempt to transplant such a governing system. Remember, it was Democrat political operatives who raced east following the Cold War to lecture the poor ignorant muzhiks on how to form a “real democracy.”) Like the totalitarian states, the liberal/left states were based on the same outmoded principle of privileged elites overseeing the benighted masses – though in this case, for their “own good.”

Each of our legends defied this system in his own way. Reagan and Thatcher, working almost alone, turned around nations that had been effectively run into the ground by top-down political structures. The UK’s Labour governments, ably assisted by “wet’ conservatives, had turned Great Britain into a basket case, while America’s newly radicalized elites had accomplished much the same across the pond. Donald Trump, for his part, was the first politician to challenge the new “Uniparty,” in which the interests of both Democrat and Republican, left-wing and “conservative,” reigned paramount over all else. And now we have Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is leading his people against a brutal attempt to revive not only a discredited system but an actual 19th-century imperial state.

Compare this to the behavior of the western elites, rushing from conference to conference to dither about nothing, collapsing before radical attempts to redefine reality itself, and putting all their efforts behind programs – “Agenda 21,” “the Great Reset” – that nobody asked for and that nobody will ever accept. This is the behavior of a class that has seen its day -- and knows it. There is, in fact, no comparison between the elites and the new, enlightened populism that is rising across the globe.

The new populists can be defeated, they can be cheated out of office, they can even be killed. But the principle for which they stand, that “no man is born to be saddled and ridden by another man,” is a permanent factor in human nature. It cannot be held back, and eventually, it will prevail.

That’s something to keep in mind these days when a funnyman from the steppes holds the sky suspended.

Image: Pixabay