Wretchard:

One unintended consequence of the rise of Islamic extremism is a crisis of legitimacy for the left and the soft-left.

Yes, but it’s not the Islamo extremists fault. They’re just benighted sociopaths stinking their way through their own sorry lot in life. “They’re just being who they are” is right. If it wasn’t Islamic extremism, it would be something else. The Left and the cadre of Western Elites they’ve replaced with pod-people have been empty shells for a generation or so, incapable of formulating a coherent, effective response to any sort of real crisis. Indeed, incapable of even comprehending a real crisis exists. To them, any crisis is just an excuse to feather their nests a little more.

I expect they will be looking for a way to make a little graft all the way to the gallows. Sometimes I wonder if most of the Democrats voting for Health Reform view it not as a piece of legislation but as a Golden Parachute retirement plan. “We’re sunk sooner or later anyway, let’s pocket what we can and get the hell out of Dodge before the tar and feather brigades show up.” They might just be smart enough to know their own limitation and realize they don’t have the wherewithal to stabilize the government and are setting up an exit strategy.

Who will take their places? what sort of leaders will inherit the shambles?

Trupeers:

if terrorism doesn’t give a fig for intellectual denunciations, why does it want to silence them?

The Islamo-nazis don’t care about intellectual denunciations., they care about dissent. Any challenge to their self-proclaimed authority must be silenced, or they will lose all their power. It doesn’t matter if the challenge is a tweedy professor writing academic papers, a rival cleric denouncing their heresy, or a military force shooting at them. They have to respond or lose their own legitimacy. It’s something they understand that Western Elites do not.

Whiskey:

People do not fight and die for a Constitution, or the idea that all men are created equal, or the idea of America or France or the United Kingdom. That’s a fantasy.

People in the end fight and die for their families and people who might reasonably be a distant relative. This is human nature.

Of Primitive people this is true. But there is an ongoing human evolution that favors the notional state, the “tribe of ideas.” It certainly has not passed all the way through the human genome, but it is there. It may not yet be strong enough to displace tribalism, but if not yet then someday. In fact, I would say it is already strong enough to displace tribalism and has been for over two centuries millenia. Rome was proof of that, and if your sentiments lean towards the spiritual, the coming of Christ and the transformation of Judaism (a tribal religion) into Christianity (a religion of ideas) was the confirmation of the change.

What the Tribe of Ideas is not yet strong enough to vanquish, and what did in Rome, is the corruption of it’s own members. The problem with our leaders today is not that they are insufficiently loyal to their race, it’s that they are simply corrupt.