Things Fall Apart

If the past few years are any guide, we’re in for a wild ride in 2018. From Pyongyang’s nukes to Hollywood casting calls, from China’s rise to the EU’s breakup, from street battles in Charlottesville and massacres in Vegas to the president’s Twitter habits: Everything teeters on the edge of apocalypse. Today’s world seems to be a scramble of disconnected data points, but there’s coherence in the chaos. The most penetrating analyses focus on the West’s loss of confidence in globalization. That framework doesn’t explain everything, but it explains a lot. It explains Trump, the polygonal backlash against the EU, the anxious resentments of the alienated young and the forgotten middle and working classes, hostility to refugees and immigrants, and frustrations with political correctness and enforced diversity. We can deepen the analysis with a glance at an actual apocalypse, the book of Revelation. Continue at Firstthings.com .