The western world is seeing a developing crisis that shows no identifiable end in sight.  Presumptively a crisis of economic stability, it is fundamentally a crisis of leaders and leadership. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dramatic end of direct Soviet threat to western institutions, the nations victoriously transcendent were those with traditions of capitalist democracy and democratic principles.  Instead of showing inspired leadership to the developing world as to the human benefits of individual freedom and expression, the west has collapsed into a post cold war funk of navel gazing, self flagellation, isolationist rhetoric, and self absorbed societal economies rewarding personal security not innovation and risk.  The sputtering exception has been the United States, briefly awoken by a direct attack on its nationhood and democratic principles on 09/11/2001, taking an aggressive tact with Great Britain to ferret out the threats to basic western principles in Afghanistan and Iraq, only to see little secondary support from its fellow democratic states, and progressive deterioration of their own population’s will. 

     The approaching climax of the challenge to western will is the two headed monster of the farce of global climate extremism, and efforts to pay for and maintain a social safety net well beyond those who actually need it.  I have recently reviewed the underlying agenda of climate change extremists epitomized in the Neue Zuricher Zeitung interview of German Economist and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change member Ottmar Edenhofer finally exclaiming the underlying agenda of climate change, “climate policy is about re-distributing the world’s wealth.”  The second and equally precarious trend is the burgeoning anti-democratic trends in western nations taken to protect the elaborate personal security cocoon that has come to dominate western society and threatens its very economic health and stability.  The trend shows itself in progressively anti-market financial bailouts, government takeovers of bankrupt and struggling companies,  and re-distribution stimulus policies.   The development of the European Union with a progressively aggressive supra-national parliament and a binding single currency across 16 nations, the Euro, has managed in recessionary times, to see the precarious nature of rigid governmental over-structure and anti-democratic tendencies.  In its bailout of two economically undisciplined members, Greece, and now Ireland, it has positioned itself for real economic crisis when larger nation members like Spain and Italy present unbailoutable dilemmas.

      Enter Nigel Farage.  Farage is a member of the United Kingdom Independence Party, a breakaway conservative British party formed when the European Union developed a formal governmental structure with the Maastricht Treaty of 1993.  Farage and the party are EU sceptics to the extreme, believing that the anti-democratic tendencies of EU bureaucrats rarely have the interests of individual Europeans at heart and on every occasion they could, have separated the local individual from having a say in economic and political decisions. His brand of politician is seen in more and more of the traditional European democracies as local control is steadily being usurped by the EU bureaucrats in Belgium.  The artificial edifice of the EU is falling on the sword of inflexible economic policy and Farage is gleefully helping the sword’s direction.  His view of the need to fight for the individual European nation to determine its best destiny democratically has significant tea party strains in it,  and his recent blast at the European Parliament savaging the policy of bailout was in the best traditions of in your face British parliamentary debate.  Farage is no outlier; his party won the second highest total  in British elections for European parliament, out-polling the Labour party,  and with the developing economic crisis on the continent definitely a Person We Should Know as Great Britain grapples with its outsiders role in the philosophical debate as  to the role of individual enterprise and governmental regulation in the age we live.