The dictionary defines a perfect storm as an “unusual combination of events or things that produce an unusually bad or powerful result.” The latter, as I see it, is life as we’ve become accustomed to enjoying it.
Four years ago, I stated my grounds and posed a question to a writer who thinks Christian Reconstruction or Theonomy meets the level of our times:
The argument . . . is over hermeneutics and confessional commitments that flow from one’s interpretation of Scripture. Do libertarians wish to have that conversation? That would be more than fine with me. I’ll need bullet-proof exegesis, however, to believe that Christians are charged, as Dominion theology teaches, with overthrowing Satan’s dominion of this world with its sex-trafficking, drug cartels, arms dealers, blood diamond trade, supervised as they are by pathological warlords; the totalitarian ethnostate of Communist China; radical Islam whose agents are sprinkled the world over; pandemics exploited by globalists and their medicrat tools; the virtually total loss of privacy at the hands of the Deep State, Big Pharma, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence; the trillions of dollars in unpayable debt and the hyperinflation that must follow central banking as the night the day—just to name some of the enormities that blight our planet.
In that post, I didn’t refer to this concatenation as a “perfect storm of crises,” but since then I’ve used this meteorological metaphor when considering our parlous estate.[1] It has come to mean any situation where a highly improbable concurrent of circumstances leads to an event of unusual magnitude or severity. I’d like to know where it falters, if it does.
The “event of unusual magnitude or severity” I refer to is the total collapse of the good of order—civilization, what’s left of it—on which any regular enjoyment of goods of consumption depends.
My list didn’t give sufficient attention to the open southern border of the United States, which is being invaded daily in great numbers, or the explosion of urban crime.
I was not thinking of the resurrection of Nazi-level, genocidalist antisemitism within the walls of the institutions tasked with handing on civilization’s treasures.
I inexcusably paid no attention at all to the moral depravity that acquiesces in (if not celebrates) infanticide and the gender confusion that spits on the revelation of God (Genesis 1:27, 5:2; Matthew 19:4-6) Whom the “perfect stormtroopers” hate because they love death (Proverbs 8:36). Structural instabilities have followed the culture of death as the night the day. (I’ll let others decide if the charge of post hoc, ergo propter hoc is relevant.)
The world-historical figure who may win the general election in 168 days (to which victory I will contribute) may slow the rate of decline and postpone some of its consequences, but he can’t reverse it.
On November 6, 2024, no perfect stormtrooper will say, “Well, you beat us fair and square! Better luck next time!” No, they’re prepared to “accept” such an electoral result the way the PLO famously “accepted” the state of Israel, that is, an enemy to be destroyed and whose people are to be exterminated. Their plans to destroy Western Civ in general and its American outpost in particular will be pursued.
Like Napoleon, Trump may reshape the trajectory of a post-revolutionary era and bevel a few of its sharp edges. In the offing, however, I see no counterrevolution worthy of the name. As I wrote in the cited post:
Call me a secular pessimist (although I’m an eschatological optimist), but I see no liberation in this dispensation, libertarian or otherwise, from those scourges. God will stop the wicked in their tracks:
So shall they [God’s enemies] fear the name of the Lord from the west, and his glory from the rising of the sun. When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord shall lift up a standard against him (Isaiah 59:19).
He’ll lift it. God’s promised government is a future intervention that God, not man, will inaugurate; its blessings will be manifest to all, and delivered directly. “Thy Kingdom come” (Matthew 6:10).
Think you can cheer me up in the short run? Have at it.
Note
[1] It refers to a rare combination of weather conditions that whip up an unusually severe storm. See Sebastian Junger’s 1997 book, The Perfect Storm, or its 2000 film adaptation.