20181228.0430

On 25 December 2018, Fareed Zakaria's "Everywhere, A Growing Backlash to Populism" appeared in the online San Antonio Express-News. The article opens with a focus on French president Emmanuel Macron's political trajectory, initially a symbol of hope but currently (as of this writing) facing falling poll numbers and the Yellow Vest protests decrying some of the reforms he has sought to push through. Macron is used as a case study for a first-blush pessimism Zakaria proceeds to explicate and undermine. Despite the ongoing populist, nationalist fervor that has hold on much of the West, broadly defined, there is quite a bit of pushback against reactionary ideas and measures; political developments across Europe and in the United States are referenced as examples. Zakaria ends with a call against despair, noting that work is yet to be done but that it can be done to effect.
As I read the article, I have to consider where Zakaria writes from. He is not here, so far as I know; I somehow doubt that the Texas Hill Country is much on his itinerary, unless perhaps it is Austin--but Austin is barely geographically in the Hill Country and even less so, culturally. From here, at least, things do not look like Zakaria describes; if anything, the reactionary rhetoric is more emphatic here now than earlier in the year, the attitudes it reflects more deeply entrenched despite the provision of data. It matters less that a thing is true than that the right person says it, and the right person looks more like me than I am comfortable with. But my discomfort is nothing against the danger others face, here and elsewhere, because those who spout such stupidity as they do are increasingly emboldened.
And why would they not be? This place is something of a stronghold for them, though the foundations for such things are not so solid as they might be pretended to be; there is only so much limestone will support, after all, and it is not for nothing that so many come to the Hill Country to find healing. But if they do, it is because they need it, and an injury once incurred can be renewed far more easily than might be hoped. Perhaps it is the fear of that that spurs so much retrenchment here, so much clinging to thoughts of guns and glory, even or especially by those who ought to know better than they give evidence of doing.
Such an implication, if voiced more plainly to particular people, would prompt more pushback than is currently in place, and if those hands are so few as Zakaria would have us hope, still do they feel heavy for those upon whom they are laid. I may not be among them, and I hope not to be, but I know that too many others are who ought not to be--and that there will likely be more as phantom fears intensify. There always are, and then things come that are rightly feared, to the loss of us all.