I am going on this historical rant because I think we are in the middle of another such crisis in the US, as is much of Europe, and no doubt China and India---not to leave out Russia and South Africa. The French riots over the National Assembly's youth employment act has remarkable resouncence to the US Congress and its heinous immigration act. The resouncance I see is a cross current or rip tide between national identity (labor) under the pressures of an international neoliberal hegemon (capital). I know that's vague but.
..........................
I'm sitting with shaving cream on my face, typing onto the keyboard of a laptop that wouldn't appreciate it if I got it wet with rich, skin soothing emollients so I must (or at least should) be briefer than I'd like.
Your post brought to mind a question which has haunted my thoughts in ghostly form like a passing neutrino: why was it so easy for the Hitchens/Bermans et. al. of the (real or imagined) left to not only sign on for the Bush crusade, but accept without question the concept of the West as a threatened and fragile flower? When you read the works of the cruise missile liberals, you can almost hear that sigh of relief the burden of broad thought has been removed - "now, at last" they seem to say, "we can get back to the proper work of praising ourselves and distrusting all others." This goes far, far beyond the actual requirements of real-world counter-terrorism and into something else entirely.
Tracing this deeply will take us light years past mere politics and into the realm of the cognitive sciences.
Is there an upper limit to the amount of social complexity the human mind can tolerate? Does it only take a trigger (such as a terrorist attack or perhaps, simply living someplace with lots of different sorts of people) to swiftly pull our thoughts and belief artifacts back to nativist island?
.d.
--------- "If human beings had more of a sene of humor, things might have turned out differently."
Stanislav Lem