NYT: The falcons cannot hear us anymore

In the widening gyre, the NYT’s Roger Cohen sleuths out why things are falling apart.

In the New York Times this week, Roger Cohen turned apoplectic on Trump, Brexit, the disintegration of the post-1945 world order. Understandable.

But why? We’re nearing the “end of truth!” Cohen understands the disastrous implications, which he thankfully enunciates “while words still have some meaning.”

To imagine that the words I write, or those of countless others lamenting the world’s lurch toward the politics of violence, may stem this “epidemic suggestion” is to indulge in fantasy. It is part of the infernal nature of such eruptions that everything feeds them, including outrage. The slouching beast is insatiable.

Give him credit: Someone at the New York Times finally admitted he and his everyman Yeats references don’t matter to the everyman. (Coming up next: An admission that the cultural ressentiment that so puzzles the NYT— remember the 2004 Values Voter? — finds snooty New York writers especially distasteful?)

However: The world order is falling apart because the masses all of a sudden lost their minds? Or, the world is falling apart, and a consequence of that is that Cohen no longer likes the masses he previously didn’t have much of a problem with, having just realized what many less prosperous, non-Western countries learned awhile ago — that tyranny through numbers…can suck?

(Just to spitball: maybe the post-1945 order within the Western world was based on a historically exceptional distribution of wealth to a middle class, following the destruction private capital in World War II, which will erode inevitably into greater and greater inequality, thereby disrupting a pluralist liberal stability requiring broad prosperity, while the post-1945 global order was based off of a strongly bipolar and then unipolar Pax Americana that is now dispersing multipolarly and, among other destabilizing factors involved in disrupting a world order, exposing the previously suppressed risks of imposing a superficial Westphalian model across much of the world?)

Or, maybe Cohen is right. The problem is not at all structural, the masses were previously rational and sober, and the world is breaking apart because the great hordes of falcons no longer hear their Falconer.