The counter-model to a "closed society" is withering fast. The West faces an existential threat not from immigrants, Islam, or NGOs, but from the people – Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Jarosław Kaczyński, and Donald Trump, among others – who often claim to be saving it.
NEW YORK – In 1938, Aurel Kolnai, a Hungarian philosopher of Jewish origin living in exile, published his most famous book, The War Against the West, an investigation of the ideas underpinning National Socialism. Kolnai seems to have read every turgid treatise – most written by third-rate thinkers – extolling the martial, self-sacrificing, blood-and-soil virtues of the Land of Heroes, and damning the materialistic, liberal democratic, bourgeois societies in the Lands of Merchants (that is to say, the West).
NEW YORK – In 1938, Aurel Kolnai, a Hungarian philosopher of Jewish origin living in exile, published his most famous book, The War Against the West, an investigation of the ideas underpinning National Socialism. Kolnai seems to have read every turgid treatise – most written by third-rate thinkers – extolling the martial, self-sacrificing, blood-and-soil virtues of the Land of Heroes, and damning the materialistic, liberal democratic, bourgeois societies in the Lands of Merchants (that is to say, the West).