Can the Center Hold?

The Left has for generations now waged a vigorous campaign against both the reality and even the idea of the modern nation-state, the political unit within which most of the world currently lives, the political unit that came formally into being in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War in Europe.

In this struggle, they've used every weapon at their disposal to include the promise of ever-greater physical and material security that would come with more universal forms of political identification and association.

The problem is that they over-promised.  Because those ever-more universal forms of political association have increasingly been unable to deliver the goods, they have also been increasingly discredited.

At the same time, in their determination to undermine the nation-state whatever the cost, they also foolishly took up weapons from time to time that actually served to undermine their own cause.  To wit, multiculturalism.  The success of politically correct multiculturalism has been more and more pressure toward balkanization, tribalization even.

Or, if you prefer, pressure for a return to the medieval political arrangements that immediately preceded the birth of the nation-state. Or so thinks Victor Davis Hanson and he's worth a read.