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No part of the political spectrum can take comfort from this predicament. Those who want to subject American policy to the counsel of the world community, as Senator John Kerry proposed, now have difficulty identifying who that world community might be? Surely not France, which has become an embarrassment, and surely not the United Nations, which has a black eye from its scandal-plagued Iraq oil-for-food program. Only in Beijing and Tokyo do we find strong governments in powerful nations.
Is it simple coincidence that the West cannot field a single functioning government? The punditry dismisses Bush as dumb, Blair as smarmy, Chirac as arrogant, Berlusconi as bent, and Merkel - well, when they discover some identifying characteristics of the new German chancellor, the punditry doubtless will find grounds to dismiss her as well. Perhaps it is just the luck of the draw, but the odds do not favor the interpretation that all the big nations of the West had the misfortune to find themselves led by ninnies at precisely the same time.
What is it about the personalities of Western leaders, though, that might explain their common predicament? Perhaps it is the fact that the leaders of the West mirror the qualities of the people who voted for them. Americans are obstreperously anti-intellectual, and chose a president with whom they
can identify. The British always have been hypocrites, and elected the most hypocritical of prime ministers. The average Frenchman is no less arrogant than the president of the republic, while the Germans, at least since 1945, have devoted their storied thoroughness to becoming as nondescript as possible. Almost every Italian is on the fiddle, and it is fitting for their prime minister to be fiddler-inchief.
That leads to a simple interpretation of the general crisis of Western politics, namely, that the people ofthe West, as it were, are the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is not the leaders of
the West per se, but rather the voters who put them in office, who comprise the problem.

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