What happened here is part and parcel of a phenomenon seen across the West: a repudiation of the New Class elites (the “Inner Party”, if you like) by that part of the electorate that is neither a client nor an aspiring member (“Outer Party”). Rather than the usual facile explanations in terms of xenophobia etc., I believe something much more fundamental is at work. Paraphrasing an immigrant from the former USSR: “people grumbled at the Czar, but they put up with him as long as he kept hunger and foreign invaders away. Once he couldn’t deliver even that anymore, his days were numbered”. Likewise, Europeans may put up with the unelected postnational, postdemocratic Eurocrats, and with their national technocratic elites, as long as they are perceived to substantially ‘deliver the goods’. Right now they are being perceived as not only not delivering the goods, but of forcibly silencing any little boy who dares say that the emperor has no clothes on (cf. the recent ham-handed attempts at official censorship in Germany) and indeed of being in it only for themselves and their peers.It would be worth the greater church's time to regard this "sea change" with some seriousness and erudition. Our institution suffers from the same lack of vision in its crystallizing cultural bubble. If the un-official motto of the greater church is "Everyone must have the same thoughts; everyone must use the same words", it sees itself as a morally superior caste whose job it is to "correct" the attitude, perspectives, and ideas of others.
Hmmm, I wonder why mainstream Protestantism is dying?