McCartney Times

HAMBURG, Germany — One of the few things uniting America and Europe these days is the deepening rift within their societies. Two crucial elections are coming up, in France this May and in Germany this September, and it’s high time we assess this dangerous cleavage. It’s not “us versus them.” It’s “us versus us”: an intra-Western clash of ideologies.

That clash pops up in different ways, but it is fundamentally about what world the citizens of the West would rather live in. Call it a “Lennon world” versus a “Bannon world.” Neither is sustainable.

The Lennon world is that of the liberal cosmopolitans, summed up in the John Lennon song “Imagine”: “Imagine there’s no countries,” he sings, “a brotherhood of man.” The Bannon world is the opposite: a place of walls and rules, run by uncompromising strongmen.

To the extent that in American cities and large parts of Europe, at least, Lennon world is already a reality, advocates of a Bannon world are the revolutionaries. As its eponym, President Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, explained, “I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

Source: John Lennon vs. Steve Bannon: A Battle for the Western Soul – The New York Times