EUROPE'S NEW RADICALS
They're young. They're glamorous. They're pro-market, and pro-American. Anne Applebaum writes in today's WaPost:
But a movement organized around fashion dies quickly when fashion changes, and while reading the reports of the dozen-odd protesters squirming about in the Mexican sand, I began to wonder whether it has already happened. Compare the squalid sand protest, for example, with another scene: Last spring a 21-year-old French student named Sabine Herold stood up in front of 2,000 people and called on them to "take back the streets" from the strikers then blocking the Paris traffic. Herold instantly became a counterculture heroine, hailed as the new Joan of Arc, admired for her daring and her chic. And she is not alone: Further north, a 30-year-old Swede with long blond hair has recently conquered Europe with a book called "In Defense of Global Capitalism," just published here by the Cato Institute. Johan Norberg, a former anarchist who believes in a world without borders, makes the case that free trade is good for the developing world, good for freedom, good for social progress, even if the dull old Marxists refuse to see it.
It can be no accident that not one but two glamorous young pro-capitalists have emerged in Europe over the past year.
I wouldn't, however, call Johan Norberg's hair "long"--except, of course, in ever-so-conservative DC. It doesn't even reach his shoulders. (You be the judge.)