QUITE A FEW PEOPLE HAVE EMAILED ME to say that the Pim Fortuyn assassination feels bigger to them than it ought to. As David Carr writes on Samizdata, “I think those tectonic plates of history just juddered.” Such intuitions are often true when widely felt — but of course, when widely felt they are often self-fulfilling. We’ll see. Europe is in a bad way, as I’ve been saying since, well, before InstaPundit even started. Because the problems have been papered over, and because there’s an agreement among the elites not to talk about them, a lot of people haven’t realized how bad they were. Now they’re starting to.

And, you know, it’s not always bad for political “tectonic plates” to move. It just depends on how they move.