The Decline of the West?

The democratic West is convulsed and convulsing. The authoritarian East is standing on the sidelines watching the liberal world order self-deconstruct. So says Daniel Hannan in the London Telegraph.

Hannan summarizes the global clash of civilizations thusly:

At almost exactly the same moment as China’s global summit of its friends and partners, US President Joe Biden was taking querulously to the airwaves to warn his countrymen against retreat. “American leadership is what holds the world together,” he intoned, with his customary expression of elderly bafflement. “American alliances are what keep us, America, safe.” Strong words and true, but undermined by the way he kept blinking in confusion at the autocue, a dotard president seeming to symbolise a nation past its prime.

“A dotard president?” Has anyone else considered that we are not known by our gauzy ideas as much as we are known by the leaders we choose. And, when it comes to choosing leaders, America has not exactly excelled. If liberal democracy is in decline, consider the role our dotard leader plays in the equation.

If liberal democracy is going to survive, or even to survive, or even to recover, Americans will need to find leaders who inspire confidence and command respect. For now, our president is a pathetic dotard. His vice president is barely literate. His cabinet was chosen in order to promote diversity, not because they are notably qualified. 

On the other side of the political aisle, Congressional Republicans are going out of their way to show that they are not serious about exercising political authority. 

As we know, the singular Western democracy in the Middle East is Israel. And it is also a bastion of free enterprise and economic prosperity.

Yet, that small nation just suffered an appalling massacre, one that its vaunted intelligence services and its powerful military had not predicted. We admire the great success that is Israel and its exceptional military and intelligence services. And yet, it had recently been consuming itself with political protest and turmoil. Political leadership involves protecting the population, so the Israeli prime minister must bear some considerable responsibility for the failures.

And then there is the problem of Islam. The Muslim world is bifurcated between those who are trying to lead a reformation and those who refuse to accept that its civilization has failed. 

Saudi Arabia has been working to modernize Islam. Hamas and Iran refuse to accept failure and have chosen to cause as much damage as possible, for no real reason, except to expose the weakness of the West and to extol the strength of Islam.

Obviously, the October 7 massacre, perpetrated by Hamas, was not a show of strength. It was a show of cowardice. If your civilization promotes infanticide and rape and homicide, it is exposing itself its impotence and incompetence.  

Worse yet, Muslims around the world, even in Europe and America have protested in favor of Hamas, because they consider the massacre as having been a sign of success.

Moreover, they have written the attack into an oppression and rebellion narrative. Thereby, what is called the Palestinian cause counts as part of the vanguard of the radical leftist revolution, the struggle against capitalism and patriarchy and Western colonialism.

That communism has been tried and has failed miserably does not seem to register in adolescent minds.

More than a few young Westerners bought this narrative and now find themselves allied with people who decapitate babies, burn children alive and rape women-- to show their strength.

The outbreak of mass protests in support of Hamas has challenged Western liberality, and especially the Western willingness to accept a massive number of Muslim migrants. In Germany, the leftist Chancellor Olaf Scholz has declared himself in favor of mass deportations.

Within the terms of the narrative, Hamas must be excused its appalling actions. The fault lies with the Jews, with the Israelis, because they are interlopers, people who do not belong. This implies, as the moral calculus goes, that Israel had it coming, and that Hamas militants were driven to do it.

Who better to quote than the singularly inept leader of the European Union, Ursula von der Leyen. Is there a better symbol for Western incompetence?

Hannan explains:

Despite the vastly different circumstances, when Israel felt compelled to cut electricity supplies to Gaza, commentators in the developing world circulated a speech by Ursula von der Leyen in which the president of the European Commission described Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure as “acts of pure terror” and “war crimes”. 

And everyone has been shocked to see the extent of the anti-Semitism on the march in Western cities. Hannan explains:

Look at the youthful crowds who marched after Hamas’s abominations. Secularists cheering theocrats, anti-racists backing anti-Semites, feminists overlooking the murders of mothers and babies, supporters of mass immigration to their own countries outraged that Jewish refugees had found a haven in Palestine.

All things considered Israel does not count among the victim class. It might have been victimized by Hamas, but it deserved to be taught a lesson-- about its appalling oppression of the Palestinian people. 

Israelis were foreigners. They brought an alien system to the Middle East, thus damaging the indigenous culture. That the indigenous culture was failing, and that the Western colonial imposition was a great success, did not matter-- because it made certain peoples feel ashamed. 

As I mentioned many years ago, in the Middle East, Israel is the solution, not the problem. Only with the Abraham Accords did a number of Muslim countries show their understanding of the point.

And yet, many Muslims refuse to see the writing on the wall. They prefer to see themselves as victims and they tout the virtue of their suffering. And they excuse any atrocity and any depravity-- because they think that such actions are a sign of strength.

The key to identity politics is suffering. Especially victimhood. It makes you a member of the revolutionary vanguard. And, Israel deserved to suffer because it had not suffered enough. It was being taught the virtue of empathy.

Victimhood has become the supreme virtue, the moral get-out clause that justifies every crime. Frame your struggle as resistance to Western imperialism and you can get away with all manner of atrocities.

Belonging to the revolutionary vanguard excuses all atrocities. It has caused moral convulsions and contortions throughout the West. If Westerners do not recover their moral sanity, they will not have much of a future.

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