Global liberalism is destroying the West in the first place
As recently as a couple of months ago, reading the mainstream press in the United States, Britain and mainland Europe, there was a sense that a new generation of global bosses represented by the Biden administration was moving unstoppably towards total victory.
Moreover, it was not only the “brute” strategic force of the West that gained the upper hand, but also its latest “inclusive” ultra-liberal ideology that denied any traditional forms of social and personal organization – from sovereign statehood and cultural traditions to the family and sexual and gendered upbringing.
This deliberate victoriousness has been picked up outside the collective West as well. Including in our country. Not that everyone is happy about this victory. Not at all! Many people frankly do not like the modern left-liberal cultural agenda of Washington and the Alliance of Democracies it is building. But almost no one doubts that this agenda will eventually be universally accepted (and if necessary, even imposed). At least in the Alliance and in those countries which will be allowed to trade with it and be culturally anchored by it.
But it is not all that simple. It is not even that the “cultural agenda” of global liberalism is rejected by half of the Western population and by the vast majority of people outside it. This, in fact, can be seen as a serious obstacle. The point is different. The new leftist agenda comes into conflict with the task of competing effectively with the so-called “autocracies” – that is, with those countries and blocs that have not accepted the new ideology.
Meanwhile, the task of “showing the effectiveness and competitiveness” of liberal democracy was not set by the current White House administration for PR purposes. The fact that in the turbulent next 10-15 years, the West could begin to lose the fight against “non-inclusive regimes” (in simple words, against the “bad guys”), American analysts began to say back in the early 2010s. And as soon as this task was recognised as a priority by the White House, the tone of publications in the mainstream Western press began to change, signalling obvious disadvantages and even an emerging split in the camp of “winners”.
Take, for example, the dissatisfaction of the left wing of the US Democratic Party with the White House’s policy on another crisis in the Middle East. Even after the Egyptian-brokered ceasefire, the US ultra-progressives are demanding that Israel be condemned for its indiscriminate use of force and violation of human rights in Gaza. They claim that an apartheid regime has been imposed on the Jewish state and suggest that arms supplies to it be halted. There has been criticism from Republicans too, of course. On the contrary, they have been outraged that the administration has not been strong enough in its support for Israel. But today the White House can afford to ignore that resentment.
But the left’s resentment… Harsh statements have been made by young radicals, Muslim immigrants – congresswoman Rashida Talib and Ilhana Omar, and Democratic heavyweights Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Both are trusted by political activists on the ground and listened to by powerful party donors and the governor’s corps.
The liberal establishment’s experienced bureaucrats managed in 2020-21 to fully harness the energy of the left-wing ultras during the election campaign and then kept almost none of them out of the new administration. But that does not mean that one can brush aside their demands and not take their ideas seriously. It’s not even about the notorious street pressure that the socialists control. The point is that it is the radical wing of the party that is shaping the ideological agenda that the Democratic Party’s sponsors actively support.
Without this ideology, political technology manipulation and administrative resources alone cannot solve the issue of power in the US and Europe. The continued control of technology, resources and the international division of labour by transnational corporations and international financial elites requires the establishment of a new system of values. As long as the old system persists, conservative-populist resistance to the “brave new world” will inevitably reproduce itself permanently. And this resistance may sooner or later topple the global bosses.
That is why even in the heart of the collective West, in the USA, liberals are consistently destroying the foundations of sovereign statehood. Faith in the state, in its constitution, history, values and institutions is being undermined. The teaching of the so-called Critical Racial Theory (CRT), the constant attacks on “toxic masculinity”, the declaration of any expression of not only patriotic sentiment but even basic civic consciousness as “racism”, are all designed to dismantle the nation-state of the United States of America. In its place should be an office of global capitalism with “diverse” servants living in post-industrial “green” metropolises.
This inevitably affects state institutions, decision-making centres and in general the ability of the “office” to conduct international affairs. A prime example of this is the utterly inept US policy during the Gaza crisis. The White House called this impotence “quiet diplomacy”. Nice try, but one might as well call poverty quiet wealth. It was in the interest (and certainly in the power) of Washington and the collective West as a whole to prevent this conflict and, when it erupted, to put it out quickly. But a new ideology got in the way. The long hesitation of the White House and the State Department and the absence of a coherent US position are all a consequence of the paralysis resulting from the conflict of ideology and efficiency (in this case, in foreign policy). As an international mediator, Egypt, which seemed to have long been written off as a serious regional player, was far more effective.
The picture is much the same on the climate front. The ideology of human-caused climate change, which is ideology rather than science, is a handy tool for managing the international division of labour. But if this ideology were spread solely by officials in Washington and Brussels, no one would believe in it. So it took an army of “green junkies” occupying academic institutions, internet sites and political organizations in the West. They are active on the territory of “autocracies” too, but they are spreading there more slowly and with much less success.
And now the staunch defenders of Mother Earth are already out there criticising the Biden administration and EU leaders for not doing enough to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels. They are demanding a transition to a “carbon-neutral economy” right now. There is more to come. Since the so-called greenhouse gases are also methane and nitrous oxide, the Greens (and they are not just the European parties with the appropriate name, but the entire socialist arm of the US Democrats) are calling for, in effect, an end to existing agriculture.
And it is the governments of the collective West that have to respond to the radical “anti-carbon” demands in the first place. China, Russia and India are far away, while their politicians, who have given the Greens so much power, are nearby. Biden has only held his first, firing shot (and, it must be said, very unsuccessful) international climate summit, and oil-rich Texas has already fallen victim to fairly average snowfalls and cold snaps due to the green infrastructure craze. In Europe, the relatively moderate “climate parties” have not even come to power yet, and the cost of electricity in the Old World already makes it completely inefficient not only for material production, but for the development of digital capacity here – servers, routers, storage devices are not powered by the Holy Spirit, they consume gigantic amounts of energy.
China, that largest “autocracy” in the world, which has promised to start reducing not just hydrocarbon, but the dirtiest, coal-fired power generation only from 2025, would be infinitely happier with a competitor like the Alliance of Democracies, which uses exclusively “clean” energy and has only “green” infrastructure.
And what kind of person – above all in the West! – is brought up by the new left-liberal ideology? That an anti-white racist is half the trouble. The “new man” (the ideological department of the Central Committee of the CPSU in the 1980s comes to mind) should be a gender-disoriented, family-less cosmopolitan who has no respect for elders and no children. How competitive are such individuals? It would be impossible to build any organization out of them except the swarm. The collective, after all, assumes a certain respect for hierarchies (at least value ones), which are forbidden by the latest ideology.
Moreover, the Western man must also become uneducated. The uncompromising struggle for “racial justice” has led to the fact that schools and universities in the United States are beginning to “lighten up” the curriculum and refuse to teach complex subjects so that non-white children do not feel “unequal”. Some politicians have already gone so far as to declare the very principle of meritocracy (rewards based on merit and knowledge) “racist”. Of course they will tell us that robots are about to replace all humans and that they will solve the problem of the effectiveness of liberal democracies. But firstly, those robots don’t exist yet, and secondly, to produce them on an industrial scale we need a large number of people with a good knowledge of higher mathematics and physics, at least quantum mechanics and electrodynamics. And they, in fact, will soon be completely absent.
It turns out that without a new ideology, the collective West cannot influence the whole world or even remain collective. But this ideology impedes its main task – to compete with “non-democracies”. Somewhere ahead is a world where “autocracies” are defeated and all “democracies” live in a “green” post-industrial tomorrow, without families and education, but with robots. Except that it is impossible to achieve this world… because of the very desire for it.
This contradiction, it seems, is beginning to be realized in the West. And sooner or later, the leaders of global liberalism will have a desire to cut this Gordian knot. But that will be another story.
Dmitry Drobnitsky, VZGLYAD