Western Civilization, which once dominated the world, has been conquered, and is now occupied territory.
This is not always obvious, and might be a controversial statement to some, because the west was not conquered as nations were conquered in the past… militarily, by force of arms.
Straightforward conquest would have been impossible. The sheer wealth and technological prowess of the West renders all other nations, societies, and civilizations militarily irrelevant by comparison. The West cannot be defeated on the battlefield, much less occupied.
The military might of second-world rivals has proven in recent years to be a sort of Potemkin village, not only comparable to NATO only on paper, but only ever designed to be so. The Russian Federation in incapable of decisively winning a proxy war with NATO even in one of its former colonies, located in its own back yard, and China, while it possesses certain tech-weapon systems which could give a US carrier battle group considerable headaches, is notably reluctant to invade Taiwan, despite its clear wish to do so.
Conquering the west through force of arms was never possible. Another way had to be found.
The United States of America, and its first-world vassal nations, were conquered by subversion of their political systems, and of the philosophy those political systems were based on.
Result of this process, and the condition of being conquered and occupied nations, looks like this:
99+% of the political leaders of Western Civilization are enemies of Western Civilization.
They do not consider themselves members of Western Civilization, much less champions of it. They do not bear it allegiance. Instead, they regard Western Civilization in one or more of three ways:
As a treasure chest to be looted.
As a criminal to be chastised and punished.
As an enemy to be hollowed out and destroyed.
An examination of how each political officeholder presents in public will quickly reveal which.
Do they speak of how everything is a human right and should be provided for free? Do they speak at great length of the evils of colonialism? Do they argue against the foundational constructs of the political, social, and economic order?
This is all easy to understand.
In fact, if this were simply a political problem, it could be solved within a week, as such problems have been historically solved in many societies in the past… with a mob of angry citizens, some trees, and some rope.
But this solution is not philosophically acceptable to Westerners, and this means that what Western civilization is not, at its core, a political problem. It is a philosophical problem, because it is the philosophy of the West which has created this political problem, and which prevents it from implementing the violent, and easy, solution.
So what is the philosophy of the West, why is it the philosophy of the West, and how did it lead to this problem?
The philosophy of the West is classical liberalism.
What’s classical liberalism? Here’s how wikipedia defines it.
Classical liberalism is a political tradition and a branch of liberalism that advocates free market and laissez-faire economics and civil liberties under the rule of law, with special emphasis on individual autonomy, limited government, economic freedom, political freedom and freedom of speech. Classical liberalism, contrary to liberal branches like social liberalism, looks more negatively on social policies, taxation and the state involvement in the lives of individuals, and it advocates deregulation.
Until the Great Depression and the rise of social liberalism, classical liberalism was called economic liberalism. Later, the term was applied as a retronym, to distinguish earlier 19th-century liberalism from social liberalism. By modern standards, in the United States, the bare term liberalism often means social liberalism, but in Europe and Australia, the bare term liberalism often means classical liberalism.
Of course, wikipedia is run by unemployed communists. So they think of classical liberalism as a precursor to what they call social liberalism, which is really just socialism.
Sometimes they call it “democratic socialism”, meaning that if you stuff enough ballot boxes, you can vote your way into it, but still have to shoot your way out after you’ve eaten all the zoo animals.
Whether we call liberalism, or classical liberalism, the traditional philosophy of the West is the philosophy of the American right wing — “republicans” — as laid out in America’s foundational document.
No, not that one. The other one. The actually important one. The Declaration of Independence.
Now, classical liberalism did not originate with America, doesn’t solely exist there, and predates the Declaration by a substantial period of time. However, the Declaration is probably the best articulation of the philosophy as it existed then, and as it exists today.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
100% of the basic philosophy of classical liberalism is articulated here, or directly and inescapably implied by what is.
Primacy of individual rights
Equality before the law
Powers of the state delegated by the people
State is directly answerable to the people
Political and economic freedom
This simple recipe worked for America, and to a lesser extent for the nations which adapted lesser imitations of it, for hundreds of years. And not just worked, but worked extremely well, catapulting what was recently a frontier society into global economic, military, and social dominance, along with provide some of the highest quality of life on the planet.
Perhaps this philosophy was not a sole factor, but it was certainly a central, important, and necessary one.
After so many years of utopia (at least compared to the rest of the world, if not to socialists’ fevered imaginings), many people concluded that the problems of governance were… solved.
“Democracy” (by which they really meant republicanism and classical liberalism) was the answer. And the most important remaining political challenge was to spread “democracy” to the rest of the world.
Turns out they didn’t want it.
They didn’t want it in their countries, despite many expensive military adventures which were, at least ostensibly, undertaken to offer them the opportunity to have it.
And when they came to the West, they didn’t want it there, either. They saw the West as one of three things, exactly the same as the previous list:
As a treasure chest to be looted.
As a criminal to be chastised and punished.
As an enemy to be hollowed out and destroyed.
Classical liberalism was not a good tool for achieving these goals, but social liberalism, which is socialism with a coat of liberal paint on it, was.
Now, decades later, the political machinery of the Western governments has been mostly suborned by a coalition of three groups who do not want classical liberalism.
Immigrants who came to the West, not for the benefits of classical liberalism, but for the benefits of the wealth that classical liberalism created.
Native Westerners who were persuaded to view the West in the same way.
Members of the political class who found power and profit in pandering to these first two groups.
To achieve this end, a wide variety of philosophical arguments were launched, to advocate for replacing classical liberalism with socialism. These arguments were for socialism, but they used the values of classical liberalism as their premises.
As it turned out, classical liberalism did not have a philosophical defense against these attacks.
In part two of this series, we will discuss exactly how this was accomplished, and what weaknesses in classical liberalism allowed it to work.
Continue this series:
Devon Eriksen is the author of Theft of Fire: Orbital Space #1. Find more retailers, and a 3-chapter preview, at DevonEriksen.com.
“It's the best first SF novel I've read in a long time” —ESR, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar (read his full review)
I really wish people like James Lindsay would understand this. They view the fall of liberalism as a simple subversion of it (which of course it is), but fail to realize that the seeds of its own demise were sown at it’s inception, and one cannot simply wipe the slate clean and reset the board and expect to get a different result. It was tried and failed to hold the barbarians at bay. It will fail again if tried again for the same reasons.