- Joined
- Jul 21, 2007
- Messages
- 11,868
- Reaction score
- 875
This recent thread :
https://forums.sherdog.com/threads/the-elite-treats-you-like-youre-dumb.3922095/
made me reflect on this well-written piece by:
Andrew A. Michta, is the dean of the College of International and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies.
Only five years ago, the general consensus among U.S. and European policy wonks was that, notwithstanding occasional glitches, the so-called liberal international order would remain the dominant global paradigm. For decades, the cognoscenti had assumed that export-driven modernization would eventually transform the likes of communist China into a mega-scale Japan, and that Russia, though authoritarian, would nonetheless adhere—at least in Europe—to the rules-based order. In hindsight it doesn’t really matter whether we fell victim to our own wishful thinking or refused to admit what was in front of us all the time—namely, a brief pause in great power competition followed by two great powers intent on revising the international order, in terms of both its principles and its geostrategic fault lines. We finally awoke to the geostrategic dimension of the ongoing rivalry when Russia seized Crimea and stoked a war in eastern Ukraine, and when China militarized the South China Sea by deploying military assets on its artificial islands. But the West has yet to fully grasp the realities of the system’s overall transformation, and especially its emerging axiology. The reason for the latter is not a lack of data points, but rather our inability to own up to the ideological shift underway within our own culture.
At the geostrategic level, the state of global affairs today is defined by two principal trends: the growing assertiveness of Russia and China, the two principal revisionist states; and the accelerating realignment of states worldwide in response to this rising pressure. More importantly, this challenge to the West runs in parallel with the apparent determination on the part of China to supplant democratic governance with a system built around authoritarianism, framed around a party elite. And for the first time the West seems too divided to launch a coherent response to this ideological pressure from abroad.
On paper, the West stands head-and-shoulders above any real and potential peer-competitors according to any reasonable economic measure. Judging by the numbers alone, the West should be able to dominate its adversaries: The GDP of the European Union totals about $17 trillion (all figures from World Bank, 2017), and that of the United States, around $19 trillion (as opposed to $12 trillion for China and $1.5 trillion for Russia). Likewise, given the combined EU population of roughly 512 million and the United States of close to 330 million (not counting the economic resources and population of our principal allies in Asia—Japan, for example, has a GDP of close to $5 trillion and a population of more than 126 million), Western democracies should be uniquely positioned to sustain their supremacy into the foreseeable future. And there are other geostrategic advantages that have accrued to the democratic world: Europe’s key position as the doorway to Eurasia, the U.S. status as a “continental island” advantageously positioned to project power in the Pacific and the Atlantic, with alliances, partnerships, and forward military deployments to match. In short, the democratic world does not have a shortage of usable power, whether one views it in terms of economics, population, or geography. And while it is true that we have made our situation worse by offshoring our supply chain to Asia and, most importantly, allowing the Chinese to acquire, whether legitimately or by theft or extortion, some of our most valuable intellectual property and technology, Beijing’s growing economic and financial muscle is no match for the combined heft of the West.
The real trouble for the West, rather, is what has been happening within our own societies. Internal changes have made us more vulnerable than any economic calculus would indicate. For the first time since the end of World War II, the so-called declinists may be onto something fundamental when they argue that the West’s heyday may be a thing of the past. The problem is not the economy or technology, but the centrifugal forces rising within the Transatlantic alliance: in short, the progressive civilizational fracturing and decomposition, fed by the growing disconnect between political and cultural elites and the publics across the two continents. Alongside this is an even more insidious trend of fragmenting national cultures and the concomitant debasement of the idea of citizenship, the latter increasingly defined almost exclusively in terms of rights, with reciprocal obligations all but relegated to the proverbial dustbin of history. The growing disunity of the West, exacerbated by tensions caused by the rejection by some in the Transatlantic community of a historical and cultural narrative that once inspired pride and admiration, both across state lines and internally, is now arguably the key national security challenge confronting us. It is this deepening sense of self-doubt that has made it all but impossible for the United States and its European allies to move beyond personal acrimony and articulate a strategically coherent common response to the devolving international power structure.
The problem runs deeper than individual leaders or governments. We are at an ideological inflection point within the Transatlantic community because of trends that have been building up over decades. Both in the United States and in Europe, we are now subject to the added stress of a “take no prisoners” politics in which the goal is not so much to win the argument as to annihilate one’s opponent.
The re-engineering of the Western cultural narrative over the past 50 years, first in our educational systems and media, and now within politics writ large, has effectively deconstructed the foundations of our shared Transatlantic civilization. In America—and increasingly also in Europe—colleges and universities produce cohorts of indoctrinated political activists with little or no knowledge of the foundational texts of our political tradition, the greatest works of Western literature, or the most enduring political debates that have shaped the Western democratic tradition. That heritage carried the West to victory through cataclysmic world wars and laid the foundations for the seven decades of peace and prosperity that followed.
Today the very bedrock of the Western political tradition is under assault. In addition, for at least three decades immigration policies across the West have shifted away from acculturating newcomers to the now regnant multiculturalist ideology, which has resulted in unintegrated “suspended communities.” In the process, in a growing number of democracies the larger national identity, which was historically tied to the overarching Western heritage, has been subsumed under ethnic and religious group identities. We are not quite there yet, but once the sense of belonging to a larger shared Western cultural community has been abolished, we will have reached the tipping point: The Transatlantic alliance that has preserved, protected, and promoted democracy since 1945 will be effectively undone, regardless of whether or not NATO continues to exist.
The cultural unmooring of the West that is now well underway is the result of more than a misguided immigration policy; rather, it flows from the larger ideological transformation of America and Europe. It is not my purpose here to recount the number of times I have encountered undergraduate students who have never read The Federalist Papers or have no idea why the Framers insisted on divided government as the backbone of our political system. Suffice it to say that members of the rising generation increasingly see democracy as either so abstract a concept that it seems to have little direct connection to their experiences or as obstacle to the necessary wholesale transformation, or even abolition, of our obsolescent political systems. According to The World Values Survey, today only about 30 percent of Americans born in the 1980s think it is “essential” to live in a democracy, compared to 75 percent of Americans born in the 1930s. In Europe, the number of youth who see democracy as “essential” was slightly over 40 percent.1 In a 2017 European Youth Study by Germany’s TUI Foundation (a sample of 6,000 respondents aged 16-26), only 30 percent of the young saw the European Union as an alliance of countries with common cultural values, only 18 percent of them attributed a common cultural basis to the European Union, and only 7 percent mentioned the value of religion and Christian culture. Meanwhile, a 2018 Gallup poll found that only 45 percent of young Americans view capitalism positively. This marked an astonishing 12-point drop in only two years, and a dramatic shift compared to 2010, when 68 percent of young Americans viewed capitalism positively. The same poll also showed that, when broken down by party affiliation, Democrats were more positive about socialism than capitalism. In short, the societies that are about to emerge from decades of the Gramscian neo-Marxist “long march” through the West’s cultural institutions may in fact have little or no grounding in the foundational principles of liberty, free speech, and a powerful citizenry.
Today many Americans in the heartland are still connected to the values that flow from the Western cultural canon, while a rising generation of elites produced by our colleges and universities can neither understand nor engage with these denizens of what some call disdainfully “flyover country.” Likewise, in Europe the gap between the elites and the electorates continues to widen, especially when the discussion touches on the delicate balance between what ought to remain national and what ought to become all-European if the collective EU project is to survive. This state of play, whereby Western elites seem no longer to care much about preserving and transmitting the foundational heritage to future generations, ensures that in a crisis a larger sense of collective solidarity will likely fail to materialize. The long-term, systemic implications of this state of affairs are dire indeed, for the logical consequence of this deepening cleavage will be the continued fracturing of societies on both sides of the Atlantic, and with it the eventual implosion of the Transatlantic security system.
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2019/02/22/the-sources-of-the-wests-decline/
Cliffs:
* The West and its foundation and values are under assault from within.
* The rift between the elite and the common people are growing by the minute.
* The polarization will lead to that the solidarity between the people of West in the past will just be a thing of the past.
* Mass-immigration is just a symptom of the disconnect between the elite and the people.
* The threats from the East (Russia and China) cannot be met if the West continues on this narrow path to cultural and democratic destruction.
* Today's political climate is not about arguing about different views, it's about destroying your political adversary by any means necessary.
