A cityscape with crumbling infrastructure, dilapidated buildings, and empty streets, symbolising economic decline and cultural turmoil. In the background, a vibrant and modern city represents the rise of other global powers.
I am not hopeful. I think The West is insolvable and the problems are unsolvable....we are dooooomed.
There must be many many measures offering evidence of decline: economic, social and governance / leadership. We won't go into them here, we all know how it feels.
What is most worrying is the very high levels of mistrust in anything 'government'. Few thinking people believe our politicians these days and the people I know are extremely cynical about our leaders' true intentions. There's also the hostility and uncompromising conflict within our 'civic society', conflict that some call 'tribal warfare'.
I imagine the lack of credibility and the internecine hostility will only get worse as people realise that we've run out of road and politics is more and more now truly a harsh zero-sum game. There is no slack, no wiggle room.
If we look to the root causes, it seems that our version of democracy does not encourage fiscal responsibility - we have high public spending and increasing national debt. These are not as bad as France and Italy. The explanations offered are electoral cycles and members' private interests.
Our version of democracy can't be working because there are powerful lobby groups. Lobby groups in form governments of the details and propose actions but this is felt to be a two-way street and often lobby groups exact favourable changes in the rules which are not in the national interest. This is especially so in the States. We see growing inequality and concentration of wealth and decision-making that is obviously not in line with our national interests. Elite interests dominate at the expense of the people, and this "malpractice" is not being identified and punished. The most egregious example can be found here.
The media is in the pockets of the elite. They are not doing their job.
It seems to many that our elites have abandoned our national sovereignty. Supranational entities and outside interests dilute national decision-making. Trump doesn't like intl bodies and trade agreements and alliances for this reason. It is far far worse in Europe where nation states are now under the thumb of the EU in Brussels, which is under the thumb of Washington, the Pentagon and NATO.
Does anyone remotely interested in national affairs defend government support for these wars, support for apartheid regines, or call them neo-colonial regimes - these are actual governments who abuse their minorities and intimidate their neighbours and western countries support them and fuel the conflicts?
This is producing high levels of intolerance of military spending on behalh of murderous regimes by ordinary people, who see these gross injustices, but don't feel they have any power to do anything about it, short of rioting in the streets and spraying everything red and orange.
Human Rights are the foundation of the Liberal side to our system of democracy and yet human rights appear to be of little or no meaning or interest to our elite. There are insurgencies in our communities by people who actively hate our leaders for their dizrespect of other peoples and accuse them - our leaders - of detestable crimes.
As well as blatant injustices, I also think that immigration has been a great unaskedfor burden in many many ways. It has strained our public services and our shared infrastructure and distorted housing demand. These are assets built over generations and they matter and we paid for them and we have been contributing since we left school. Now, they are saturated wirh demand, supply has run out, and everyone outside the monied elite is suffering as inequality grows to unprecedented levels.
We worry for ourselves and we worry how our kids will lead happy family lives. The result is that if our leaders don't care, and we have no agency, then we just don't care either and we will simply demand more and more from our politicians without giving a hoot as to how it will be paid for, until they bankrupt our country. Perversely, this is nationalism destroying the nation.
Cultural integration - absorbing immigrants into our system of beliefs, values, acceptable behaviors and shared hopes for the future, for which we were prepared to work - is a real problem, and yet integration seems to be discouraged in favour of multiculturalism and diversity is cheered on as a source of strength, which no one believes in anymore.
What about job availability and wage levels for lower-skilled workers, now thrown into competition with foreigners who have literally just got off the boats? We are talking about our own people who are being left behind in school and at work.
We should have accepted a smaller GDP for the sake of a socially happier citizenship. And we should not allow ourselves to be deluded into thinking that a greater GDP on its own is a good thing because what has actually happened is that GDP per capita has been falling. It is very important to remember that GDP per capita is a measure of our quality of life.
More should have been done to protect our sovereignty and our borders by harnessing nationalism to central planning. The government gets us sidetracked on trivial woke-type issues, but where is the military industrial complex? It should be there for the defense of the country, not for the profit of a few large, often American, corporations. Where is our energy and raw materials supply chain and why have we cut ourselves off from low-cost supplies from Russia?
We used to be a consumption and production society, but now we are just consumption and the production has been outsourced to countries like Bangladesh and China. First, the jobs. But next whole industries are being lost, like electric vehicle production or microchip production. And what work is left behind for those formerly in industry? Entertainment, healthcare, nursing for the ambitious.
Europe has allowed its economies to be destroyed for the national interests of America and an ideology that it doesn't understand, especially Germany.
Anyway these are thoughts presented in fairly random order, but I think they are the essential points.
And I could go on as you know, but I will spare you for today! Sadly, I am talking in the past conditional, the third conditional form.... if only The West hadn't..., this wouldn't have happened. Alas, alack! The unexpected and often inexplicable moments of life, they do pile up, we reap the whirlwind.
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