It's the end of the American Empire as we know it

And I feel fine...

Prologue:

As I was composing this essay, which I did in fits and starts over the last two months, some important things were going on in the world which only fortified my positions set out below. As the Western media pumped the airwaves full of war porn starring un-consenting Ukrainian citizens, I started noticing stories about Russia and China, working away at the serious, grown-up business of divvying up the spoils of a new world order….Headlines read:

Russia says it's building a new "democratic world order" with China

And

Bristling Against the West, China Rallies Domestic Sympathy for Russia

And

China, Russia partner up against West at Olympics summit

Does anyone else feel like the real story is happening without us even realising it? For my highly personal take on how Western elites fiddled while their worldview burned, read on…

Total Elite Failure

The world’s media has been proclaiming the end of the American empire my whole adult life. But it seems to be really upon us now. 

If you will allow the indulgence, I will attempt a somewhat idiosyncratic, broad analysis of what has happened, melding my own personal and professional experiences with my observations of societal changes on a macro level. This newsletter is devoted to personal politics for the politically homeless, after all.

In 2011, I decided to pack up my life in the US, where I had lived since finishing university in Ireland in 1998. My ex-husband and I decided to sell our Brooklyn apartment, leave our stable jobs and large extended family, all for me to do a Masters in London that I hoped would propel me into a career with a governmental agency, or a think-tank, or an international organisation in the foreign policy sphere. I hoped that I could parlay my professional experience into a job with a large agency with a global remit. 

I had spent three happy years working for an establishment newspaper. And I spent five happy years working for government, with (mostly) men who were tasked with keeping civilians safe in the event of a terrorist attack or natural disaster. These very positive professional experiences had given me a pro-state, pro-liberal world order stance. I had seen the system work. On top of that, I had grown up absorbing the exciting story lines, feed to me by cultural touchstones from Hollywood movies to Time Magazine, of the brave Westerner, travelling to an exotic place and overcoming danger while doing good. Ever since I was a girl, that story line held great appeal to me.  And in that, I am one of many.

What a difference a decade makes. Now, my disillusionment with my own former worldview is total. My trust in government at all levels, and all groups that work within that system, has been irrevocably broken.

To pick just one example of something I used to look up to, but no longer do: multinational, non-governmental bodies. Major international organisations may have been set up with good intentions — maybe — and may have started out filled with people who genuinely wanted to do good. But institutions have a tendency to rot — see the UN child sex scandals in the Balkans, Haiti and Africa; the OXFAM sex scandals, accusations of corruption against Interpol, to name just three.

This tendency of institutions to degrade over time is neither that surprising nor particularly controversial. 

Yet to watch mainstream media, to read the most respected newspapers, we are still operating in a world where the fundamental goodness of the liberal world order is not really in question. All internal criticism is reserved for the “racist” working classes and/or “conservatives” who possess unacceptable views. 

So why is it so hard for so many people to recognise that the liberal world order is broken? Why does the smart set insist on defending the indefensible, like teaching small children about sex acts, or protecting elite institutions that have clearly failed in every possible way? For me, this problem is the central one of our time.

My demographic (educated, upper-middle and middle class, internationalist, urbane) has become so accustomed to the assumption of their smarts and virtue that the whole demographic is now an obstacle to reform. I’m not claiming that there is zero effort to improve within these circles. But I happen to think that any attempts at reform from within will fail. First, it is simply too late. Some liberals might be waking up now to their excesses and failures, but I fear we are years past the point of no return. Second, without tackling the bigger cultural problem, the fix cannot be achieved. See: Watson, Tom: Twitter blue check, who thinks that a New York Times editorial on the importance of safeguarding free speech is way worse than The New York Times reporting that Poland invaded Germany in 1939, as unearthed by Ashley Rindsberg in his book the Gray Lady Winked.

A few weeks ago I watched yet another video of Kamala Harris making a fool of herself and beneath it was a Tweet from Andrew Sullivan: 

Andrew, what can I say? You sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind. Kamala is in office in part because you and all of your smug cohorts were so blinded by your classist Trump derangement syndrome you actually thought Biden was reasonable? Aren’t you supposed to be the smart guys? Hating Trump is understandable and rational. But clinging to the notion that Democrats are somehow not even more corrupt, venal, and dangerous? That means Andrew and his fellow intellectual prestige peddlers are actually just dumb suckers with irresponsibly large platforms. A simple Google search, back at any point before the election, of the phrase “Hunter Biden travels on Air Force 2 to do deals in China” would have disabused them of any thoughts that Joe Biden was working in the best interest of ordinary Americans. But oh no. Only crazy MAGA types were rolling around in that mud. Not smart, reasonable sophisticates like Andrew Sullivan.

Andrew, Watson, et al are emblematic of our bigger cultural problem. Which is: we (the educated, liberal class) have been trained to view ourselves as the good ones, as special, as always on the side of virtue, even when what we are doing is patently not good or virtuous, and most of all, even when we are being monumentally taken for a ride.

It feels to me like this intellectual debasement within the liberal chattering class is reaching a climax just as it looks more and more like we are at the end of the liberal-west hegemony life-cycle.

That life-cycle seems to have gone something like this:

The societies created by the liberal Western governments and liberal values start in optimism, with things working well on the whole. Prosperity is raised, quality of life improved, aspirations go up. 

Soon, we have large demographics of people who are socially mobile, moving up the class ladder by a rung or more. Some get rich, some get educated, some do both, creating a new generation of well-off, educated offspring who are healthy, confident, groomed for success.

Soon, we don’t have any really poor people. But the poor we do have are intractably poor, at home and abroad. This is a drain on our collective resources and also a moral and ethical stain on the character of our societies. It creates ample opportunities for injustice, and for spinning captivating narratives around those injustices.

Soon, we have many, many young people with their heads full of book learning and strongly held opinions about things  — even complex, ancient dilemmas that they could not possibly have the wisdom to grasp. These people, the offspring of the first and maybe second generation of social mobility and peak democratic success, are then let loose onto the world, busying themselves as they were programmed to do. They help. They help the poor at home and abroad. They help the immigrants. They help the “less fortunate”.

Yet the more they help, the worse everything seems to get. Society then looks for reasons for this quandary, but it looks outside itself, outside its values. We need something to blame. We blame capitalism. We blame a different religion. We blame the patriarchy, or white supremacy. We blame big, amorphous things that cannot be easily tackled. We become fervent in our blame and ever more demoralised. Things start to fall apart.

Meanwhile, our prosperity has made us soft, vain, narcissistic. Being soft and vain and narcissistic makes us fearful. Being fearful makes us defensive, immature and weak. And not only do we raise our children accordingly, we allow the state to actively encourage our children to see themselves as weak, as victims, as dysphoric — to see their childhoods as full of threats that only the Great State can shield them from. 

Suddenly, despite living in the safest and most prosperous societies in the history of all humanity, we have children who are too anxious to go to school, or who think they were born in the wrong body and are desperate to cut off bits of themselves. 

We have grown men in the prime of life who possess no physical skill or strength or competency. We have young women deforming their bodies with silicone and chemicals, or cutting off their breasts and sterilising themselves. 

Yet nobody feels better.

All these problems create more (mostly taxpayer funded) jobs for the well-meaning liberals who have been trained to care. And because it is their job to do so, they spread the problems around. More kids become anxious. More kids become dysphoric. More young adults become incapable of doing for themselves. 

Meanwhile, the ever-shrinking base of economically active, independent small businesses get squeezed more and more and more and more, strangled by regulation and taxed and indebted to the balls. This is the situation my husband finds himself in, as he attempts to keep his small restaurant afloat despite tax hikes, and food and energy prices soaring, in an industry with already notoriously small profit margins. While predatory capitalist corporations accumulate more and more wealth, allowing them to buy up all the valuable political real estate and with that, more and more power.

But never mind the hairdressers, the taxi drivers, the mom-and-pop takeaway restaurants. We — the liberal, the educated, the white collar — have all fallen in love with the fictionalised drama version of our society: the honourable middle class professionals battling injustice on behalf of a powerless working class and/or black person and/or refugee— to the extent that we no longer even bother asking whether we are doing a good job in real life. And we do not even see those just half a step below us on that slippery socio-economic ladder.

The end result is, as my husband said the other day, an inverted totalitarianism, extreme liberalism that says to its subjects: I will help you even if I have to kill you in the process.

The biggest trick ever played on mankind was the devil convincing smart people he did not exist. The second — and related one — is that liberal progressivism is inherently kind and unthreatening and can only be those things, no matter how corrupt and inhuman its policies become. 

The present moment to me feels very much like the end of one era and the beginning of a period of chaos from which will emerge a new one.

The question is: what will it be?