We can all sense that Western civilisation is collapsing around us. The left celebrate it, the rest of us worry about it – hence the surprising, to some, women especially, fact that a great many men ponder the Fall of Rome quite regularly – and we all want to blame (or lay the credit) to someone else. The left, the elite, the New World Order, Islam, White Supremacists, drag queens, the ‘Other’, and so on.
But what if the problem is really all of us?
What if, as some pondered at the recent D-Day commemorations, no generation since WWII really has been, or will be, up to the challenge of defending Western values?
Consider, after all, the oft-quoted saying:
Hard times make strong men.
Strong men make good times.
Good times make weak men.
Weak men make hard times.
That isn’t a damnation of one person or one segment of society: it’s a damnation of all of us. To borrow from comedy duo Mitchell and Webb, Are we the weakies?
“A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean,” historian William Durant wrote in The Story of Civilisation. “If war is forgotten in security and peace … then toil and suffering are replaced by pleasure and ease; science weakens faith even while thought and comfort weaken virility and fortitude.”
They are words that are perhaps worth pondering as the Western world moves closer to the precipice while distracting itself with endless cat videos and online spats about whether plaiting hair amounts to cultural appropriation […]
I fear the West hasn’t figured out what is going wrong and why.
The biggest problem is exactly what Tocqueville (not Benjamin Franklin, as so often misattributed) worried about: democracy can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury.
Which is just what we’ve all been doing. Blame welfare queens, Boomers, Zoomers, grifters, leaners or illegals, as you will, public debt is skyrocketing and no one dares upset the apple cart. Debt levels are mind-boggling.
Lazy business and political elites assure us that we can lift GDP by importing the mendicant Third World instead of sending it Foreign Aid. The problem, though, is that having imported more people than we could ever grow at home, we’ve can’t build anything for them. We’re spending billions, trillions even, and building nothing.
For when you look again, you notice a single and, in my view, unavoidable cause: an inability to make short-term sacrifices to secure a brighter future; to defer instant gratification for long-term success. We have become a civilisation that’s all about “now, now, now” and “me, me, me” – the antithesis of what the West once represented.
Building railways, for example, represents a sacrifice in the here and now because the money to hire diggers and pay workers can’t be splurged on day-to-day consumption. But guess what: if we make this sacrifice, in a few years we will have extra connectivity to fuel growth. Similarly, weaning ourselves off low-wage immigration means paying workers more in the here and now, but it also means that we are not storing up vast fiscal liabilities and putting extra pressure on our physical infrastructure and (if these immigrants fail to integrate) cultural capital.
As a civilisation we have become the ultimate reckless spendthrift, racking up more and more on the collective credit card, to pay for fripperies rather than essentials, with no thought to how to pay it all off.
Success for nations, as for individuals, requires tough choices. This is what we tell our children, isn’t it? Work hard. Practise. This might not be as much fun as playing another game on the iPad but it will confer blessings that last a lifetime. And we have words, do we not, for children who refuse to make such sacrifices? Spoiled. Entitled.
The same, I suggest, applies to civilisations. When Rome was lean and driven, it built infrastructure, created a superb military and grew. A few centuries later, flabby and complacent, it wanted the blessings of success but not the costs. The empire had entered a fantasy land, where expenditure on ever more generous welfare payments and bread and circuses rose beyond the capacity of the state to afford it. So when the money ran out, the emperors debased it, reducing the silver content until the currency was worthless.
Who would ever have the political guts to challenge the collective entitlement mentality? The left want to punish the rich, the right want to punish the welfare class, yet both would squeal with outrage if anyone were to point out the obvious: we have to cut spending and raise taxes if we’re to have any hope of saving ourselves.
This is why, if I were prime minister, I’d be saying to benefit claimants cheating the system: I’m coming for you. I’d be saying to the army of rent-seekers in the administrative state: your time is up. I’d be saying to the entitled old: I’m no longer allowing you to use your voting numbers to rig the system.
I’d be saying to the mobile super-wealthy: I’m closing your tax loopholes. I’d be saying to cronyist regulators: I’m locking the revolving door. And (some readers might not like this) to the homeowners who enjoyed zero interest rates generated by funny money after the financial crash, and who laughably think they deserve their inflated gains, I’d be saying: I want to claw some of this cash back to make the investments we so desperately need. Yes, I’m coming for you, too.
But the devastating, potentially terminal truth is that a critical mass of voters are not ready to hear this.
The Australian
Or are they?
In Argentina, Javier Milei is a beacon of hope. He’s abolished entire government departments, sacked thousands of public sector leaners, stripped back public funding of university places.
And halved Argentina’s inflation rate from 25 per cent to 13 per cent. The leaner classes are outraged, of course, but Milei still has majority support, despite claims of rising poverty.
Argentines at least, it seems, have realised that tough choices have to be made.
