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I recently pondered if the dire state of Western civilisation was all our own fault: are we the ‘weak men’ who make hard times?
Making the West strong again requires hard decisions and hard work with much risk and not much prospect of immediate reward. Collectively, though, we’re all like the “Millennial RAF Pilots” in The Armstrong and Miller Show: “I’m over flying”, they grumble as the Luftwaffe strike overhead. “It’s, like, against my human rights’n’stuff.” And we all expect a medal, too, just for participating: “We as better at war and flying and shit as they is”.
The counter-argument is that, well, perhaps we’d all be prepared to make the sacrifices, if our leaders were, too. This seems to be the most common response to recent revelations that Gen Z are notably less likely than previous generations to volunteer to serve in the military: “Why should we make sacrifices, when they won’t?” They have a point: time and again the ruling elites act like the board in Oliver Twist: finger-wagging the poor to shut up and swallow what little gruel they’re given, while they gorge themselves into a coma.
During Covid, it was Boris Johnson, Barack Obama, and Gavin Newsom whooping it up in private while the plebs were told to mask up or lock down. Lesser but no less egregious examples include Siouxsie Wiles enjoying a day at the beach with a pal, or Professor Neil Ferguson nicking out to shag a mate’s wife, during lockdown. The Climate Cult are even more brazen: swanning about the world in their fleets of private jets and luxury limousines, while sternly lecturing the rest of us to reduce our emissions.
Almost everywhere we look in the West, we are beset with leaders who are hated by their constituents.
At the recent meeting of the G7, the only democratic leader present with an approval rating north of 40 per cent was its host, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni.
The best of the rest, at 37 per cent, was the United States’ Joe Biden (although this was before his debate disaster), followed by Canada’s Justin Trudeau at 30 per cent, Germany’s Olaf Schulz at 25 per cent, Britain’s Rishi Sunak also at 25 per cent, France’s Emmanuel Macron at 21 per cent, and Japan’s Fumio Kishida at just 13 per cent.
Yet, hated as all these are, their opponents are invariably little better. While Sunak’s Conservatives are likely to be thrashed in the looming election, there is little enthusiasm for Keir Starmer’s Labour, either. Roughly half of America viscerally loathes Donald Trump. Anthony Albanese limped into government with the second-lowest vote in Labor’s 130 year history.
Not for almost a century has strong and confident democratic leadership been so needed yet almost never has the leadership of the main democracies been so lacklustre. And so, why?
First, it’s because almost none of the current crop of leaders has addressed their societies’ underlying problems.
Even when they acknowledge them – such as record-high mass immigration paired with even higher illegal immigration – they do nothing about it. If anything, they turn right around and make it worse. For all the bluster about the US southern border, Donald Trump’s policy answer is doling out green cards to foreign students. NZ’s Christopher Luxon is barely indistuinguishable from his Labour predecessors when it comes to climate cultism or rainbow groomers.
When Nigel Farage scorned Rishi Sunak for ducking out of D-Day commemorations, saying, “He doesn’t understand our culture”, he was referring to Sunak’s privileged, OxBridge bubble upbringing. A splendid isolation the rest of the political class, as well as their cronies in media, government, and bureaucracy, share. The West is ruled by an elite as isolated from the mass of people as the Sun King and his courtiers at Versailles.
And even more suicidally clueless than Marie Antoinette.
In thrall to Francis Fukuyama’s fatuous nonsense about “the end of history”, Western elites have spent decades patting themselves on the back for their ‘New World Order’. The non-Western world are, to damn them with faint praise, no such fools. China has rapidly built up its military. Russia, for all the delusional cheer-squadding of Ukraine by the Western elite class, has called the West’s bluff. The Biden ‘withdrawal’ (in reality, a mad, panicked flight) from Afghanistan was the crowning humiliation of the West.
At least, so far.
Meanwhile, all the main democracies are engaged in economic self-harm in the name of climate change and other luxury beliefs. The latest example is our own parliament’s banning of the live sheep trade this week on the grounds of alleged cruelty to animals.
A trade which only ever existed, it must be pointed out, because of Western pandering to the Mediaeval theocratic barbarism of the Islamic Middle East. Again, to damn them with faint praise, the swivel-eyed jihadis at least believe in themselves.
The main Anglosphere countries are full of doubt about their fundamental legitimacy and self-worth: America over slavery, Britain over colonialism, and Australia over the dispossession of the original inhabitants.
Very few democratic leaders show unqualified pride in their countries or appreciation of how the Pax Americana has helped the wider world, until very recently, to be more free, more fair, more rich, prosperous, and more safe for more people than ever before in history; and that migrants to their countries have won the lottery of life and should be grateful.
And almost none of them are prepared to say that in order to stay free, fair, and prosperous, the main democracies need to be less obsessive about reducing emissions and climate catastrophism, much readier to clamp down on out-of-control immigration, much more strict about morally relativist and culturally self-loathing education systems, and be willing to make at least some sacrifices in support of freedom.
Yet, damn these leaders as we will, we keep on voting for them.
As the US commentator George Will said during an earlier dispiriting period (the late 1970s), “the cry goes up for leadership from millions of people who wouldn’t know it if they saw it, and would reject it if they did”.
It all comes back to what I previously wrote: no one, left, right or centre, is willing to swallow the bitter pill themselves.
Almost no one contending for high office, establishment or insurgent, is prepared to tell voters the truth that there are few cost-free changes. Trump has nothing to say about America’s unsustainable deficits beyond “growth will fix it”. Looking at the creaking NHS, no British leader is prepared to say that patients simply cannot always get treatment that’s the best, immediate, and for free; so, one or more will often have to give.
Here in Australia, it’s generally accepted that the NDIS, for instance, is a fiscal time bomb but no one will face up to the fact that eligibility and entitlements have to be curbed if the scheme is to be sustainable.
The Australian
When Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey attempted even the most modest reforms in 2014, the near-universal reaction was the apoplectic screaming of a gorging toddler seeing just one or two sweets put back on the shelf. Boomers screamed blue murder about the most trifling changes to their beloved pensions. The welfare class threw a fit about the prospect of paying even a few dollars for a doctor’s appointment.
The political class learned their lesson: can we really blame them?
