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The West has lost its dominance over rival civilizations and we are facing a cold war with the giant in the east, China. We are struggling with domestic challenges in the form of economic shocks due to the Corona pandemic, but also destructive political conflicts not seen since the sixties. The latter is by many characterized as a cultural war, where radical left-wing ideas are seeking to overthrow the capitalistic system. Although the US and UK are governed by a political majority claiming to have conservative values at heart, real politics appear to be increasingly inspired by socialistic and sometimes utopian narratives. Today US Republicans and UK Tories are restricting civil liberties and spending more money on public handouts than even left progressives would do just a few decades ago.
Former president Bill Clinton started free trade with China when he blithely signed the agreement in 2000 arguing that it would support American export “without exporting jobs”. Since then more than (allegedly) 5 million manufacturing jobs have flowed to Asia from the US only. Politicians unwillingness or inability to protect common people from the cost of globalisation has eventually produced brave push-backs in the form of the Trump presidency, Brexit and the Tory big election victory in 2019.
Western bureaucrats, experts, politicians, academics are higher educated than ever. Despite all this brainpower, Western economies are failing to reverse the negative trends. Economic output is declining and we are losing grounds to Asian competitors by the day. The financial crisis in 2008 was created by too much debt. How did we solve the problem? We doubled public and private debt over the next 10 years. We treated the symptoms but failed to cure the disease. Today we face additional economic shocks due to the Corona-virus. So, what is the solutions this time? You guessed it - More debt. Western consumption has reached unprecedented levels and our living standard is no longer supported by Western production, but our best financial minds have convinced politicians to let the money press run wild with perpetual quantitative easings. Money flows into applauding stock markets, this time reflecting an even bigger “irrational exuberance” than we experienced before the dot-com crash in 2000 and the global financial crisis 2007-2008. The bubble is reinflated yet again, and the party goes on. For how long? No one knows.
Our political elites have since the financial crisis wasted much energy on issues regarding woke narratives not acknowledged or supported by the silent majority. The western educational system appears broken with teachers having a political bias against conservative values. Only 14% of UK teachers said they would vote conservative in the 2019 election. Less than 10% of the graduates from leading law schools as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia and Berkely, describe themselves as conservative. Universities have buckled to the shouts from the closed minds of the radical left. Speakers of controversial views are in effect shouted down or simply cancelled, suggesting that universities no longer defend free speech, tolerance and intellectual diversity. Snowflakers appear unable to walk by a statue without being offended by its presence, a statue they showed no interest in until the BLM and Antifa riots. The act of taking offence seems to be a new and growing religion replacing Christianity and conservative values. Expression of perpetual social grievances and fingerpointing provides a false shortcut to personal higher moral grounds. It is about feeling good, but without giving anything useful back to society. We have witnessed politicians denouncing our police and openly supporting criminal acts from street mobs. The Democratic mayor of Seattle predicted the lawlessness would create a “summer of love” – an absurd statement turning out to be as ridiculous as it was embarrassing. The Mayor and many other political elites and celebrities have openly proved to be infected with the Woke virus. A virus that generates a “disease” where the victim justifies its right to rule based on an assumption of moral superiority.
The UK public understands that the Civil Service, the educational, and even the judicial system, have become direct players in political struggle proving unable to maintain impartiality. Most of the UK population, and viewers from many other nations as well, have for decades considered BBC to be the cornerstone of unbiased and nonpartisan journalism. This ended abruptly with the Brexit discussions. BBC and other mainstream media outlets have since then faced criticism for political activism. The US mainstream media with, CNN and MSNBC as good examples, left journalism for political activism in the obvious quest to remove a democratically elected president. Joe Biden needs no presidential campaign. The mainstream media is effectively doing it for him. The Woke and Covid viruses seem to share two distinct characteristics - The infected often feel no illness but are highly contagious.
Western political elites have made many mistakes over the last decades. Our intellectual capital is freely given away by allowing citizens of totalitarian states joining our universities and job markets. To make it even worse, the production of goods has extended its supply lines to a multitude of foreign nations. The Covid virus has exposed our vulnerability to globalism. Experts and elite thinkers are coming out of the woodwork still defending globalism in favourable terms Some of them have been sitting in a university closet for decades, quite oblivious to the challenges faced by ordinary people. Consequently, the advice given is often failing. Western jobs have been sacrificed with blatant disregard for the social cost to our societies. The only exclusion seems to be a growing government and a thriving business fed by an unstoppable illegal migration to US, Western Europe and the Scandinavian countries.
The loss of Western jobs is expected to speed up with our leaders becoming increasingly woke. European leaders in particular have become obsessed with the utopian quest to save the world. They are excessively travelling the world praising the good in non-Western cultures, but fail to speak up against regimes practising capital punishment for adultery or being gay. Asian competitors have a completely different agenda completely insulated against woke ideology. For instance, green policies are not even secondary. It is all about economic growth at any cost, and fossil fuels are a necessity to meet the objectives. China’s appetite for coal is by far outpacing Western cuts. We legislate self-imposed penalties on our economies, making it more and more difficult for businesses and families to compete in a globalized world. While Western populations are forced on to their bicycles due to green policies, the Chinese are smiling. The Chinese will never go back to cycling – For them, cycling is a symbol of poverty and national decline.
The West prides itself on freedom of expression. We are no longer allowed to laugh of Fawlty Towers, Benny Hill, Monte Python or other comedy not conforming to diversity, anti-racism, or other woke dogmas. We can all imagine the uproar if Monthy Python’s “Life of Brian” should be mocking Islam rather than Christianity, and no studio would dear to take on such a script. Strong forces are advocating a female James Bond. Our highly-priced Charles Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol” (2018) is unrecognizable, now with a family of a female provider and a husband caring from home. The Netflix production “Das Boot” is less about submarine and a lot more about sexual identities and social justice grievances. Hollywood seems unable to produce movies without lecturing on left-wing woke narratives. Some viewers can’t take it anymore and watch old movies over and over again, protecting themselves from badly disguised political agendas. From 2024 it becomes even worse. The new Oscar diversity rules aim to dress the industry in an artistic straight jacket preventing any historical script to be based on historical honesty. Western literary works will have to be rewritten to comply with the new rules. Academics of the woke agenda can call it what they like, but this is just utter absurdity to most people.
UK’s House of Commons has astonishingly introduced “Unconscious Bias Training”, a program aiming to reform participants to the woke agenda. The similarities to contemporary Chinese or former Soviet re-educational camps for political dissidents are palpable, but almost 40 000 UK civil servants have already completed the program, paid by taxpayer’s money. Ordinary people joke about Whitehall becoming Wokehall. The training is made mandatory for police and the Mayor of London states that 23000 officers have completed the program by September 3rd, 2020. No wonder the police are doing the knee in front of BLM and other street mobs? Now MPs are expected to do same. The program is an attempt to control thought and brings a whiff of a dystopic Orwellian society. How can it be that a majority Conservative government fails to resist the woke agenda even on its doorsteps?
The London tube has warned travellers with the all so familiar “Mind the Gap” message, preventing us from stumbling over the small opening between the platform and the train. We have all gotten used to the message and most of us don’t think of it more than a safety message. However, politicians should think of it as a warning to the ruling elites. When they leave the train on Westminister on their way to Parliament, they ought to ask if they still are connected to common sense and the people who gave them a parliamentary seat. Do voters not deserve less attention to the virtues of cycling, and more on the big things in life, safety, job creation, border security, and all the other issues that the shy majority cares the most about? A nanny-state is a distraction and certainly not what Tory voters will support.
President Trump made, in my view, a brilliant speech (Mt. Rushmore) when he defended American values and attacked the “cancel culture”. We have to admit that his style of expression sometimes make even his most ardent followers blush, but he is the only vital bulwark defending against a system corrupted by the radical left. Mr Macron has also stood up, and he defended French history and culture. Same has not happened in the UK. Mr Johnson’s failure to publicly defend Britains cultural values will presumably serve him declining popularity. His resent draconian Covid-measures effectively introducing a new lock-down will add to this effect. He has indeed been hit hard by the combined challenges from Brexit and Covid, and he deserves both time and respect for the complexity of the matter. Reforming the Civil Service and other deteriorated institutions is a tall order and will take time. Nonetheless, it is high time to walk the talk he should have made a long time ago.
The act of expressing ideas outside the woke envelope can cause great harm to individuals. Twitter’s search and destroy mobs are hunting down heretics to the woke agenda. Personal attacks, threats and harassment are commonplace and there are many examples of people losing jobs for expressing mere facts. Spineless politicians have fallen prey to fear of being named racist, homophobe, misogynist, anti-environmentalist, or any other demonizing characterisations. Sadly the magic words still work. Many supporters of Mr Trump hide political preferences from fear of being harassed – and understandably so. How can people exercise free speech when demonized as a racist for protecting national borders from illegal immigration, or risking prosecution for hate-speech? Or students risking expulsion when declining to accept claims that gender differences are a social construct? Who can blame anyone for protecting family and livelihood by remaining silent? Trump supporters, Brexiteers, and everyone believing in a national patriotic identity have all become deplorable in the eyes of the woke elites. The 2016 election, Brexit referendum and 2019 UK election were followed closely by pollsters, but predictions failed. This phenomenon suggests that demonized voters, not only are shy but also lie to pollsters. This may have an interesting bearing on Joe Biden’s allegedly lead over President Trump in the upcoming election, and may suggest that Joe Biden’s campaign is already is destined to lose – even after the debate we choose to speak no more of.
The Trump presidency and Brexit signify that voters are finally pushing back against globalism and toxic identity politics. Decaying Western institutions are at peak power and hold nothing back in its contempt for ordinary people – “the deplorables”, but common sense has prevailed over academics, experts, and politicians - the elites arrogantly lecturing people what to think and how to live their lives. The push-back was initiated by the ones still believing in sovereign nations and the good in Western culture. So, the ballot box can still work as an instrument of power. Voters are certainly not as dum and ill-educated as mainstream media has exhaustively claimed over the last four years. The November US election will tell if “the deplorables” are still a force to be reckoned with.
Wokeness incites division and creates resentment. It doesn’t take a university degree to understand that it is counterproductive. I believe the woke agenda would never gain traction without Western excesses and the collective guilt our elites have taken upon themselves for our ancestor’s wrongdoings. The last two decades have been financed with debt we arguably never will be able to repay, a clear sign that Western consumption is becoming financially unsustainable due to declining production of goods and services. Our political elites know this and as a consequence they are kicking the can down the road, hoping that the ultimate crisis will hit after they have left office. Meantime they are purifying themselves by bowing to the woke agenda and generally failing to make decisions that can reverse the negative trends. As with Covid, the Woke virus has yet no cure, and has rendered our democratic systems political impotent. However, reality will eventually catch up. At some point, our elites will acknowledge that the West can no longer afford to be woke and politically correct. Winston Churchill once said that “Americans will always do the right thing – After exhausting all other possibilities”. This statement is still valid today, but this time it is even more pressing for the UK and Europe. When our politicians eventually become confronted with the ultimate crisis that cannot be alleviated with monetary or fiscal stimuli, that is when corrective decisions will be made. Failure to do so spells the end of Western civilization as we know it.