The Decline of the West
Over the last fifty years, the West has witnessed a continuous decline in the quality of the state and its activities, along with a cultural deterioration of the public sphere. All OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries have also undergone a massive dichotomization of private property ownership: An ever-smaller fraction of the population owns a growing share of all non-public assets. According to some estimates, the richest one percent holds 70 to 80 percent of all global private property, while an increasing number owns nothing and is excluded from decent incomes and the means to live a normal family life.
A major cause of this trend is economic globalization, which has moved low-qualification jobs outside the OECD. While the new working classes in Asia and the global owner elites gained from this development, the lower classes in the West have suffered a net loss from globalization—despite the stable consumer good prices of the last decades. Their exclusion from or marginalization in the value creation chain and the increase in the share of retirees have led to rising absolute and relative public spending. This has been financed to some extent by increased tax revenues, but overall via a rising debt level in almost all OECD countries. However, this spending has to a high degree been allocated to consumption, while education, the legal system, public security, infrastructure, healthcare, and infrastructure have been neglected. The concentration of property within a small elite has been driven by the financial system introduced in the early 1970s, in which the partial bank reserve system was supplemented with a purely fiat money system. This system automatically transfers more property to those who own assets already but has also created the current debt bubble, which is without historical precedent.
At the same time, massive migration into most Western states has taken place, both legally and illegally but tolerated, with some of it, such as in France or the United Kingdom, partially caused by the unraveling of colonial empires. The migration rate has exceeded the rate of assimilation over a long period of time and is now reaching levels comparable to migration into the territory of the Roman Empire in the early Middle Ages. This migration has led to a sequestration and fragmentation of our societies. New groups of migrants unfamiliar with Western values and without knowledge of the norms of modern democratic societies have formed and threaten established society through crime as well as through an overuse of social welfare systems.
These tendencies have been accompanied by a new political ideology that questions the foundations of pluralism and democracy. Its main planks are the politics of identity and minority entitlements, the political purging of our language, and the abolition of the right to free speech in universities, schools, and the media, as well as aggressive propaganda calling for so-called “climate protection,” international solidarity, and the acceleration of migration. This ideology is promoted with the help of massive financial support supplied by interested parties and an aggressive multichannel propaganda machinery in which the media, a multitude of NGOs, and politicians participate.
These dire developments, which are unraveling our societies and states, are praised as the greatest examples of progress in freedom, equality, social justice, and solidarity that we have ever experienced, while criticisms from liberals or conservatives in the tradition of Hume, Kant, Burke, Mill, and Hayek are vilified as extremist and fascist or as conspiracy theories. The productive bourgeois elites have yielded to this pressure and assumed a passive, defensive position leading to a further decline in the enforcement of legal and penal norms and the rule of law. Leftist partisans have taken over important positions as judges, college teachers, politicians, media editors, and managers of big corporations.
Causes of the Decline
Open democratic societies and the rule of law were achieved through painful historical struggles to overcome the static, hierarchical societies, centralized power, and low productivity of the agrarian societies of the past. Because of their complexity and recurring lack of stability, free market democracies have always been vulnerable to threats from modern totalitarian states such as communism, fascism, and national socialism. All totalitarian states require constant violence to stay in power and replace the rule of law by despotism.
Since Babeuf, one of the first ideologues to advocate secular, chiliastic political redemption schemes, politicians and intellectuals have often been tempted by the idea of a dictatorship that would enable a radical implementation of a new, just, equal, and ecological world order. These forces pursue the goal of ending the freedom for which our ancestors fought and died as they struggled against feudalism and absolutism. They are the enemies of the open society, but unlike traditional revolutionaries they are currently not perceived as such. Their ranks are formed by teachers of the humanities, journalists, professional politicians, EU and UN bureaucrats, and proponents of economic globalization such as bankers and multinational corporation managers. They share a deep contempt for ordinary, locally rooted people, as well as their ways of life and traditions, which they try to ridicule or even delegalize (such as hunting or meat-eating). Since the 1970s, an ideological collusion and fusion of the former socialist left and economic liberalism has created this ideology, epitomized for example in the later writings of Michel Foucault. The ideology is a space of projection for the chiliastic political hopes of left-wing thinkers, while economic globalists see it as a justification to further optimize the concentration of global property and profits in the hands of a few thousand families preparing to own everything.
The Threat and How We Can Respond
This transition is happening silently, often not yet dawning on the consciousness of most of the citizens of the West. However, many citizens are beginning to sense that what they are facing are not small changes in their living conditions, but that these changes are fundamental and threaten their civil liberties and the Western social systems. What will happen to our democratic societies if we do not stop this development?
We must fear that, at the end of this development, we will find ourselves living in societies that are exactly the opposite of what our ancestors and we ourselves have fought for: undemocratic and totalitarian supranational systems. The socialist and globalist movements appear to be united in striving to do just that. The architects of communism and other totalitarian regimes realized that the transformation of a society into a totalitarian state is so much easier if family and local cohesion are destroyed, if people are uprooted, and if traditions and national cultures are destroyed. The consequence is that people become an anonymous, disintegrated mass that is easily controllable and manipulated. Current developments in Western societies seem to follow this path and make it easier for the enemies of our free democracies to consolidate what are effectively totalitarian structures. Since the 1980s, we are witnessing how ideological indoctrination is replacing the classical education in the humanities departments of our universities.
Yet such societies would be deeply dystopian, incapable of producing prosperity or inner peace. Only nations that are able to live in inner and outer peace are inhabited by free citizens sharing a common culture and living under the rule of law. They benefit from a stable public sphere, democratic participation and representation, decent, non-dichotomic ownership structures, and international trade.
This development toward a new totalitarianism is not inevitable, even if it is already well advanced. Three factors might slow it down or even prevent it:
1. The bursting of the global debt bubble;
2. The chaos of distribution fight in migration societies;
3. An awakening of the bourgeois elites and their will to fight for our open society.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are witnessing a global supply-and-demand shock affecting all countries, unlike anything seen since the so-called “summerless year” of 1816. This shock is about to prick the global debt bubble and will lead to a massive contraction of the world economy, with negative growth rates as serious as -20 to -30 percent of GDP.
This contraction will trigger material distribution fights among the lower 75 percent of the income pyramid, and it will be most serious for the lowest third. Among these, we find migrants, long-term autochthonous unemployed/non-tax-paying social layers (“white trash”), and victims of crisis-induced downward social mobility; the latter as well as the clans of migrants working in the domain of organized crime (such as the French Chechens or the German Lebanese) have the best organizational ability. The large-scale fights among these groups can call into question the public monopoly on violence to an unprecedented extent.
Both trends—the economic disruption when the bubble bursts and a crisis-induced breakdown of law and order—could awaken the bourgeoisie from its current stupor to become aware of the grave threats to our freedom, property, democracy, and the future of our children. We need to understand what is currently at risk. Interesting times ahead.
Hans-Georg Maaßen is the former head of the German domestic secret service (2012–18) and a leading representative of the conservative wing of the CDU. Johannes Eisleben is a conservative author.
