HMM: Depressing thoughts.
First of all, a bit like communist China, America and Europe are – let’s be honest – increasingly totalitarian societies, in which it is no longer enough even to refrain from speaking out against Big Sister; no, you must love and affirm Big Sister, and all her values and beliefs, and all her progressive works, and you must say so constantly and at high volume or be instantly suspected as a dangerous, hateful, reactionary threat not only to the regime but to all humanity.
But, unlike China, many Western “liberal-democratic” societies are despite this totalizing obsession also increasingly dysfunctional, dangerous, and awash with anarchic madness. No one is satisfied with this state of affairs. The globalist liberal presses for ever more centralized and supranational government power and tighter control over wrong-thinkers – erm, I mean “disinformation” – in order to crush the nationalist-populist opposition – erm, “threats to democracy” – whom they think are to blame for destabilizing the profitable liberal-progressive project. The conservative nationalist, having had quite enough of the top-down ideological crusades and the lawless chaos that has proliferated in their wake, is in revolt against globalist liberalism and dreams of a Hungarian-style “illiberal democracy” that could return power to the people of sovereign nation-states and allow for a restoration of public order and moral stability. . . .
This is because the causes of Western liberalism’s civilizational breakdown run much deeper than bad policy and incompetent or even malevolent elites. Rather, as many, including myself, have by now concluded, over a couple of centuries Western liberalism essentially cannibalized the prior substructure of Christian values, moral assumptions, and social norms that it inherited and unknowingly relied on to function; now that those foundations have been sufficiently destroyed, it has no solid ground to stand on and is collapsing into the weird transitional stew of dysfunctional post-modern totalitarianism we now enjoy.
Sad, if true.