From all sides, the message is coming in: the world as we know it is on the verge of something really bad. From the Right, we hear that ‘West’ and ‘Judeo-Christian Civilisation’ are in the pincers of foreign infidels and native, hooded extremists. Left-wing declinism buzzes about coups, surveillance regimes, and the inevitable – if elusive – collapse of capitalism. For Wolfgang Streeck, the prophetic German sociologist, it’s capitalism or democracy. Like many declinist postures, Streeck presents either purgatory or paradise. Like so many before him, Streeck insists that we have passed through the vestibule of the inferno. ‘Before capitalism will go to hell,’ he claims in How Will Capitalism End? (2016), ‘it will for the foreseeable future hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself but still very much around, as nobody will have the power to move its decaying body out of the way.’
When I was young and highly interested in the Cold War competition between the America-led West and the Soviet Union, I was blissfully unaware of the 1970s view even among some conservatives that the USSR was destined to win and our best bet was to manage our decline gracefully and stretch it out.
It wasn't until some point in college that I was exposed to that thinking. Luckily, after Reagan won in 1980 and said to Hell with that defeatism.
But before I heard about our assumed prediction of doom, I was spared that warped thinking. I knew we had a difficult job of defending West Germany, but I never felt that the task was destined to fail. Nor did I think that the Soviet communist system was destined to defeat our capitalist and democratic system.
And the victory of our doomed system took place from 1989 to 1991, from the collapse of the Berlin Wall to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I don't feel the West is doomed. And you shouldn't want the West to fail in order to be cleansed through fire by that catastrophe to reach some future Heaven on Earth.
My confidence doesn't mean we have no work to do to defend the West. But it is worth defending and we should succeed with our advantages.
I'm just saying, as I say about a lot of issues, work the problem.
And have a little damned civilizational self confidence, for God's sake.
