The Decline of the West…

…and a chance for a revival?

For those of us on the Right, the prospect of Western Civilization’s demise—particularly the ignoble and futile one that seems prepared for it with all the inevitableness of Judgment Day—is something to be regarded with horror.

I suppose that’s what comes with being “of the Right”: a preoccupation with tradition, a keen interest in the glories and failings and missteps and triumphs of one’s ancestors…together with a reverence for the past as a kind of treasure or heirloom entrusted to our stewardship for the benefit not only of ourselves, but for the future most importantly.

I’m sure that’s why it is so much easier to be “of the Left.”

It’s so much less burdensome to simply break faith with the past, to discard it as so much cumbersome baggage, and to declare oneself a superior being to those benighted men of the past, a proud foot-soldier enrolled in the van of “Progress,” steamrolling ahead recklessly toward a future of one’s own making, without any concessions to the past and unfettered by any sense of duty to tradition.

But I always get the feeling that the Left can only afford to be so reckless because they know, even if they dare not acknowledge it, that there’s always been a Right in existence to counter their worst instincts, and prevent them from achieving their unanchored—and ultimately terrifying—future of limitless (leftist) possibilities. In that way, the Left is a lot like that loudmouthed braggart that’s always picking a fight…but only when there are enough people around to hold him back and break things up before it really gets ugly.

Increasingly, though, there are few remaining to restrain the Left. Worse yet, “the West” seems increasingly to be just a euphemism or synonym for “the Left,” so complete has been the triumph of that segment of mankind (or “ze/zir-kind,” or “transkind,” or “womxnkind,” or whatever) over the institutions of our once-beloved Western Civilization. I think it was Paul Kingsnorth who said as much in a recent article: something to the effect that it has become impossible for him to side with the staunch defenders of Western Civilization, since it is after all that very civilization that led inevitably to the modern world, and the corrupt, rotten, blinkered Regime that misrules it.

That’s a disheartening and disorienting feeling for we right-wing dissidents in the West.

It also makes it very difficult to fully assimilate the ideas of, say, such thinkers as René Guénon or Julius Evola—ferocious opponents of modern civilization whose critiques inevitably (and understandably) fixate on the profound philosophical, spiritual, and intellectual errors of Western Civilization. It’s hard to stomach the notion that our civilization, the greatest the world has ever known and the one fashioned by our own people, has always had a certain spoiling rottenness woven into its very fabric from the get-go.

But here we are, in the Year of Our Lord 2023: the results are in, and it ain’t pretty. It’s often said that it is foolish and hyperbolic for the Right to claim that the Western countries—the freest, bestest, least censorious, most open and democratic countries in the history of the world since forever—are verging on tyranny and totalitarianism.

After all, they say with mocking contempt, we don’t have any gulags. We don’t have jack-booted, paramilitary secret police forces that raid people’s homes in the early morning hours, and haul their occupants off to indefinite detention for vague charges. We don’t have political enemies, or political prosecutions, or lists of proscribed persons; we don’t attempt to shut down publishing houses for the simple crime of printing material that is not in ideological conformity with the government.

To adduce any evidence to the contrary is to be smeared as acting in bad faith, or to be accused of being a bad actor, or even a foreign asset—probably a Russian (it’s like the Cold War all over again, these days, but with the roles reversed, and gayer).

Of course, they’ll say, governments must combat disinformation, or misinformation, or malinformation…whatever the hell it’s called. After all, one cannot be tolerant of ideas that tend to undermine faith in liberalism and democracy. Which pretty much puts the lie to any lingering notion that we have free choice at all: there is only one choice permitted, and we all know exactly what that is.

In the meantime, conditions in the “free countries” continue to deteriorate. Free speech is, for the nonce, more or less permitted—tolerated even—on such platforms as Substack, Twitter (to an extent, and only recently), and through the remarkable activity of alternative and independent publishing houses; but this feels provisional and entirely conditional, and subject to revocation at any moment. We enjoy it while it lasts, but it doesn’t feel even semi-permanent…at least not to me.

The Covid pandemic opened our eyes to many things. Freedom of movement, of association, of speech, of the right to gather and work—all these and many more were curtailed or removed altogether, as the cities became giant prison camps, and Western governments curtly informed us that our vaunted rights and guarantees were, well…more like suggestions, perhaps. More aspirational, really, than anything at all like a sacrosanct and inviolable and innate covenant between the governed and those who govern—despite what all our lofty constitutions tell us.

It seems obvious—to me, at least—that this never had anything to do with a disease emanating from the Far East, whence such things often emanate; this was about the Regime countering the growing right-wing and populist backlash to their policies, and the need to crack down on increasingly uppity “citizens.” It was about consolidating power, and demonstrating in an unmistakable fashion that things were going to be different going forward. There was a new sheriff in town, and the leniency of the past was at an end.

I never imagined to see in my own country the mass revocation of a citizen’s right to a speedy trial by a jury of his own peers, and the establishment of a Guantanamo for Americans in the very lee of the great, bombastic, and ever more absurd-seeming monuments to freedom in Washington, D.C.; but this is precisely what has happened with the “J6” electoral justice protestors, and so maybe those who warned about the evil excesses of the War on Terror were right all along. I never thought to see a day when a gaudy and satanic flag—the very pennon of perversion—would be hoisted above the ol’ Stars and Stripes, and given “pride” of place to represent the dawn of the new American empire of enforced gayness and debauchery.

But here we are.

It is—to say the least—a strange and dizzying experience to be living in a civilization at the very moment that it is ousting even imperial Rome to become a new byword to future generations for decadence, dissipation, hedonism, and moral degeneracy of the most appalling kind.

So I think it’s foolish not to speak of tyranny and totalitarianism in the countries of the free West. Of course it can happen. Of course it is happening. It is ever thus when the Left is in a position of unrestricted power. Perhaps the tyranny is not inflicted with quite the same brutality as in the East, but there is still time for that; besides, the peoples of the West, despite our current effeminacy and weakness, are cut from a different cloth. We’re not at the point yet—even at this late hour—where our rulers can get away with what theirs can.

Even so, we are saddled with the cruel yoke of what some have cleverly called the “Pink Police State”—administered on our behalf, naturally, and for our own health and safety.

The basic questions that confront the Right today are the same questions that have always preoccupied the West: what is freedom, what is the proper relationship between the state and citizen, what is the nature of good government. The attempt to come to grips with these questions goes back to Plato at least, and almost certainly much earlier.

It is disheartening that the great Western republics—founded by men who were determined to answer these questions once and for all, and who left us with founding documents that still astound the world—nevertheless managed not to escape the seemingly inevitable slide into tyranny that is apparently the appointed portion of all republics.

But I still think there’s some comfort to be gleaned from history. Western Civilization, in the Spenglerian schema, is “Faustian;” that is to say, it is driven by a relentless will-to-power, the urge to conquer and dominate the globe. Even its predecessor, the Classical civilization of Rome (what Spengler designates the “Apollonian”) evinces some aspects of this characteristic, in its drive to dominate the known world of its time; the Roman Empire was the great globalist power of its time…and the aftermath of that experiment is proverbial. In after-centuries, the Catholic ecumene had virtually achieved total power in its considerable sphere of influence by the dawn of the sixteenth century, ere it foundered on the catastrophe of the Protestant Reformation.

Such is the way of things, but there’s some hope to be found in the cycles of history: the pretensions of Western Civilization to global empire have always been dashed sooner or later, and a kind of renaissance of tradition and culture soon follows, like a belated but much-needed reaction.

The Left, from the commanding heights of culture and power, has painted us into a corner; our future must be more leftism, more “progress” as defined by the Left. Anything else is backsliding, leading to far-right “authoritarianism” and probably eventually in an appalling state of rule by right-wing body builders (RWBBs).

I guess that would make it an RWBB-ocracy. Or, worse, a FREN-ocracy—rule by FRENs (far-right ethno-nationalists).

The alternative presented by the Left is, naturally, more of the same dystopian state of affairs that we find ourselves in today. Many Western countries (America especially) are little more than open-air shopping malls; stripped of traditions, cohesion, purpose, and even a people, they are nothing more than economic zones, where citizenship ain’t worth the cheap paper it’s printed on. France is learning to its cost the wages of importing aliens to magically become beret-sporting, croissant-eating Frenchmen, hoping to shore up its economy through the worst kind of demographic Ponzi scheme; but they are hardly alone in this delusion.

How pathetic is the liberal-democratic understanding of nationhood, where a country is a mere geographic unit, its culture and traditions commodified and sold to the highest bidder, and its people reduced to Posthistoric, ant-like interchangeable units—what Renaud Camus, in his inimitable Gallic way, calls “UHM” (undifferentiated human matter).

But it doesn’t have to play out according to Leftist fantasies. Their fantasies are cheap and sordid anyhow, like a played-out movie franchise. If we really are on the cusp of Western Civilization overreaching itself, and we’re long overdue for a course-correction, then it’s high time for the Right to start looking ahead—to what comes next.

I’ve always been amused by a particularly pompous sort of American politician (redundant, I know) who talks endlessly not only of “Our Democracy,” but of the “American Experiment.” But an experiment cannot run indefinitely, else it is no experiment at all; at some point, one must gather the results and data, and assess their meaning. Then it’s a matter of applying the conclusions gleaned to either tweak the experiment, or abandon it altogether for a new one. But that’s never what they mean, of course; what they mean is more of “Our Democracy”…and harder, goddamn it!

But maybe we really are at the concluding stage of the American Experiment, and for the liberal-democratic experiment more broadly in the West. That’s one of the things that I’d like to look at in my own humble Substack: where we go next, and I guess I’ve been exploring it a little in my own meandering and desultory fashion in previous articles.

But I’d like to look in greater detail at some ideas from the Right about possible new political dispensations for the future. Maybe they’re crackpot, maybe they’re infeasible, and maybe they’re just plain ridiculous; but it’s not enough merely to criticize, but to propose new ways and alternatives as well. So I’ll be exploring some of these ideas in an upcoming series of articles, and, hell—maybe they’ll inspire some genius out there to synthesize them into something that just might work.

Anyhow, that’s my plan at least. I’ll be looking into a lot of “-isms”: Foundationalism, Enclavism, maybe some futuristic Traditionalism thrown in to liven things up, and perhaps I’ll throw in some obligatory permutations of Archeofuturism and Ethnofuturism, as well as a little futurist nationalism and folkism (is that a word?) for good measure.

And who knows? Maybe if you autists and obsessives throw some interesting ideas about new political systems my way…well, I might just look into them too.

So that’s where things stand. Cocaine Joe is at the helm in the White House—his palsied fingers just itching to finally press that button to drop some cluster bombs on the Russkies or MAGA semi-fascists or white supremacists or someone—and we’re all just along for the ride. Meanwhile, the American Experiment seems to be nearing its end on its way to becoming something decidedly else, and maybe that’s for the best. Hell, if those Enlightenment bastards could draw up plans for the future dystopia we’re living in today, surely we can do them one better, and devise a more satisfying dispensation for the men and women of a few centuries from now.

So sit back, relax, and stay tuned…maybe the future doesn’t have to be so bleak after all.