How the West Was Lost
After the second World War, liberal cultural themes emerged from the Western World in the reconstruction of Europe and in normalising international relations. In ways that reflected their existing paradigms, the European re-organisation was led by Rousseau’s type of romantic liberalism with organisations like the UN, World Bank and EU where the United States with its materialist and realist paradigm tended towards neo-liberalism with free trade agreements and open markets.
As a kind of weird extended family, the two systems had enough in common to see things in similar ways and to co-operate through most of the 20th century.
It had originally been the materialist and realist paradigm that impacted the world most where the pursuit of free markets as the highest public good allowed a bad-faith morality best summed up at its zenith in the 80’s — that ‘Greed is Good!’. This cultural trend of a dedicated pursuit of profit, both a result of and contributing to a degeneration of Western Culture gave us the nihilistic 90’s, where rock music became grunge, associated with depression, suicide and heroin, Black Americans who had previously created a lot of high popular culture with rhythm and blues, soul, funk, jazz-rock, hip-hop and even house music became gangster rap, associated with misogyny and violence. But it was the corporations and globalism that were identified socially as the big threat, especially in the late 90’s and who produced superficial ear-worm candy — boy bands and other pop stars, accelerating a trend towards an Andy Warhol dreamland.
And, well what does this have to do with the cost of tea in China? In an earlier piece we showed Bill Clintons speech at Johns Hopkins University, imploring America to consider a Permanent Normal Trading Status with China. By the time that the year 2000 had come around the principles of why laissez-faire economics provided common good in trusted trade relations were completely overridden. After a period of Nihilism to which the Western public where particularly vulnerable to an abyss of moral values, where Greed was Good and who were rebuilding a sense of morality through progressive politics, Clinton asked ‘Will it be the next great capitalist tiger, with the biggest market in the world, or the world’s last great communist dragon and a threat to stability in Asia?. Clintons reference to ‘the biggest market in the world’ is no mistake in his conscious stream of political messaging — It may even be possible to identify this as the failure point of post World-War 2 neo-liberalism, where the Western World no longer lived up to its own principles, without caveat.
The second type of liberalism that Clinton also used to get corporate access to Chinese markets for filthy lucre, the Rousseauian romantic liberalism became ‘progressivism’, initially seeing itself as the linear inheritance of culturally liberal events in the 20th century, going back as far as the Womens suffrage movement. They were quick to claim this from Simone De Beauvoir and Germaine Greer, suspiciously ignoring Martin Luther King and Malcolm X until it suited purposes. But increasingly it was nobody who suited their purposes as progressivism slipped into becoming something like a religion and the intellectualism of De Beauvoir was ignored, Germaine Greer became Persona Non Grata, Martin Luther King was turned into a symbol of oppression, which he never was in his time and his words ‘I have a dream that one day this nation will up, live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Are not just ignored but violently opposed — the progressive religious ethic, ‘Intersectionality’ definitively states that man is NOT created equal as a fundamental and necessary moral fact upon which it builds its raison d’etre.
It is far harder to try and identify a point where these liberal values failed — they never made us a promise on building a strong economy and so it would be hard to argue that it was when they were used to justify a collapse of lending standards in banks in the 90’s. But the current state of progressive liberals, falling over and into themselves with political irony, nonsensical ideas and manifestly failing with the problems they champion solutions for are a shambles evident in the lead up to the American 2020 election.
And of course the elephant in the room — the right-wing of politics, potentially ‘neo-conservative’ but wholly encapsulated in a dominant culture of neo-liberalism were absolute madmen post 9/11, converting Islamic countries to their cause at the end of a sword and making deals that the devil himself would blush at. They stony-faced believed that they were creating reality with their decisions in what is at face value a complete misunderstanding of the connection between their own identity, the source of their social power, the usage of that power and how those decisions play out in the long-term — after all their Mujahedeen enemy was a previous ally that they trained, a haunting spectre of the last reality they ‘created’.
“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ […] ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do”– 2002 Interview with George Bush Senior Advisor, likely Karl Rove.
It reads in a disturbing way, but we are all Rove-ians now, Barack Obama having won the Nobel Peace prize and in his final year of office bombing 7 Islamic countries with 26,171 bombs for an original reason stuck somewhere in 1970’ — it is something like avoiding having to treat any oil producing nations as equals in trade and acting publicly ignorant about Wahhabist psychopaths.
So why is it wrong? The circumstances of the political left and right are in a state where into an increasing chaos, hypernormalisation of this wildness has occurred. Over 200 billion dollars of money printing madness was added to the financial markets recently as a result of these cultural failings, beginning with Alan Greenspans neo-liberal, lower-than market interest rates, which combined with progressive liberal lending standards — caused a Global Financial Crises that led to the original Federal Reserve Bank policy of Quantitative Easing.
And here we can see the link between society, culture, politics, finance and economics, that in our liberal system that treats each of these specialties as their own world that a malaise has formed, taken hold and dragged things down to where we had the President of the United States, Barack Obama leading conversations on which toilet child transvestites should use while China built military installations in contested seas in South East Asia and so now, we are studying what they do — both the Chinese Communist Party as well as our own political hierarchies but perhaps not in the way that Karl Rove would fantasise about.
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