Slouching Toward an Abyss: Troubling Questions in a Critical Year for America and the West

As it was in the 1970s, ordinary people are slouching toward an abyss they may never be able to climb out of.

The U.S. flag at the dome of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington on May 12, 2023. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

Commentary

In the final years of the 1960s, defenders of liberty found themselves facing a dangerous moment in Western history.

The military supremacy of the NATO alliance was uncertain. Revolutionary socialist movements were on the rise. The post-war economic boom was giving way to “stagflation,” and while millions of people were being oppressed in communist dictatorships, Marxist professors were teaching students to loathe America and the West.

Thankfully, we found new leaders who rejected the allure of Marxist ideology and worked to restore the integrity of Western civilization for forthcoming generations.

The Opium of the Intellectuals

In the post-World War II era, one of the leading champions of the West was French political philosopher Raymond Aron. In the mid-1950s, Aron wrote “The Opium of the Intellectuals,” which identified Marxism as the favorite narcotic of the Western literati.

English-speaking readers accessed Aron’s insight through the pages of Encounter Magazine, a publication underwritten by the CIA in an era when U.S. intelligence agencies put the interests of America first. Late in 1977, Encounter published Aron’s “In Defense of Decadent Europe,” a challenge to the left written after radical student mobs disrupted the City of Paris during the summer of 1968.

The iconic French author warned his readers against seductive versions of Eurocommunism that were being promoted by Marxist intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre.

“Despotism has so often been established in the name of liberty that experience should warn us to judge parties by their practices rather than their preachings,” Aron wrote.

In defense of Western culture, Aron asserted, “In matters of productivity, technical innovation, living standards, scientific progress, and human freedom, it is the West, the United States and Europe combined, which has taken the lead over the last 10 years.” He also noted “that it is from the European-American centre of the world economy that the Third World now seeks aid, and not from the so-called socialist countries; it is the West, and it alone, which possesses the means to reduce, little by little, the gap separating the rich and poor countries.”

By the beginning of the 1980s, Aron and other conservative thinkers contributed to a renewed embrace of liberty in the West. The political winds that followed favored the election of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan, whose combined influence led to some 30 years of political stability, military security, and economic prosperity.

Mandatory Self-Loathing

By the end of the last century, Marxist intellectuals had burrowed deep into the West’s formative institutions and were preparing to drive democratic capitalist nations into submission.

In 2008, woke academics and left-wing journalists supported the election of a fellow-traveling U.S. president and hundreds of progressive legislators. While traditional liberal scholars stood aside, cultural Marxists taught a new generation of college graduates to loathe the U.S. Republic and almost everything it stands for.

Before his death in 2020, British political philosopher Roger Scruton observed that we’re in the grip of a “culture of repudiation” that views the legacy of the United States and the West as irredeemably racist, imperialist, misogynistic, xenophobic, homophobic, and destructive of our natural environment.

Woke ideologues devalue Western culture by identifying “democratic capitalism“ with ”imperialism,” as though free world prosperity was entirely achieved by the exploitation of “colonized peoples.” University students are taught to detest the legacy of the United States’ European founders.

Cultural Disorder

The cultural Marxism that disfigured the West in the 1970s isn’t just back; it has returned with a vengeance!

Five decades after Western students demonstrated against the war in Vietnam, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) waits in anticipation while U.S. elites collude with global plutocrats to construct a future in which ordinary people will face unprecedented levels of economic distress and societal collapse.

According to American Catholic scholar R.R. Reno, elite policymakers are poised to transform Western societies. First, the encouragement of mass migration is producing enormous demographic shifts in Europe and the United States. Second, massive amounts of capital are being expended on the development of a tenuous green economy.

“The first erodes the quality of life for ordinary people in the West. The second is likely to produce a lower standard of living. Both dynamics are overseen and ideologically justified by today’s elites. The dissatisfaction and disorder they will create will put great stress on our political and cultural establishments,” Mr. Reno wrote.

The left also has an alarming level of control over the way votes are cast and counted. A recent survey conducted by Rasmussen Reports and The Heartland Institute revealed that more than 1 in 5 voters who submitted ballots by mail in the 2020 election say they did so fraudulently.

The survey asked those who voted by mail if they filled out a ballot “in part or in full, on behalf of a friend or family member, such as a spouse or child?” Twenty-one percent said they did, and that may only be the tip of an increasingly corrupt iceberg.

The United States is flirting with political and economic disorder at a critical moment in history.

Questions for 2024

Free nations are presently trapped in a post-democratic culture in which extreme-left parties use any means possible to block election outcomes that interfere with their Utopian visions for the future.

As it was in the 1970s, ordinary people are slouching toward an abyss that they may never be able to climb out of. The shared fate of the Free World will depend heavily on what occurs in the United States of America. The political future of that nation remains uncertain, and ordinary citizens are facing some troubling questions.

Can the Republic survive the totalitarian temptations of an unhinged left? Will Americans tolerate the imprisonment of a leading presidential candidate? Can establishment Republicans set aside their animus for former President Donald Trump and join the side that they pretend to be on?

Will woke cancel culture continue to obstruct independent thought in Western schools and universities? Can legacy news media rediscover the concept of impartial reporting?

Will the U.S. administration finally understand that inflation won’t be brought under control by restricting the production of fossil fuels and injecting more borrowed money into the economy? Is NATO’s military strength sufficient to deter CCP and Russian ambitions?

Can honest election practices be restored? Will equal justice under the law be reestablished? Can broken national borders be secured? Will peace and good order be restored to U.S. city streets?

Will commonsense U.S. leaders and patriotic citizens unite to “make America great again?” As the irrepressible 45th president of the United States has been known to say with a confident twinkle in his eye, “We’re gonna have to wait and see.”

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.