Source: Chronicles
June 17, 2021
Germany’s defeat in World War II was accelerated by Hitler’s unwillingness to accept reports at odds with his increasingly fantastical view of reality. His self-deceptions were believed with such firmness that, by mid-1944, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel concluded that the Führer was living in a Wolkenkuckucksheim (“cloud cuckoo land”).
The same diagnosis applies to the establishment Right, both in Europe and the U.S., which still assert that we live in an imperfect yet improvable world in which the West is dominant and has the energy to reinvent itself. The luminaries at Heritage Foundation, their Euro-doubles, and assorted believers in civic nationalism reject all evidence that the Western world is declining vis-à-vis its global competitors, still advocating legislative solutions to civilizational challenges. For Conservative Inc., any warning that Western power is but a façade which conceals rot and weakness is paleo-reactionary propaganda and unpatriotic defeatism.
On the other hand, for over a century—at least since Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West was published in 1918—there have been warnings by philosophers, political scientists, theologians and others, mainly disbelievers in “progress” and the improvability of man, that our civilization is in peril. They make use of a massive body of evidence to point out that we live in abnormal times, characterized by the collapse of moral norms and civilizational standards on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The malaise is strikingly augmented in our own time by the metastatic growth of Weiningerian self-hatred throughout the Western world.
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