Civilizational Decline is a Choice

American Thinker 

When pundits say that the United States — or the West, more generally — is “in decline,” what do they mean?  

Are they talking about Western nations’ rising and unsustainable sovereign debts, including a U.S. national debt of over forty trillion dollars?  Are they acknowledging that forty-plus years of “free trade deals” have hollowed out once-bustling manufacturing and industrial towns and left tens of millions of blue-collar workers unemployed and dependent upon government welfare?  Are they admitting that a century-long public policy campaign designed to arrest population growth by discouraging marriage and families and encouraging promiscuity and abortions has created a highly sexualized, self-indulgent, and lonely world?  Are they recognizing that open borders and Western governments’ traitorous betrayals of their own citizens have transformed relatively peaceful countries united by common cultures into battlegrounds where warring tribes from around the world attack Western nations’ histories, churches, traditions, tranquility, security, identities, and beliefs?

These are all symptoms of decline.  There are many more.  But none of these sizable problems is a death sentence for Western civilization.  

After all, we live in a world where fifty million people live as slaves today.  Nearly twenty million of those slaves toil in India and China.  However, when political pundits describe the U.S. and the West as “in decline,” they usually describe the future as belonging to the planet’s two largest slaveholding nations.  From the point of view of Christians and other enslaved minorities, India and China are Hell, while the West is the Promised Land. 

Similarly, communist China runs the most sophisticated domestic surveillance system of any nation in the world.  News flows are strictly regulated.  Social media accounts are monitored.  Purchases are tracked.  Citizens’ “social credit scores” are adjusted to reward “correct” behavior and punish “incorrect” thoughts.  While Western governments are shamelessly copying these forms of soft oppression and constructing their own surveillance states, the degree of totalitarianism that already defines life in communist China is not yet prevalent in the West.  

Even more importantly, Western citizens have not yet yielded to totalitarianism as an inevitability.  The United Kingdom uses as many surveillance cameras to spy on its citizens as communist China, but rebellious Brits vandalize these cameras much more frequently than their Chinese counterparts.  Likewise, Americans have begun to target and destroy Flock Safety cameras that record license plates and track citizens’ movements.  As Western governments scheme to construct surveillance infrastructure that is repressive in nature, Western citizens in growing numbers are fighting back against totalitarianism and in defense of personal freedom.  

The governments of Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Australia, and New Zealand censor online communication and criminalize public dissent; there is no question that free speech is under attack throughout the West.  But Western citizens are constantly finding workarounds to communicate with each other and to spread their messages far and wide.  While the European Commission and the British and Canadian governments are working to build digital “Iron Curtains” to keep “unwanted” thoughts and expressions from reaching their citizens’ minds, freedom-lovers are waging quiet wars against State propaganda and other systems of public control.  Western governments are finding it difficult to erect modern “Berlin Walls” that separate free-speaking Westerners from thought-policed Westerners because Westerners on both sides of these social media walls are exchanging government-labeled “disinformation” in defiance of their regimes’ authoritarian mandates.

Furthermore, the fastest growing political parties across most of the West are so-called “populist” movements demanding an end to mass immigration and a return to secure borders.  There is a belated recognition that Western civilization has been under attack for quite some time and that Western governments have been the primary villains doing the attacking.  There is increasing public awareness that Western governments have been replacing Western citizens with foreigners as part of a long-term, malevolent effort to repudiate Western values and traditions and to instigate sufficient domestic strife to distract citizens from the economy-killing effects of “green energy” delusions that have no effect on the weather but do transfer wealth from the poorest to the richest members of society.  

For too many years, government-sponsored paramilitary forces such as Antifa have been the only shock troops causing mayhem on the streets and terrorizing Western citizens.  Now Western citizens are mobilizing huge public movements of their own in an effort to demonstrate to Western governments that they will no longer be silenced.  For days, large numbers of citizens have been fanning out across Great Britain and Spain to protest their governments’ open borders policies that have flooded both countries with dangerous foreign nationals.  They fight for free speech, secure borders, and the preservation of their way of life.  Western governments continue to demonstrate how afraid they are of their own citizens by expanding online speech controls, criminalizing public opinion as “hate speech,” undermining the electoral will of voters, outright canceling elections, and designating popular political parties as “domestic terror” groups.  

These protests, opposition movements, and forms of civil disobedience may appear chaotic or even scare people, but they are hardly signs of “decline.”  On the contrary, they are unmistakable indications of life coming from Western societies that have appeared comatose for entirely too long.  Energizing long-inert electorates takes time, but once the event horizon for political change is crossed, there is no going back.  A mere decade before the American War for Independence, colonials were overwhelmingly loyal to the British Crown.  The threshold separating status quo from revolution is often thin.  

That is why the German political Establishment is losing its collective mind right now after the “Alternative for Deutschland” party won a historic victory in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt state elections on Sunday.  Despite the German Deep State’s attempts to criminalize AfD as a domestic terror group because of its opposition to open borders and the European Union and support for German culture and cheap energy, German citizens (including young voters) rallied behind the rebellious party.  There hasn’t been this much raw energy and excitement in Germany since the wall came down.

This political effervescence popping up in different parts of the West is intoxicating.  There is electricity in the air.  It’s as if volatile elements are being shaken together, and Western citizens are waiting for the explosive chemical reaction.  These are not signs of “decline.”  These are the winds of change.

If decline is not inevitable, then, why have so many political prognosticators already written obituaries for the United States and the West?  Perhaps pessimistic political pundits are a big part of the problem.  They view Western “decline” as predetermined because they lack the sense of civilizational pride necessary to accomplish audacious things.  

Our American ancestors embraced the spirit of “Manifest Destiny,” the belief that settlers would tame the frontier and expand the American way of life across the continent.  They were not deterred by the lack of roads or the multitudinous dangers.  They did not expect government agents to “save” them; they knew that they were on their own.  Yet they did the hard things anyway.  They crossed rivers and mountains.  They carved new trails through the wilderness.  With callused hands, they plowed the fields and farmed the land.  They built the country one settlement at a time until America’s destiny lay manifest from coast to coast.

Our problems — no matter how gargantuan they seem — are not evidence of American or Western decline.  Decline comes when people refuse to confront what threatens them.  It spreads like poison gas slowly suffocating a nation.  It disorients entire countries, one lost soul at a time.  But decline is a choice.  Every day, you either give in or fight.  In America and across the West, we have so much worth defending.  Our enemies wish for us to submit and die.  We shall rebel and live.