The West hasn’t figured out what’s going wrong. Voters are the problem
“A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean,” historian William Durant wrote in The Story of Civilisation. “If war is forgotten in security and peace … then toil and suffering are replaced by pleasure and ease; science weakens faith even while thought and comfort weaken virility and fortitude.”
They are words that are perhaps worth pondering as the Western world moves closer to the precipice while distracting itself with endless cat videos and online spats about whether plaiting hair amounts to cultural appropriation.
The alarm bells are ringing everywhere. You can hear them in the travesty of an election taking place in the UK, the rightward turn about to hit France’s Fifth Republic and the parody of a debate in which a pathological liar and someone apparently suffering cognitive decline were put forward as prime candidates to become leader of the “greatest nation on Earth”.
Yet even now I fear the West hasn’t figured out what is going wrong and why. While pundits examine exit polls and consult focus groups, they miss the rot buried so deep in our system that it has become all but invisible.
And – if you’ll forgive me for being candid – it has nothing to do with hopeless leaders, Russian bots, high taxes, low taxes or being members of the wrong trading bloc. The problem is Western electorates. Us.
Let’s briefly look at what most people agree are the symptoms of political decay.
Debt is rising: approaching 100 per cent of GDP in the UK, 115 per cent in France and 120 per cent in the US. These are highs previously reached at the end of World War II, when we had just financed a conflict, after which levels rapidly fell. Today they are set to rise – and rise (partly because of changing demography).
The US Congressional Budget Office projects that the share of GDP used to service the federal debt will be twice what is spent on national security by 2041. The Office for Budget Responsibility foresees UK debt reaching 300 per cent by 2070. France – well, who knows what will happen if Marine Le Pen gets the chance to enact her deluded version of populism?
Let us rattle through the other problems too: we can no longer build, whether it is homes, roads, railways or power grids. Then there is the addiction to low-wage immigration and funny money (otherwise known as quantitative easing) and our abject failure – notably in Europe – to spend adequately (or wisely) on defence. I could go on, but allow me to cut to the chase. Policy wonks tend to analyse these challenges in isolation and come up with what look like solutions.
For example: we can cut public debt by abiding by fiscal rules. The problem is such rules are serially broken or subverted. The same happens to promises on infrastructure, immigration, monetary realism, you name it. And the reason is that the dysfunction is a symptom of a deeper – much deeper – problem.
For when you look again, you notice a single and, in my view, unavoidable cause: an inability to make short-term sacrifices to secure a brighter future; to defer instant gratification for long-term success. We have become a civilisation that’s all about “now, now, now” and “me, me, me” – the antithesis of what the West once represented.
Building railways, for example, represents a sacrifice in the here and now because the money to hire diggers and pay workers can’t be splurged on day-to-day consumption. But guess what: if we make this sacrifice, in a few years we will have extra connectivity to fuel growth. Similarly, weaning ourselves off low-wage immigration means paying workers more in the here and now, but it also means that we are not storing up vast fiscal liabilities and putting extra pressure on our physical infrastructure and (if these immigrants fail to integrate) cultural capital.
Or take public borrowing to finance current spending. We have a choice: do we resist the temptation to use the credit card today – which implies we will have less of everything else? Or do we max out the Amex, enjoy extra consumption and borrow again next year, saddling future generations with crippling interest payments and structural weakness? The latter choice is easier, but also – over time – insidious, chipping away at the vitality of a civilisation.
My point is that success for nations, as for individuals, requires tough choices. This is what we tell our children, isn’t it? Work hard. Practise. This might not be as much fun as playing another game on the iPad but it will confer blessings that last a lifetime. And we have words, do we not, for children who refuse to make such sacrifices? Spoiled. Entitled.
The same, I suggest, applies to civilisations. When Rome was lean and driven, it built infrastructure, created a superb military and grew. A few centuries later, flabby and complacent, it wanted the blessings of success but not the costs. The empire had entered a fantasy land, where expenditure on ever more generous welfare payments and bread and circuses rose beyond the capacity of the state to afford it. So when the money ran out, the emperors debased it, reducing the silver content until the currency was worthless.
The West is (I’d estimate) three centuries into its period of global supremacy, roughly the time between the beginning of the Roman principate and Diocletian’s splitting of the empire. And is it not reasonable to note a similar pattern, with China playing the role of the insurgent Vandals?
Yet instead of confronting the disease, we look for scapegoats: immigrants, populists, wokesters, MAGA, remainers, leavers and so on. Anything to distract us from the more challenging truth that almost every section of Western society has drifted into a state of endemic entitlement.
And this is why, if I were prime minister, I’d be saying to benefit claimants cheating the system: I’m coming for you. I’d be saying to the army of rent-seekers in the administrative state: your time is up. I’d be saying to the entitled old: I’m no longer allowing you to use your voting numbers to rig the system.
I’d be saying to the mobile super-wealthy: I’m closing your tax loopholes. I’d be saying to cronyist regulators: I’m locking the revolving door. And (some readers might not like this) to the homeowners who enjoyed zero interest rates generated by funny money after the financial crash, and who laughably think they deserve their inflated gains, I’d be saying: I want to claw some of this cash back to make the investments we so desperately need. Yes, I’m coming for you, too.
But the devastating, potentially terminal truth is that a critical mass of voters are not ready to hear this. They are too comfortable in the delusion of their own entitlement, pretending the problem lies with everyone else (in this sense, polarisation is another symptom of the rot). And let’s not pretend the problem is short election cycles or hopeless politicians, because these retailers – Starmer, Sunak, Biden, Trump, Farage – are merely regurgitating different versions of the fantasy voters wish to hear, but never daring to tell the whole truth.
In a seminal intervention recently the superb Paul Johnson, of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, called the British election a “conspiracy of silence”, but I’d suggest the true conspiracy engulfs the whole Western world. Our only hope is to escape our delusion and embrace realism.
For perhaps the killer point is this: as the audacity and brilliance of Western civilisation degenerates before our eyes, it is the world’s autocrats who are rubbing their hands with glee.
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