It seems the West, and in particular the United States, just can't shake its habit of trying to bend the rest of the world to its will. Everywhere we look, we see ignorant savages who need to be educated to see things our way. One day you're handing out Bibles to the Indians, and the next you're accusing other cultures of bigotry if they don't share your politics. No matter one's personal views on gay rights, or anything else, it's not our place to force those views on others -- especially when we're a guest in someone's house. Would Americans like it if we were hosting an international event and a conservative Muslim nation's representatives decided to admonish us for not subjugating our women? Or if a Catholic nation's representatives went around criticizing America's easy access to abortion?
The American Conservative's Rod Dreher, whom I cited in my last post, sees what's happening and has had a change of heart regarding his own past tendencies toward American cultural imperialism. In the wake of 9/11, Dreher was all too happy to want to bomb some sense into what Americans considered a bunch of backwards Islamic nations, without understanding that constantly forcing our will on those nations, often at the barrel of a gun, was what inflamed their violent hatred against us in the first place. Ron Paul was saying as much practically the day after America was attacked, but no one listened. For Dreher, it took relocating to Eastern Europe to appreciate how much resentment there is against the United States worldwide, not just in the Middle East. Dreher writes:
[...] America, which used to be a beacon of hope to others, is now seen with ambivalence, and even hostility, by people who see how the United States is destroying its own society, and is also trying to export its corruption abroad. It's a challenge to love your country when you listen to older people in the former Soviet bloc ask you, one way or the other, what happened to the Shining City on a Hill that they used to love?
Dreher, naturally, isn't alone in once being unable, or unwilling, to see America's arrogance. People don't want to think poorly of their home nations, and of course the United States is controlled by a massively powerful corporate-government alliance that colludes to control what the public can hear, think, and say. As just the most recent of many ongoing examples:
- YouTube censored a video whose creator documented Democrats' claims of election fraud when Donald Trump won in 2016. The establishment wants you to know how wrong Republicans are for criticizing the outcome of the 2020 election, but they won't let you see that Democrats did the same thing, because that undermines their anti-conservative agenda.
- Elon Musk's Twitter permanently banned an account for a post that mocked the vicious murderousness of U.S. foreign policy.
- Elon Musk's Twitter also banned an account for pointing out Ukrainian war crimes that the U.S. military-industrial complex won't allow you to hear, or even consider. (So much for Musk's commitment to free speech. I admit he had me fooled.)
The flip side, of course, is that the Woke Gods will attempt to force not just you, but the rest of the world, to accept its holy dogma. And what does that dogma look like? Dreher again tells it like it is:
The United States is a country where we castrate young males and cut the breasts off of young females, and call it liberation. We are a country where it is considered moral progress to bring in deviant men who dress like women, and have them read to children modern fairy tales teaching them to question their bodies and their sexual identities. We are ruled by an elite class that treats LGBT culture as sacred, and that celebrates its way of life in commerce, in advertising, in education, and everywhere it can possibly be inculcated into the rhythms of daily life. Our ruling class and its dominant value system now celebrates racism, and calls it "diversity, equity, and inclusion." Our young people are suffering a horrible mental health crisis. Millions of our people, especially poor and working class people, are succumbing to "deaths of despair" via drug and alcohol addiction.
Our young are going to live with less material, social, and emotional security than their parents and grandparents, while our liberals are tearing down all sources of solidarity outside of radical politics, and our conservatives mostly don't care. The United States is busy destroying its higher education system, which used to be the envy of the world, all for the sake of ideologizing it. We are also destroying the capacity for excellence in science and nearly every other field of endeavor, for the sake of DEI ideology. The rich are getting richer, and the numbers of the economically precarious grow daily. And for the past two decades, Washington has not seen a war it didn't want to fight, even as the woke war machine understandably struggles to convince young Americans that serving in the armed forces is worth doing. Respect for God is in collapse among American youth. Violent crime is up. American pop culture celebrates what is most violent, sexual, and degraded in the human experience, and export that baseness globally.
Over and over, as I travel through Eastern Europe, I hear the same thing from beleaguered parents, teachers, and religious leaders: that there is no way to resist American pop culture and its effect on their young. A high school teacher in Poland once told me that there is nothing at all in his country remotely as powerful as Western pop culture in forming the moral sensibilities of young Poles. What we Americans have done and are doing to our country, we are training the next generation of young people abroad to do to theirs.
And on and on.
I'd be resentful too if I were a citizen of a foreign country trying to defend my young people from the rot and depravity of Woke America. When the Ukraine cheerleaders say they're defending the "liberal order" in opposing Russia, this is what they want to preserve. It's not just American and Western military and economic hegemony, but also the corrupt values the ruling elites now embrace.
And as I've said before, wokeism is all the more insidious because it emerges from a society that claims to champion "freedom" and "democracy" and tricks people into believing they're still free, even as the West slips into totalitarianism. And it plays on people's sympathies by exploiting minority groups to amass more and more power. This is how Dreher put it in a September 2022 interview:
The basis of the woke ideology is, on the one hand, that we must protect the weak because they are victims. As Christians, we accept this, but woke has taken this to a whole other level and treats the victims as saints. It justifies the elimination of classical liberal values such as freedom of religion and freedom of speech by demanding sensitivity to the victims. It claims that victims need to feel safe, so they destroy freedom by claiming safety.
Everywhere you look, everything is black and gay -- one because of white guilt, and one because of woke moral supremacy. The woke hate the majority culture, and they expect that you won't push back because to do so will get you branded as a bigot. They've turned color and sexuality into ideologies and weaponized them as a means of consolidating their own control over society. Even as we decline into an era of segregation and upside-down racism -- a world in which failing to overtly celebrate people's sexual orientations, or in which daring to point out the incontrovertible truth that humans are sexually dimorphic and can't change from male to female, gets you scarlet-lettered and can even end your livelihood -- too few will stand up and denounce the growing tyranny.
In talking to my wife about the state of the West, I suggested that much of what plagues us is that America lacks any discernible culture. We were a bunch of (mainly) Europeans thrown together and expected to create something new -- but lacking a shared ethnic identity, we never really had anything to fall back on. We tried to create a melting pot, but now everyone wants a tossed salad instead -- the scourge of "multiculturalism" wherein we might all be stuck in the same bowl but we never come together as one, leaving us forever at odds with each other. And so if the lettuce leaves outnumber the tomatoes, the tomatoes are elevated, praised, and given special treatment, while the lettuce is lectured about its privilege and told to learn its place and step aside. Obviously, this would never happen in a melting pot, where everyone blends into a harmonious whole.
In the end, the flag and the Constitution are essentially the only culture Americans have, and that's nothing to base a national culture on, especially when people no longer even care to defend the liberties that the flag symbolizes and the Constitution enshrines.
The Founding Fathers, moreover, are essentially our only national mythology, and what good does that do when the younger generations have been conditioned to hate those whose lofty ideals gave us arguably the greatest experiment in self-governance in the history of the human race?
When asked what the framers of the Constitution had given the people, Ben Franklin is said to have quipped, "A republic, if you can keep it." Two and a half centuries later, it seems we indeed weren't able to keep it -- and we now seem all too eager to throw it away.
Maybe people are just too tired and beaten down to care. Maybe their dumbed-down education has left them incapable of critical thought. Whatever the case, I think it's just a matter of time until it all comes crumbling down.
At this point, maybe it deserves to.
I think I'll be shifting gears on my blog heading into the new year, provided it doesn't get nuked in this growing climate of intolerance. I figure it does little good to complain about a seemingly inevitable collapse. I'll probably just do my best to hold on to what I can of fading Western culture until it's gone.
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