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Prefatory Note

This is a work neither of the “left” nor of the “right” but influenced by both, and is addressed principally to readers in the United States and in Britain. Without deference to nonjudgmentalism and political correctness, it was written out of the necessity to record and try to make sense of the disintegration of Western free societies in the last two or three decades, and to point to the principles of the “true commonwealth” as an alternative to today’s political, ethical and social disorders. One of the book’s governing ideas is that market freedom and moral freedom are two sides of the same coin, and that between them they are bringing down civil society itself.

I have drawn on a wide variety of sources past and present. In addition to citations of the findings of governmental and intergovernmental organizations, and of social institutions of many kinds, I have used contemporary media coverage of the subjects with which the book deals. Available daily in the public domain, such material serves to illustrate the extent to which bad faith chooses to ignore whatever is unwelcome to it.

I have also sidestepped the work of academics whose writings shed too little light on our times, and many of which are overburdened by scholastic theories without practical utility and lacking in genuine substance. Instead, I have often preferred Greek, Roman and Hebraic thinkers and the writings of America’s Founding Fathers as guides to the truths we need. 

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Chapter One - As Other Powers Advance

These are convulsive times for Western democracies, times of turmoil. On the horizon other political and moral forces are advancing, benefiting from the free society’s gradual fall. These are times, too, of gross disproportions of poverty and wealth under the pressures of globalization, greed and growth; times of the breaking of many moral bounds, of the perpetual motion of migrants crossing lands and seas in search of work or refuge from strife, and of deepening environmental harm.

Metropolises increase to unprecedented size, and the prospect arises of a world population of some 11 billion by the century’s end. Interplanetary travel beckons, one billion tourists are on the move each year—more than 100 million passengers travelled through Atlanta airport in 2016, over 75 million through Heathrow—and Americans drive their vehicles more than three trillion miles in a single year. At the same time, the flux of humanity is so great as to constitute a new and advancing world-force in its own right.

The number of migrants living in countries other than those in which they were born had reached over 250 million by 2017, an increase of nearly 50 percent since 2000, with prophecy of an even greater “exodus of biblical proportions” to come. Such motion is in itself no new thing. “When there be great Shoales of People without Meanes of life and Sustentation,” wrote Francis Bacon in 1639, “it is of Necessity that once in an Age or two, they discharge a Portion of their People upon other Nations.” But today’s “discharge” is on an unprecedented scale.

Asylum-seekers, refugees (real or pretended) from war and civil conflict, and economic migrants flow in their tens of millions from place to place in search of sanctuary, food and work, with many in flight from encroaching famine as climate change takes an increasing toll on the teeming populations of Africa and elsewhere. They are rescued, or drown, by the thousands in foreign seas, are blocked at borders or enter their havens as “undocumented” illegals. If subsequently caught, they may suffer arrest and deportation; find guarded welcome or arouse hostility as communities struggle to absorb them, house them, feed them, and educate their children; or “disappear” without trace.

Today’s instabilities are on a larger scale than in the thirties, with uncountable numbers lost to civil society in the labyrinths of electronic limbo. It is also a hard fact that neither discredited socialist nor amoral libertarian prescriptions can deal with the free society’s multiplying dysfunctions. In disintegrating Western democracies, the instinct for self-harm to “left” and “right,” and the illusions which accompany it, reign largely unchecked. Belief in the supreme virtues of free choice, and large indifference to the consequences of its exercise, flourish. Freedom from moral restraint is seen as a right, even as a human right, and limits placed upon such right are perceived as authoritarian or worse. Even mere transgression is regarded by some as progressive, while in the freest societies which have ever existed “progressives” believe—or pretend to believe—that they are living in “police states.”

In this chaos of perceptions, a mirror of our times, the belief reigns in many (or most) that a market-driven liberal democracy resting upon free moral choice and individual entitlement in liberty’s name is the culmination of the historical process, and stands at the summit of political evolution. But Francis Fukuyama in The End of History was wrong.

Instead, there is a new and suicidal dialectic at work within free societies which is bringing them to disorder and disintegration. Many of their supposed strengths are weaknesses, the failure to grasp this a source of further debilitation. Meanwhile, “freedom and liberty” in market and moral choices are undoing the social order, while internal disparity and division grow. “During my stay in the United States,” wrote de Tocqueville, “nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people.” He would not find this today, yet de Tocqueville saw such condition as American democracy’s premise. But, now, all that is required for Western democracy’s survival, so some think, is the preservation of economic and moral laissez-faire from erosion, diminution, or regulation.

Historical knowledge, on the wane in Western democracy’s educational systems, is necessary for true perspective and informed judgment. Its increasing lack prevents us from seeing that our freedoms, many of them now put to antisocial ends, are mutations of the freedoms fought for in the Reformation and in the revolutionary overthrow of the anciens régimes. Where abused, such liberties also parody those for which the nineteenth-century emancipationists and the suffragettes struggled. Moreover, many lack the means to exercise today’s freedoms, whether those freedoms be real or false.

It is a paradox, too, that many of Western democracy’s present-day libertarians—”progressive” human-rights libertarians and free market libertarians alike—are deeply authoritarian. Both are swift to condemn any institution, ethic, or legal decision which runs counter to their dogmas, and each assumes that its principles and prohibitions are conducive to the common good.

In the bypassing or subverting of alternative notions about where the true interests of civil society lie, the scope of public debate has shrunk to the harm of democracy itself. Moreover, neither the one type of libertarian nor the other possesses an ethic capable of protecting the free society from increasing self-harm. Indeed, few libertarians of whatever stripe, and whether market or moral free-choosers, believe in much more than doing what one wants.

If in the “Soviet bloc” civil society was wrecked by state socialism, in Western democracies it is being brought down in freedom’s name. This is therefore not the “end of history”—far from it—but a time in which the dialectic is quickening as free societies unravel, with American sway reduced and other powers advancing. Yet because the “left” has been disabled by state-socialist failure and because market nostrums are productive of great injustice, few can now tell the truth about Western democracy’s decomposition.

Nor has it been grasped that new times such as these require a new understanding of what constitutes “progress.” Today’s political class in free societies, and those who furnish it with its increasingly impoverished thoughts and words, are incapable of it. But it is clear enough that a “pro-enterprise and pro-competition agenda” on the one hand, and a moral free-for-all on the other, are insufficient for true progress.

Moreover, the word “progress” has no fixed sense other than that of a “going forwards.” It is a sense which demands new interpretation in times such as these. Thus, to make a stand against much of what presently passes for “progressive”—such as the abuse of the liberties that the free society provides—could be regarded as urgent, and as itself a “going forwards” in the general interest.

However, candor about the “free society’s woes is also stopped in its tracks by nonjudgmentalism, holding its tongue, and by political correctness, an orthodoxy of mind born of fear of the truth. Such fear is the true reaction of our times, since without moral judgment of our mounting ills there can be no real progress in social reform, while self-censorship blocks reason with taboos about what we can say, and (almost) about what we should think. Between them, nonjudgmentalism and political correctness help “progressives” to fill the hole where the “socialist project” once stood and are surrogates for genuine belief. 

There are many optimists who still believe that the heart of the free society is essentially sound. “Hope,” Gibbon tells us, is “the best comfort of our imperfect condition.” But growing distresses of every kind in the free society do not encourage hope, social orders are easily damaged, and the time-span of empires is short and becoming shorter; indeed, few have lasted as long as has Western dominion.

Unsurprisingly therefore, and like other poorly-led Western democracies, America is under challenge by notions of right different from its own, those of Islam leading the way.