Joe Biden’s decline is a perfect mirror of West’s slow decay
5:00am July 25, 2024.
Updated 22 hours ago
US President Joe Biden speaks as he meets with national union leaders at the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations.
American social theorist Camille Paglia once remarked that Western society would enter its “late decadent phase” when the ruling hierarchy consisted of the “senile and the adolescent”.
Joe Biden’s age and incoherence should be seen as the personification of the accelerating decline of the West – marked by the growing arrogance, self-interest and hubris of its ruling elites – that has drastically eroded the quality of our governance with devastating implications.
The incessant focus on political horse races between candidates who offer much the same policy prescriptions distracts us from this harsh reality.
Simmering internal political hatreds have intensified, inequality and concentrations of economic power have soared to nearly unprecedented levels as real incomes stagnate or reverse for the bulk of the population.
Public trust in institutions has collapsed amid rampant social decay in all but the top echelons of the population, while the chance of nuclear war has grown. Much of this stems from deliberate policy choices by a richer, ever more remote governing class that increasingly ignores the interests and opinions of everyone else.
So grim is the outlook, Stanford University academic John Ioannidis has started asking whether the West has entered a terminal “death spiral”, which he defines as a “vicious cycle of self-reinforcing dysfunctional behaviour characterised by continuous flawed decision-making, myopic single-minded focus on one set of solutions, denial, distrust, micromanagement, dogmatic thinking and learned helplessness”.
In a paper titled Is Society caught up in a Death Spiral? Modelling Societal Demise and Its Reversal, published last year, Ioannidis and Dutch academics Michaela Schippers and Matthias Luijks find two standout characteristics of civilisations on the brink of collapse: extraordinary levels of inequality combined with ever scarcer resources.
The obsession with phasing out energy-rich fossil fuels at whatever the cost to ordinary people’s living standards guarantees the latter for years, while the relentless creation of trillions of units of new fiat currency, pushing up assets’ values to enrich those who have them, ensures the former.
“Societies fall apart and societal dysfunction rises when an ever increasing group of have-nots are unable to sustain themselves, let alone earn the money and produce the food to sustain the rich, and the difference between the elite and masses have become too big to bridge,” Ioannidis writes.
At the same time voters demand cuts to immigration, governments have deliberately flooded their countries with millions of unwanted new immigrants, legal and illegal.
“In the earlier periods of the (Roman) empire, the elites were willing to offer lives and treasure in the service of the common interest, while in the period of decline the elites became increasing selfish,” Ioannidis writes.
At that time the ratio of incomes of the richest Romans to the poorest was about 20 times, a ratio that exploded to many thousands by the time the empire collapsed around AD400 and not far beyond what it is now in the US and Europe.
Earlier this year economist Daron Acemoglu concluded the liberal democracy model that created jobs, stability, higher wages and broad social cohesion from the end of World War II “has fallen short on almost every count since around 1980”.
“In the United States, real (inflation-adjusted) incomes at the bottom and the middle of the distribution have hardly increased since 1980, and elected politicians have done little about it,” Acemoglu writes. It’s a statistic that must shock those who express surprise at the growing embrace of radical political movements. And all this is before artificial intelligence wipes out hundreds of millions of low-skilled jobs in coming years.
Nothing confirms the collapse in governing wisdom so much as the destructive response to Covid-19, when across a few years almost all advanced governments crushed their citizens’ living standards, rights and educational outcomes over a new virus whose fatality rate was known among experts from early 2020 to be less than 0.05 per cent.
Last year the Israeli government conceded it couldn’t find a single person under 50 who died from what was ridiculously sold as a “great plague” without serious pre-existing medical conditions.
Such policies pushed 150 million people into extreme poverty and boosted the wealth of the billionaire and centimillionaire class by more than 70 per cent between 2020 and 2021, Ioannidis notes. The further 20 per cent-plus inflation since then added insult to injury as governments forced novel, rushed vaccines on millions of people who didn’t need them and didn’t want them – coincidentally enriching some of the most influential corporations in the world that largely funded the pharmaceutical regulators.
The signs of this growing institutional stupidity or malevolence were already clear during and after the global financial crisis, when gigantic state-backed banks were allowed, indeed encouraged, to leverage themselves to absurd levels, practically inviting the economic collapse.
Paglia’s “adolescent” prognosis is in no short supply either, well evidenced our hysterical and outright dangerous approach to international relations.
Each side of the Israel-Gaza war, for instance, denounces the other as the incarnation of evil when the tragic events of the Middle East are born of a complex history that should, and once did, rule out simplistic moralising.
Similarly, it was once an article of faith by US presidents, leading diplomats and scholars that insisting on NATO troops in Ukraine would be provocative madness. Now, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are dead, and US foreign policy is pushing the world into two gigantic nuclear armed blocks that hate each other.
Individuals can do little to affect the arc of history, but greater recognition of the growing recklessness, corruption and childishness of our governance may help arrest the devastating trends around us.
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