Eighty Years in the Waste Land

The West's Suicidal Pursuit of Heaven on Earth

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal

T.S. Elliot, The Waste Land

In the 80 years since WW2, the United States’ primary commitment has not been to the flourishing of its people but rather, the pursuit of the holy grail of Progressive liberalism: the creation of a liberal international order (LIO). This LIO is a body of global institutions like the U.N., the WEF, NATO, and countless NGOs and nonprofits, all whose purpose is to facilitate liberal politics (democracy), liberal economics (free markets), and liberal cultural values (secularism + libertinism). This endeavor did not emerge organically from America's interests but was instead a kind of geopolitical sleight of hand in which the U.S. took over many of the imperial commitments and ambitions of the British empire under the guise of opposing communism. For the next fifty years, building institutions to oppose communism became a central focus of American policy. What Americans did not realize at the time was that this was not a geopolitical struggle but was instead a theological one between the two false faiths of The Enlightenment: British liberalism and Communism. American leaders from at least Woodrow Wilson through the present have acted collectively as a "Constantine I of global liberalism," converting America from its Christian Protestant faith, and diverting it from its political commitment to the betterment of its people. The entire post-WW2 sacrificial nature of American politics has been mostly the heretical pursuit of a "liberal utopia" dressed up as Christian morality. The consequences of this invisible religious conversion has brought the West from the brink of world domination in 1900 to the verge of total collapse in 2024.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, a victory for liberalism appeared all but certain. A mere decade later, in 2001, a new antagonist had emerged in opposition to the LIO: radical Islam, and by 2016, the entire LIO enterprise was clearly in trouble with Brexit and Trump. Now, in 2024, it appears clearly doomed. This collapse likely started with 9/11 when radical Islam upset the fantasy of progressive liberalism. Muslims simply were not interested in anything that the LIO had to offer. They did not regard the political, economic, or cultural pillars of this new liberalism with anything but revulsion. Then China and India both rejected core tenets of the LIO. China wasn’t interested in political liberalism (or Communism, as it turns out) or environmentalism and India wasn’t interested in secularism or population control. In spite of nearly 80 years of foreign aid, investment, generous trade agreements, political pressure, coups, bribes, and even assured security, most of the world simply wasn’t interested in embracing or sacrificing for this new liberal order; preferring instead to take advantage of it.

Thus, at some point between the mid 1990’s and 2009, many Western elites realized a hard truth: the liberal international order was doomed. The energy that fueled the creation of the LIO came largely from Enlightenment-inspired Anglosphere, along with the U.S., and France. As they declined, so too did the prospects of the LIO. America’s relative wealth, post WW2, made them instrumental in carrying this project forward but even it proved insufficient given the sacrificial demands that liberalism puts upon its advocates. Given how much the West committed to make the LIO a reality, these nations suddenly found themselves in a long-term compromised position. They had severely reduced their industrial capacity, fertility rates, protectionist economics, and martial ambitions, while adopting massive financial commitments to the developing world. The West was no longer ascendent but in obvious decline, and the LIO looked increasingly unlikely to establish itself. In response to this reality, many elites concluded that the West couldn’t and perhaps shouldn’t recover. Some felt betrayed by their own people and decided to use those institutions to punish them. The more pragmatic and morally flexible simply decided to transform the LIO institutions into a kleptocracy (government by thieves) to enrich themselves. Having successfully hollowed out its soul, the financial plundering of the West began.

The obscene hostility to Trump was never about his opposition to the LIO, as he’s mostly amenable to it (it’s been the norm his entire life, though he appears to be changing). Rather, it’s that his optimism and earnest patriotism makes it impossible for him to join the plundering of our nation that Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are so representative of. He expects America to win if, for no other reason, than he is an American and he expects to win. For all of his faults, that makes him unsuitable as a kleptocrat. His conflict with the thieving class has given us a gift by exposing the truth of the LIO: it’s dead and exists today as little more than a cover for ambitious thieves and suicidal spiritual sadists.

A focused look at the core assumptions of liberalism and communism exposes them as risible heresies that position the state as the vehicle through which a chosen people can lead the world to salvation, i.e., “world peace.” They both require that humans have no meaningful fundamental nature and are thus entirely malleable to social organization. This is akin to Christian Millenarianism except instead of ushering in the return of Christ, they produce Earthly salvation for mankind. To the proper Christian mind, this is clearly heretical and yet it has been the primary objective of most Western Christian nations for the past 80 years (one could reasonably speculate that Russia’s post-communist rejection of the LIO is largely the reason why it has been treated more harshly than legitimately hostile and abusive nations such as China, in spite of it being significantly more Christian in practice and welcoming of them). Why has this heretical nonsense so fully captured the full commitment of the West? Why does it appear to have replaced the moral and spiritual core of Christian faith in Western Europe and within the American political class?

The intuitive answer to this question is that the senseless destruction of WW1 was so profound that it disrupted our faith in the goodness of God, leading to an age of nihilism. Lacking purpose, liberalism and communism stepped in to fill the void. This is a compelling answer but I believe it is an insufficient one. After all, how does one explain Britain’s willingness to sacrifice 10% of its population and 25% of its GDP because the Austrohungarians decided to invade the Kingdom of Serbia? This self-immolation defies logic unless you consider that Britain had already embraced the false faith of liberalism, and Woodrow Wilson would shortly lead America down the same path. They weren’t fighting a war for political but spiritual reasons. Wilson wanted to “make the world safe for Democracy,” but why? Because it is a core belief of liberalism that Democracy is a necessary structure for the moral transformation of a people. The British fought WW1 with such total commitment because they believed that the very salvation of man was at stake. But why did it take hold there? Why so quickly in the U.S? That answer is unclear but it is worth speculating that Democracy may well have contributed. After all, politics are relevant only to a few in a Monarchy, but to everyone in a Democracy. This causes politics to infect everything, including the church. Once political interests, objectives, and methods become ubiquitous in a society, perhaps it becomes uniquely susceptible to politics masquerading as religion.

This quality of mirroring Christianity is why men like Woodrow Wilson (raised as a Southern Presbyterian, he transformed into a “liberal” over the course of his career) were some of the earliest its proponents and why its mission was dressed almost exclusively in Christian language. It is particularly well-suited to Christians for whom pride is their primary sin as it seeks to do that which God has set aside for Himself (a hallmark of the Christian millenarianism, which asserted that it was the goal/destiny of Christians to usher in Christ’s return by making paradise on Earth). These proponents transformed the traditional pragmatic political function of the nation state (to protect a specific group of people) into a transformational and universal moral one: the creation of heaven on Earth. This error was famously critiqued by Eric Vogelin (and later popularized in the U.S. by William F. Buckley) with the phrase “don’t immanentize the eschaton.” 

This pride has been the West's undoing. First with Britain and now the United States, it has inspired Western Civilization to abandon salvation in Christ in favor of themselves “saving the world.” It is fashionable in many Western churches today for their members to engage in charity tourism. I’m reminded of a very wealthy man who showed me pictures of his teenage son on a trip to Mexico to build houses for the poor. Then later lamenting that his daughter, a recent graduate of Brown university, was transgender now and had just married a transgender man (in addition to completely abandoning Christianity and his politics). Variants on this story are commonplace. Central to the appeal of this kind of activity is the lack of continuity. You put in your “best effort” but you don’t have to stay to see the consequences (the opposite of the aristocrat who is tied to a place, its people, and the consequences of his and his family’s actions). More so, these kinds of endeavors are ripe for exploitation by savvy natives who happily take advantage of these tourists. This is also known to the tourists and they engage in a reciprocal exchange. Faux faith in exchange for faux virtue. Families and entire congregations degrade right in front of them while they focus their attention on distant and often unsolvable problems. Many fashionable causes fit into this mold: environmentalism, overpopulation, but it is “world peace” that is the most fantastical. All of Christendom has found itself ignoring the cultivation of faith in its citizenry in favor of chasing childish fantasies of heaven on Earth. This fatal conceit has brought the West from the cusp of world domination to the brink of extinction in a mere century.

If Western people are to survive in a meaningful way, they not only need to abandon this heretical ambition, but they also need to contend with the catastrophe that was the 20th century. In all of human history, no one has possessed a greater advantage nor surrendered it more dramatically than the modern West. The sins of war and the pursuit of false faith have nearly destroyed them. For perspective, to start the century the European people constituted approximately 33% of the world’s population, were rapidly growing, had access to large territories of mostly unsettled land, significant technological, economic, and cultural advantages, and an ambition to conquer the globe.

Today, no Western nation has a growing population and their global share has fallen to 10%, and will be under 7% in a generation. They no longer possess any significant advantages, cultural, technological, economic, nor the will for global expansion. While it may be tempting to pin this collapse on two destructive world wars, the truth is that the rabid pursuit of the LIO caused a much greater share of the damage.

WW1 was arguably the most catastrophic event for any civilization since the Mongol conquest of Baghdad. The scale and meaninglessness of death invited an age of nihilism. Additionally, the collapse of the legacy empires and kingdoms (Aristocratic Europe) had an unanticipated consequence: it severed the continuity of their political and cultural traditions, as well leaving the relationship of the people to their government suddenly ill-defined. The new governments that would emerge were no longer aristocratic and had no aristocratic obligations. Its officials were no longer exemplars of the people they represented. This was a government in desperate need of a way to justify itself to its people. In addition, this collapse of the aristocratic states weakened the Christian churches of Europe, as the two were relatively integrated (this was also true in Turkey with the collapse of the Ottoman empire). This foundational loss enabled communism to flourish in Russia, fascism in Germany, Italy, and both in Spain, along with liberalism further spreading. These belief systems were providing spiritual and moral purpose via the same institutions which had once fostered a cultural identity and spiritual unity.

An unappreciated virtue of an aristocracy is that there is a clear relationship between the state and the people. If the people don’t admire and respect the state then it is in danger of being overthrown. This incentivized aristocrats towards becoming an embodiment and leader of their people. A single pious king could inspire more faith than an army of missionaries. The same is true of fitness, courage, artistry, and any virtue. A monarch, if admired, would be emulated which in turn would help to create a people. A democracy has no such virtue. This is partly why Democracy was so rare, historically speaking. It isn’t a particularly good form of government because it doesn’t possess any practical virtue. Any virtue of a Democracy is theoretical. The liberal democracies attempted to solve this problem by embedding within itself a moral purpose (various forms of “liberty,” i.e., liberty via Natural Rights of the United States or British mercantile liberalism and French egalitarian liberalism). In every case thus far, this moral purpose evolved into the pursuit of the LIO. Why liberalism tends to break out of nationalism and into universalism is unclear unless you consider its religious elements. Liberalism inherited the universalism of Christianity. This particular political and spiritual chemistry lends itself to imperialism because liberalism doesn’t see itself as a practice tied to a particular people. Instead, it is a “gift” to all people, whether they want it or not.

As a side note, it is worthwhile to consider the failure of post WW1 democracies. They almost all immediately drifted to communism or fascism. The Western nations could clearly see that their commitment to Democracy had not produced the desired outcomes. Had they sought to restore the aristocracies, they might have avoided WW2 entirely. That they either didn’t consider this or found this outcome worse than war clearly indicates the degree to which liberalism had become a dominant article of faith among the political class of Britain, France, and The United States. Any amount of death and destruction was preferable to an aristocratic state. 

One thing that liberalism, communism, and fascism had in common was correctly recognizing that they competed directly with the Christian church (Islamic in Turkey, but I’ll primarily focus on Christendom here). Consequently, each system set about banishing, co-opting, or mitigating the church. Liberalism preferred the latter option. Especially after WW2, liberal nations started restricting Christianity in any domain over which the state could assert plausible control. This included public streets, facilities, and even schools. Slowly, Christianity was displaced, leaving people increasingly accepting of liberal faith as somehow neutral i.e., secular. By the mid-1950s, with the Communists as a convenient enemy, the LIO would firmly establish itself as the de facto moral purpose of the West. The opposition to communism ultimately proved to be a pretense as the real enemy was Christianity.

Liberalism and communism are the twin heresies of Christianity (fascism being a form of neopaganism) with the former rooted in the sin of pride and the latter the sin of envy. Both emerged with evangelicalism (though not necessarily “from”) and possess the missionary zeal and universalism, thus making them impossible to limit to a state or a people. This tendency lends itself away from regionalism and naturally towards imperialism, which is precisely what happened and why there was any conflict at all between them. The apparent intensity of this conflict helped mask their shared assumptions and religious quality. Communism was a perfect antagonist to liberalism. It was so villainous (explicitly atheistic versus merely “secular”) and the credible threat of nuclear holocaust so potent, that criticism of liberalism was effectively verboten. Over the next forty-six years, the moral purpose of the West ceased to be “love God and your neighbors” and became “defeat communism.” Under this umbrella, the rapid secularization of America took place.

Most living Americans today have known only LIO America. The same is true of Western Europe. Most Westerners today are completely detached from Christian moral duties and expectations. All they know is the LIO, and they have no experience of a world before it. Seeing its collapse has left them unmoored from their moral purpose. It would be as if Christ Himself returned but only to say “never mind. You’re on your own.” 

Other than displacing the moral and spiritual functions of the church, liberalism also displaced the proper nationalist relationship of the government to its people. Historically, the empire was the more common form of political organization. The nation state was relatively rare and only recently has it become the political norm. What distinguished the nation from the empire was, more than anything, was the relationship of the state to the people. Empires tended to involve people of various ethnic groups and even religious faiths. The state had no loyalty or duty to any specific people, nor could it. If it did, it would create disruptions. What mattered was the continuity of the political structure, i.e., the empire itself. Whether any particular people survived or thrived was incidental.

The nation state has a much more personal relationship with its people. It is obliged to their protection and prosperity as a justification for its own existence. In short, the Japanese or Ethiopian or English nation state was only legitimate if it served the survival and prosperity of its corresponding people. Thus it was fitting that an aristocratic structure would exist as the aristocracy would be of the very people it governed and as such, its actions were a reflection of the character of those people. While it’s true that many foreign monarchs would govern nations, this became less and less frequent as national identities coalesced. More so, it was far less frequent in the second tier nobility that largely dominated. Ultimately, if any distinct people are to survive and thrive, history suggests that they require a competent class to protect them. That is what a monarchy provides. A monarchical nation is justified by the competent execution of its purpose. An empire has no inherent justification at all and thus it exists in tension with its people as they jockey for power and influence. Its existence depends upon how well the imperial state can keep its people fractured. A democracy is plagued with similar problems  but is even less stable than an empire as ethnic groups fight over governmental control.

Finally, the aristocratic class had to represent the people as an ideal. A French nobleman must be distinctly French, which means there has to be such a thing as “distinctly French,” and it would be unsavory for him to embody the virtues or vices of any other people. Thus, the relationship between the monarchical nation and its people is deeply personal.

The Constitutional United States, for example, was conceived as a political entity for a Christian people, as John Adams famously declared “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” It was broader than the English tradition from which it emerged, having embraced in design many Roman sensibilities. It was, however, of its people. If they were to change, it would no longer be appropriate. Conceived as a functional empire (union of states), multiethnic, and with a superior conception of natural rights (a moral restraint on the use of force, versus Rousseau’s notion of Democratic obligation), the United States can be reasonably construed as  the only logical “liberal” state. Elsewhere, kingdoms appear a more natural form of government.

Let us return to post-WW2 America. As the United States grew, its Christian foundation was embedded everywhere, which limited what the government could or should do to actions within a Christian moral and spiritual framework. This was an obstacle to the LIO. After all, no Christian state would seek to preempt Christ’s return (functional objective of the LIO). Thus, the American people needed to cease to be a Christian people. In order to accomplish this, Christianity had to be banished from any space that the state could control. This was done mostly after WW2 under the guise of the supposed bedrock American principle of “separation of church and state.” Christian practices needed to be restricted as much as possible so that “liberalism” could take over as the de facto religion in common of the American people.

It is important to understand that the LIO and the Christian church were necessarily in direct competition in a zero-sum game. This was more than small issues like “prayer in school.” It initially started with the coopting of women’s Christian civic organizations charitable and educational work during the “Progressive era” in the late 19th century. Over 70 years, the valuable contributions of the Christian churches were replaced by the state, leaving the Church greatly diminished. This allowed a critical problem to emerge: namely that two sets of ethics, moral purpose, and metaphysics were now being taught. One 40 hours a week in public schools and the other one hour a week in church. It is a testament to the power of Christian faith that the American churches didn’t collapse faster. Ultimately, this moral divide was exposed by Roe v. Wade and its progeny, reaching an apogee in Obergefell. More recently, transgender issues expose a further divide, now on our very metaphysics.

As the mainline churches emptied, many blamed their liberal shift but this was insufficient an explanation. Why go to a vestigial church when you’re already in a vital church 40 hours a week? That’s what American Christians failed to understand. The public schools were a religious institution that provided the moral purpose and spiritual needs of the students. One could not reconcile public school and Christian church any more than one could piously attend a Mosque on Friday, Synagogue on Saturday, and Church on Sunday.

Liberalism first stripped the churches of their charitable and social contributions, then drove them from the public square, before undermining the intellectual foundations that they’d built into society, before finally attacking their moral and spiritual purposes. By the close of the 20th century, liberalism had replaced Christianity as the default religion in virtually every single Western nation.

Pursuit of the LIO has cost the United States greatly (and Britain before it). In proper missionary style, we have had to live out our faith in order to inspire converts. Consequently, the U.S. has engaged in the most bizarre example of political self-sacrifice that the world has, or likely ever will, seen. We enabled and even encouraged the collapse of almost all of our major industries. We crippled what remained with illogical, dubious, and punitive environmental laws. Almost all of our trade deals since WW2 have been comically one-sided in favor of foreign nations. We’ve given away decades of critical technological advantages (including military) to nations that are unapologetically antagonistic to us, and trillions in foreign aid. We’ve policed the world with our military, costing around a hundred thousands lives. We’ve histrionically badgered people with illusory fears of overpopulation, thus inviting a complete cratering of our own fertility rates. On top of that, we’ve encouraged gender-antagonism, and explicit and grotesque sexual immorality, thus making repairing the fertility rate issue even more difficult. We have accepted somewhere in excess of seventy million immigrants from around the world since 1965 and are carrying over $150 trillion in debt (including social security and Medicare), which is six times our GDP.

Most wickedly, Western liberalism has mitigated Christianity by way of its embrace of cultural relativism presented as “tolerance.” It has made great efforts to present non-Christian faiths as spiritual equals, ignoring the incompatibility of their truth claims. Liberalism has reduced Christianity into a "mere faith." By standing as peers with the Dalai Lama and Islamic clerics (its embrace of Islam is particularly galling because unlike Hindus or Buddhists, there is no reciprocation. Islam continues its unapologetic war on Christendom), it has made Christianity a mere aesthetic instead of the soul of the West. In so doing, it has further spiritually gutted the West, thus making the LIO project all the more necessary to its now spiritually starved citizens. With its collapse, the people are now spiritually starved, which is why so many in the West increasingly long for death.

What makes all of our political and cultural sacrifices to the LIO even worse is that they inspired no converts. The rest of the world was happy to pay lip service to our fanaticism in order to exploit our self-sacrifice but they weren’t interested in our liberal faith. We sacrificed for nothing, which is a very bitter pill indeed.

American Christians must come to terms with the British and continental inspired liberalism that has shaped American Progressives since Woodrow Wilson: It is not merely a Christian heresy like its twin Communism, that must be rejected. Rather, we must come to terms with the fact that it replaced Christianity as our dominant religious faith far earlier than we admit and consequently, we’re not playing defense. We’re not conserving our Christian faith. We must rebuild it. 

This liberalism; this failed utopian project has cost America its preeminent position in the world and has brought us to the brink of collapse. We’re not, as often discussed, at the beginning of the end. Rather, we’re facing the end of the end. We’re not in a position of refining a functional system. We must abandon this project and all of the institutions that have derived from it.  For Americans, this means revisiting virtually everything we’ve done since roughly 1890. We must reevaluate our domestic and geopolitical goals. We must reaffirm that such goals must emerge from the state's duty to its particular people, and we must educate our people accordingly. We need to rediscover our philosophies and our true Christian faith. We must refocus our attention away from distant troubles and utopian dreams and towards our own souls, our relationship with God, our families, and our communities.