Future of Western Democracy

 There's been a lot of handwringing about liberal democracy in the West.

My thoughts are these:

1. The West has gone through worse. They've gone through the nightmare of the middle of the 20th century. WW1, Depression, WW2. There aren't many heroic episodes in world history but the postwar institutions were heroic, the defeat of fascism was heroic. Ultimately, though WW2 was about the defeat of colonialism and that was basically self-inflicted. But they will have to go through some hard times, muddle their way through, find it deep within themselves to develop problem solving capacities, and triumph over adversity.

2. USA is basically Western Civilisation plan B. Plan A was Europe and it failed during WW1 and WW2 and after that it became subordinate to the USA. The institutions that make up the West are under attack on all sides and they dug themselves into a hole: for decades they had the mentality that emergent systems could take the place of government, that evolution could take the place of intelligent design. (When running a country, unlike in nature, intelligent design matters.)

3. Another heroic episode which has gone about unnoticed by the West is the rise of Asia. If they want to get out of their current mess, they will have to study how the rise of Asia was achieved. Because we did it without needing to rely on democracy and capitalism to function well. We had other qualities that helped us, and if the West doesn't figure out what those other qualities are, they will be going down further.

For example, I don't doubt the greatness of their intellectual tradition. But there are some things which are disconcerting. "Government" and "Political Science" are used interchangeably, as though they were the same thing. They are not. "Government" is about administering and running the show. "Political Science" is about monkey business. They need to start thinking more about administration and less about monkey business.

Europe needs to start thinking about how to function like a developing country, because some parts of their system are broken and they need to rebuild. There's been this habit of thinking, "let's just give people freedom and on their own accord, they will build a great society". That is lazy thinking, and they need to be more specific about how they will go about their business.