Many right-wing pundits and intellectuals claim to be deeply concerned about the condition of “the West.” The conservative commentator Matt Walsh says “The West is in a state of total moral collapse.” The popular author, guru, and anti-woke crusader Jordan Peterson sounds the alarm about the “demise of the West” every other day. Conservative intellectuals like Rod Dreher give talks on the “fate of the West,” while books with titles like The War on the West are bestsellers.
Premature eulogies for the West are nothing new. In 1918, the German author Oswald Spengler published the first volume of The Decline of the West — a two-part series which predicted that the “life” of the West would enter its final stage around the year 2000. Missing his cue by just a couple of years, the nationalist politician (and forerunner to Donald Trump) Pat Buchanan published The Death of the West in 2002.1
Dire warnings about the terminal decline of the West aren’t confined to the American right. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán presents himself as a defender of Western civilization against hordes of “Muslim invaders” (even though Muslims make up a tiny fraction of Hungary’s population) and says multiculturalism is an “illusion.” Orbán’s defenders on the nationalist right in the United States and Europe believe he’s one of the few leaders defending their narrow idea of “the West” as a bastion of traditional values. They celebrate his scorn for immigrants, Hungary’s passage of anti-LGBT legislation, and his endless attacks on the EU (even though Budapest is one of the top net recipients of EU aid). They cheer when he describes “globalists” as “locusts” who “start wars, tear down worlds, [and] redraw borders.” In a 2022 documentary, Tucker Carlson made the case that Hungary is Western civilization’s last line of defense against the sinister machinations of globalists like George Soros.
The West’s right-wing eulogists-in-waiting are especially paranoid about immigration — they demand a return to a mythical homogeneous past in which fellow citizens shared the same faith, culture, and beliefs. They inflame and exploit nativist and isolationist sentiment among their compatriots. This is why the word “globalist” has become such a versatile smear on the right — it fuses conspiracism with the yearning for a harmonious traditional society that never actually existed.
Trump says the “greatest threat to Western civilization today is not Russia. It’s probably, more than anything else, ourselves.” Trump sometimes echoes the standard conservative laments about the death of the West — he decries the “abolition of our national borders” and the “collapse of the nuclear family.” He describes the United States as a “godless nation.” But his most vicious criticism is reserved for the “globalists” who “want to squander all of America’s strength, blood, and treasure chasing monsters and phantoms overseas while keeping us distracted from the havoc they’re creating right here at home.”
Trump and Orbán present “globalism” as the great enemy of the West — but “the West” is fundamentally a globalist concept. The American Constitution is based on Enlightenment ideas about individual rights, the consent of the governed, and private property that originated in Europe, and which have been put into practice across the liberal democratic world. These ideas and the institutions they’ve created aren’t confined to North American, European, or Judeo-Christian countries — Japan and South Korea became part of the Western economic and political order because they embraced democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. The former Soviet states of Eastern Europe are part of the West for the same reason, and Russia invaded Ukraine to prevent it from following a similar path.
In an April 2017 lecture, the historian Stephen Kotkin provided a definition of the West which transcends region, religion, language, and culture. “I can tell you what the West is about,” he said. “It’s about markets, private property, prosperity, open societies, free economy … liberal constitutional order, and democracy.”
Orbán says immigration is “not medicine but a poison.” Trump says immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
There are several reasons nationalist politicians like Trump and Orbán don’t embrace this universalist conception of the West. For one thing, their authoritarian political projects are built around undermining the liberal constitutional order and democracy. Trump tried to steal the 2020 election, he argues that the rule of law shouldn’t apply to him, and he called for the “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” in his campaign to recapture the Oval Office after he lost. Orbán openly touts what he describes as “illiberal democracy” in Hungary, which means undermining judicial independence, passing laws that attack NGOs and media organizations which are critical of the government, and imposing election rules that favor his ruling Fidesz party.
The other reason nationalists don’t emphasize the universalism of Western values and institutions is that their version of the West is exclusionary. Orbán describes the “Hungarian quality of existence” as a “special, unparalleled, high form of human life.” Trump’s political movement is ostensibly about putting “America First.” Trump and Orbán are constantly appealing to constituencies which share their contempt for “globalism,” which is why they argue that immigrants are destroying their countries from within and express hostility toward international institutions and alliances. Orbán says immigration is “not medicine but a poison.” Trump says immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Orbán and Trump both celebrated when Britain left the EU. They’re both deeply critical of NATO and other Western institutions. Both use immigrants as scapegoats. Both claim to be resisting a nefarious cabal of “globalists.” Both want to abandon Ukraine. After Trump recently described Orbán as a “fantastic leader” and praised his authoritarian inclinations at Mar-a-Lago, Orbán celebrated the fact that Trump “will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war. That is why the war will end.” Orbán claims that Vladimir Putin never would have invaded Ukraine on Trump’s watch and declares that “Trump is the man who can save the Western world.”
Opposition to support for Ukraine is a consistent theme among intellectuals who claim to be concerned about the imminent collapse of the West. Consider the lineup at the beginning of this piece. Matt Walsh says “I couldn’t care less about Ukraine and it doesn’t matter to me if Ukraine stands or falls.” Jordan Peterson hosts anti-Ukraine American politicians like Utah Sen. Mike Lee on his podcast to discuss all the reasons the Biden administration’s support for Kyiv is stupid and dangerous. Peterson also derides expressions of support for Ukrainian democracy as a “banal form of dimwit flag-waving” and thinks Putin is on the right side of a global culture war. Rod Dreher works at a think tank funded by the Hungarian government, and he believes “Viktor Orban, the only European leader who keeps calling for peace before the war takes everybody down, will be vindicated by history.”
It’s remarkable that so many of those who claim to be the guardians of the West and champions of its deepest values have elected to stay neutral — or have effectively taken the wrong side — in the greatest direct confrontation between the West and its enemies since the Cold War.
In May, Putin delivered a speech at Russia’s annual Victory Day parade. See if anything he said sounds familiar:
Western globalist elites keep speaking about their exceptionalism, pit nations against each other and split societies, provoke bloody conflicts and coups, sow hatred, Russophobia, aggressive nationalism, [and] destroy family and traditional values which make us human. They do all that so as to keep dictating and imposing their will, their rights and rules on peoples, which in reality is a system of plundering, violence and suppression.
Remove the references to Russia — as well as the remark about “aggressive nationalism,” which was a clear reference to the mere fact of Ukrainian sovereignty — and those words could have come out of Trump or Orbán’s mouth.
Putin attacks the West because he fears it. Despite all his bluster about Russian power and greatness, he understands how weak his country is relative to NATO and the United States. During a recent visit to an air base, Putin acknowledged how much more the U.S. and other NATO countries spend on defense than Russia and said, “In view of that, are we going to wage a war against NATO? It’s ravings.” Of course, Putin was similarly dismissive of the idea that Russia would invade Ukraine even after he deployed hundreds of thousands of troops to the border. However, his remarks are a reminder that the West’s ability to contain Russia isn’t in doubt — the only question is whether it has the will to do so.
While Putin complains about NATO expansion and presents his “special military operation” as a form of self-defense, the primary reason he’s waging war on Ukraine is his horror at the idea of Kyiv moving out of Russia’s orbit and into the Western sphere of influence.
Beyond Putin’s imperialist fixation on what he describes as the “historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” he has spent many years broadcasting his fear of a Westernized Ukraine. In a speech following the annexation of Crimea a decade ago, Putin said Russia took action in response to a “coup” led by “nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites” in Kyiv. This was Putin’s description of the Maidan Revolution, which was spurred by then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision in late 2013 to reject a political and economic agreement with the EU in favor of closer ties with Russia. After Ukrainians took to the streets in protest, escalating clashes with security forces left over a hundred people dead. On February 22, 2014, the Ukrainian Parliament voted to remove Yanukovych from power.
Because the United States and other Western powers supported the protesters, Putin has long presented the revolution as a coup engineered by outside forces. He couldn’t accept that the revolution was a genuine expression of popular will — Ukrainians no longer wanted to be subordinate to Russia, and they rejected the Moscow-backed Yanukovych after he made it clear that he wouldn’t respect this demand. Ukrainians wanted a stronger relationship with Europe, and they chose the Western model of democracy over the corrupt and stagnant autocracy in Russia — just as so many other former Soviet countries have done since the Cold War.
The West didn’t stop Putin from annexing Crimea a decade ago, and he appears to have assumed that its response would be similarly impotent when he invaded the whole country in 2022. He was wrong. The Western alliance has provided significant and sustained support to the Ukrainian war effort — an effort which revitalized NATO and showed European countries that they must make greater investments in their long-neglected militaries. While Congress has failed to authorize new military assistance for Ukraine in recent months, there are encouraging signs that House Speaker Mike Johnson is finally planning to bring an aid package to the floor.
Despite the sneers from nationalist intellectuals like Peterson, the war in Ukraine really is a war for democracy — and a war in defense of the West. Ukraine is a flawed democracy that has long been hobbled by corruption, but its elections have been remarkably free and fair — and its government recognizes that sweeping reforms are necessary if it ever wants to join the EU and NATO, which the vast majority of Ukrainians now support.
Putin understands the appeal of democracy, which is why fake elections — like the one conducted in Russia last month, in which he received 88 percent of the “vote” — are a key component of his legitimacy. He also recognized that the invasion of Ukraine had to be presented, however implausibly, as a “liberation” and “de-Nazification” of the country (which is particularly absurd in a country with a Jewish president who was elected with 73 percent of the vote).
But Putin has always made it clear that Russia stands outside the liberal democratic alliances, economic arrangements, and institutions that Ukraine wants to join. Outside the West, in other words. As Russia’s envoy to NATO put it in 2009: “Great powers don’t join coalitions, they create coalitions. Russia considers itself a great power.” Putin’s political project is built around the idea that Russia is a counterweight to the liberal democratic West. For Putin, it was unacceptable that Ukraine, a country with such deep cultural, linguistic, and historical ties to Russia, would willingly move toward the political model of his Western enemies. But Ukraine did so for the same reason as all the other former Soviet states that Russia no longer has any claim over. The West simply has far more to offer — in terms of economic opportunity and political freedom — than the decaying kleptocratic dictatorship to the east.
The conservatives who presume to speak on behalf of the West have an impoverished understanding of their own society, history, and political system. Their view of the West mirrors Putin’s view of Russia — it’s all about “traditional” values, religious chauvinism, and nationalism. But the greatness of the West lies in the characteristics Kotkin identified: democracy, political openness, free markets, and the rule of law — all the principles and institutions that have made the West so resilient, free, and prosperous, and added country after country to its sphere of influence. Meanwhile, Russian influence is a shadow of what it once was, and what’s left of it can only be maintained by force and coercion.
There are those who believe defending Western civilization means waging a tireless campaign against wokeness. They claim to be resisting an “invasion” of immigrants and the corruption of globalist elites. They’re willing to make common cause with authoritarian demagogues that trample hard-won democratic norms and institutions because those demagogues happen to hate all the same people they do.
Then there are those in Ukraine who are risking their lives to confront the West’s most lethal enemies directly on the battlefield. They’re resisting a real invasion — an attempt to destroy their democracy and any chance they have to join the West. It’s suggestive that many of the loudest self-appointed defenders of Western civilization can’t seem to figure out who their friends and enemies are in this fight.
Like many conservative intellectuals and politicians, Buchanan argues that immigration is to blame for the West’s terminal decline. He describes the United States as a pit of degeneracy which abandoned its “cradle faith” and deserves the “title the ayatollah bestowed upon us, ‘The Great Satan.’” He’s an isolationist who believes Western countries shouldn’t concern themselves with lofty notions about defending democracy, human rights, and liberal values around the world. He’s an admirer of Charles Lindbergh’s America First movement, which opposed the United States’ involvement in World War II (and was marred by anti-Semitism).
The motto of Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign was “America First,” and he recognizes that his connection to the 45th president isn’t just rhetorical. After Trump was elected, Buchanan said, “The ideas made it, but I didn’t.” From Trump’s relentless antipathy toward America’s allies to his economic nationalism to his attacks on immigrants, Buchanan’s nativist and isolationist ideas are indeed at the heart of today’s GOP.
I only have two quibbles. First, “wokeness” is truly a poison which stands squarely against Enlightenment liberalism and seeks to divide rather than unify. It is worth opposing, but as a matter of reasonable degree, not obsession. Second, a country without enforceable borders is not a country, and as a matter of history it still takes a country to be a democracy. That said, we are a nation of immigrants, and we will continue to be for the foreseeable future, if not forever. We just need reasonable and enforceable immigration rules, which our Solons refuse to give us in order to continue using the issue as a political football.
Matt Walsh, Jordan Peterson and Rod Dreher are not serious people and shouldn’t be used as proxies of conservative defenders of the west. I think the author chose Matt Walsh and Jordan Peterson because they are some of the louder voices. Conservatives like Jonah Goldberg, Matt Continetti, or Ramesh Ponnuru can make much better arguments to defend the west.