The neutral-to-positive reception given President Trump’s video address to the Davos conference last week confirms that the long tyranny of wokeness, political correctness, affirmative action, aggressive restraints in the name of combating climate change, and militancy ostensibly on behalf of diversity, equity, and inclusion, is finally crumbling into dust, where many of us have been claiming it belonged.
Historians of the future, but starting quite soon, will make learned inquiries into why Western society suddenly collapsed in a temporary but profound orgy of self-criticism frequently descending to collective self-hate.
By high standards of conduct, we are all sinners, and all sane and reasonable people sometimes feel guilty about their own conduct and the conduct of collective entities where they are members, such as their country or occupation, or the organization that employs them. In general, Western civilization, as it has developed since World War II, has operated on a consensus that the preferable political system is a democratic state in which governments are chosen in free elections, and the population enjoys freedom of expression, assembly, and religious, political, and other beliefs.
In the postwar period, those beliefs were concentrated in the countries that described themselves collectively as the Free World, which was challenged both competitively and at times by infiltration and threat of aggression by totalitarian communism, in particular by the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. The Free World was led by the United States as the world’s greatest economic and military power. In the American strategy of containment, elaborated in the years following World War II after the Soviet violation of the agreements over liberated Europe that had been made by the U.S., British, and Soviet leaders (Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin), the Western Alliance pledged military resistance to aggression but avoidance of the initiation of aggression against the Soviet Bloc or China.
The Free World, in fact, included a good many despotisms, such as Spain, Portugal, much of Latin America, South Korea, at times Greece and Turkey, and many countries in Africa and the Middle East. But most of the countries named, and many others, did in fact become authentic democracies in the course of the Cold War. China, meanwhile, detached itself altogether from the Soviet Bloc and, in economic terms, ceased to pretend to be a communist country though it continues as a totalitarian dictatorship.
By Conrad Black
