When in 1787 Benjamin Franklin emerged from the final day of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, a woman in the waiting crowd asked, “What do we have, doctor, a monarchy or a republic?” He famously replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”
Implicit in Franklin’s admonitory response was the recognition that to create a novel polity perched precariously on the edge of a continent-size wilderness was one thing; to nurture and preserve it was a different — and daunting — kind of challenge altogether.
Yet from those tentative and fragile beginnings, our fledgling republic would grow to become in less than two centuries a globe-girdling military and economic colossus and the principal architect of a rules-based international order that provided a stable framework for an era that would witness unprecedented advances in the material well-being of peoples around the world.
However, today that global order faces a growing series of interlocking crises so grave in nature as to potentially threaten its existence.
Indicative of this danger is a recent column in the Wall Street Journal by Walter Russell Mead, entitled “The Rules-Based International Order is Quietly Disintegrating,” in which he states that “the core institutions and initiatives of the American-led world order and the governments that back them are growing progressively weaker and less relevant.”
By way of illustration, Mead describes tottering pillars of world order, including an increasingly paralyzed United Nations, an irrelevant World Court, a largely toothless World Trade Organization, disappearing arms control efforts, an apparent stalemate in the Ukraine war, and rapidly spreading chaos in sub-Saharan Africa.
[Editor’s Note: This post was written before the Hamas terror attack in Israel on October 7. Mead spells out how that attack further bolsters the above thesis in his 10/15 WSJ piece, “A Middle East Wakeup Call.”]
He concludes that the Western defenders of that order, “undermined by political decadence and institutional decay from within,” are facing an existential crisis unlike anything seen since the 1930s.
Further exploring the theme of internal decadence and decay is another Wall Street Journal article, “The New Moral Order is Already Crumbling,” by Gerard Baker. He describes a lethal three-pronged assault on the values, history and moral foundations of Western civilization, conducted over the past 30 years by left-leaning elements in some of society’s institutions: the media, academia and nongovernmental organizations.
The first prong of this broad-based attack, in Baker’s view, is the bold assertion of the “ethical primacy of global obligation over national self-interest,” best exemplified by the “demographic tsunami” that is currently inundating such places as the Italian islands of Lampedusa or the border towns of Texas, with attendant demands that receiving countries must prioritize the needs of new arrivals over those of their citizens.
The second element is a belief in “climate catastrophism,” in which the affluent countries of the West must repent of their “energy-consuming sinfulness” through “massive sacrifice of economic progress.”
The final element requires the “wholesale cultural self-cancellation” of the values, virtues and achievements of traditional civilization and replaces them with a new cultural hierarchy that demands submission to “comprehensive social and economic reparations.”
While acknowledging the immense damage done to Western economies, self-confidence and social cohesion by three decades of left-wing iconoclasm, Baker suggests that efforts to impose a “new moral order” and re-engineer society to conform with thea Left’s ideological imperatives are failing because of internal contradictions, self-evident economic lunacy, and a growing revulsion and resistance on the part of many whose beliefs and material well-being are under assault.
Baker cites an example of this grassroots revolt in the recent national uproar over the British government’s commitment to phase out gasoline-powered vehicles and achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, which caused Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to make a humiliating retreat from this unrealistic timetable. That, in turn, elicited criticism from climate activists worldwide.
Another example is the resistance by some in Australia to a forthcoming national referendum asking the Australian people to endorse a redesign of their constitution that would create a branch of government for the purpose of advising lawmakers on the needs of Indigenous peoples.
It is clear that the phenomenon of decline is not a purely American syndrome but, rather, one that is much wider. The oceans that Ben Franklin and his contemporaries believed would insulate the New World from the calamities of the Old World no longer suffice in that regard. What is unclear is whether the emerging awareness and resistance will be sufficient to reverse or even check the creeping cultural changes that may serve the ideological elites but materially and spiritually impoverish everyone else.
William Moloney is a senior fellow at Colorado Christian University’s Centennial Institute who studied history and politics at Oxford and the University of London and received his doctorate at Harvard University.