My Take | What’s wrong with America today? Read Oswald Spengler
Democratic decay is not a bug but a feature in ‘The Decline of the West’ of a system that progressively favours naked power and dominance over consensus and diplomacy
“The US is tending to impose deals and threats even on its allies.”
– Shigeru Ishiba, leading Liberal Democratic Party politician and likely next Japanese prime minister
When it comes to the last global financial crisis, many Chinese including myself think it signalled Western, especially American, decline.
But while many believe “decline” means failing influence and power, it can have the opposite effect, at least on the surface and for the time being.
According to German philosopher and historian Oswald Spengler, author of The Decline of the West, decline in its civilisational sense actually translates into greater militarism and what he calls money politics, and therefore, ever growing naked power and undue influence, at least for a time. That seems to be exactly what the United States is undergoing as it increasingly exercises economic coercion and military dominance over allies and enemies alike.
Paradoxically, in terms of the quality of leadership and its exercise of power, “decline” can translate into even greater “quantity” of power, as in its ever expanding abuses despite it once being more wisely exercised with discrimination and restraint.
Spenglerian decline goes hand in hand with what Aristotle, more than 2,000 years ago, considered the key problem of political organisation – regime or constitutional decay.
