Outsuffering the Woke Western Alliance

The little-noted but principal effect of the ongoing world crisis has been to challenge woke-progressive political agendas throughout the world. As Roger Cohen recently wrote in the New York Times, a crisis has derailed the Great Reset:

The Covid-19 pandemic, invasion of Ukraine, trend toward autocracy and economic inequalities challenge the World Economic Forum’s relevance.... The scramble in Europe for new sources of energy to replace Russian oil and gas, in societies under acute economic pressures, does not always favor expensive renewables or the conversion to 'environmental capitalism' that so many business leaders in Davos have publicly embraced.

The End of History vacation cruise has been suddenly canceled. The expanding scope of the war in Ukraine will force Joe Biden to either let go of his Woke agenda or risk losing the conflict. Until recently there seemed hope he could hang on to both, but when China indirectly joined the fray Washington's calculus was upset. Beijing's offer to broker a negotiated settlement to the war in Ukraine, has both divided the West and threatened to extend Russia's ability to hold out. China has become the arsenal of autocracy, allowing the Kremlin to prolong the war.

Friends in low places.

This Chinese strategic challenge should not be confused with Russia's inability to inflict tactical attrition. Tactically, Russia may be weak and is losing men and equipment at an unsustainable rate. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, "Russia suffered more combat deaths in Ukraine in the first year of the war than in all of its wars since World War II combined." Moreover the Kremlin is going broke. Russia will run out of money in 2024, one oligarch warned. But Russia and China may figure they can "outsuffer" the West if by that they can make the New World Order unaffordable in domestic political terms.

The warning signs that so alarmed Roger Cohen are flashing everywhere. Polls show that limiting economic damage due to the war has become a greater priority to Americans in 2023 than it was in 2022. According to a new survey, some 58 percent of Germans fear their country could be drawn into the war, while 69 percent believe the economy will deteriorate further. Politico summarized both trends by noting that:

Biden will host German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the White House... in what will be, on the surface, another display of Western unity with Ukraine as it repels Russia’s punishing invasion... The show of solidarity comes against a backdrop of growing strain as the trans-Atlantic alliance works to remain in lockstep while grappling with the fact that the war has no end in sight.

Perhaps nowhere are the strains between the new reality and the Woke agenda more evident than in the matter of "climate change." David Gelles at the NYT writes, "beyond the enormous human suffering and catastrophic damage inflicted on Ukraine, its people and its cities, one of the war’s most profound impacts has been on global energy markets, and by extension, on the global fight against climate change... coal has had a resurgence, subduing hopes for meeting goals to rein in greenhouse gas emissions."

Can't afford one? Too bad.

The strain of higher energy prices is heightening tensions between the rich and poor voters. As Scientific American notes, "Russia’s war in Ukraine has altered global energy markets, accelerating the green transition in wealthy parts of Europe and forcing poorer countries to fall back on dirtier fuels like coal." News that wealthy Australians are buying solar panels while the poor struggle to pay their power bills sums up the class effect of Green policies that Joel Kotkin called a "neo-feudal war on the people."

"Can't afford the gas prices? Buy a Tesla!" works about as well as an electoral slogan as "Let them eat cake!"

But nowhere is the effect of the new Cold War potentially to be more keenly felt than upon DEI policies. The first Cold War was set off a competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in every conceivable arena – even space — that forced the United States to call on even politically incorrect Nazi rocket scientists to meet. "Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from the former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945 and 1959... Many of these personnel were former members and some were former leaders of the Nazi Party."

The technological challenge now posed by China to Biden's crumbling "new world order" now equals or exceeds the former Soviet threat. "Technology is at the center of the emerging competition between the United States and China, with far-reaching consequences for democratic societies. At stake in this competition are the prestige and reach of liberal values, as well as the economic competitiveness and national security of the United States and its allies and partners," writes Brookings.

In the face of this challenge the U.S. cannot afford to lumber the hard sciences with racial and sexual identity quotas so favored by the progressive constituency. The Supreme Court's reported resistance to Biden's proposal to forgive half a trillion dollars in student debt may reveal a new reluctance to bail out bad choices. "Let’s not forget that the student debt problem is built on a foundation of terrible major choices. Bailing generations out of those bad choices will mean more bad choices, tuition hikes, and terrible consequences for America," said one investor. One thing America cannot afford to do in a Second Cold War is throw away money any more.

Now on sale.

Before 2019 there may have seemed enough money for projects like DEI, the Great Reset, "Climate Change," Pronoun Revolutions, and the world order. It seemed like the whole landscape lay before the heights of Davos just waiting for them to remake. But the pandemic, economic crisis, war and Cold War that followed rang down the curtain on that fleeting scene and reimposed hard choice.

By the end even the politicians realize there'll be a lot less public desire to eat bugs, live in dark unheated ruins and make out with bearded ladies after privation brings the demand for basics back. China and Russia need not "outsuffer" the West in a military sense, only in a political one as hardship melts the Western progressive vision away.

Against the Great Reset: 'The War on Capitalism'

Continuing today, and for the next 11 weeks, The Pipeline will present excerpts from each of the essays contained in Against the Great Reset: 18 Theses Contra the New World Order, to be published on October 18 by Bombardier Books and distributed by Simon and Schuster, and available now for pre-order at the links.

Part III: THE ECONOMIC

Excerpt from "The War on Capitalism" by Conrad Black

As other contributors have mentioned, if any place could be identified as the birthplace of the Great Reset, it must be the small, drab, German-Swiss Alpine town of Davos, a center of contemporary anticapitalism, or at least radically altered and almost deracinated capitalism, and site of an ever-expanding international conference. (It grew exponentially and has spawned regional versions.)

I attended there for many years by invitation in order to ascertain what my analogues in the media business around the world were doing. The hotels are spartan and the town is very inaccessible. When I first attended nearly forty years ago, the Davos founder, the earnest and amiable Klaus Schwab, had ingeniously roped in a number of contemporary heads of government and captains of industry and leaders in some other fields and had sold huge numbers of admissions to well-to-do courtiers and groupies from all over the world, attracted by the merits of “networking.”

Davos, and its regional outgrowths across the world gradually came to express a collective opinion of the virtues of universal supranationalism (the Davos variety of globalism): social democracy; environmental alarmism; the desirability of having a nonpolitical international bureaucracy; a public sector-reflected image of the Davos hierarchy itself (and in fact, in many cases, preferably the very same individuals); and gently enforcing a soft Orwellian conformity on everybody. It must be said that many of the sessions were interesting, and it was a unique experience being amid so many people capable in their fields, and this certainly includes almost all of those who were revenue-producing, “networking” spectators and not really participants.

Davos is for democracy, as long as everyone votes for increased public sector authority in pursuit of green egalitarianism and the homogenization of all peoples in a conformist world. It was the unfolding default page of the European view: capitalism was to be overborne by economic redistribution; all concepts of public policy were to be divorced from any sense of nationality, history, spirituality, or spontaneity and redirected to defined goals of imposed uniformity under the escutcheon of ecological survival and the reduction of abrasive distinctions between groups of people—such obsolescent concepts as nationality or sectarianism. (My hotel concierge stared at me as if I had two heads when I inquired where the nearest Roman Catholic Church was and was even more astonished when I trod two miles through the snow there and back to receive its moral succour; the parishioners appeared a sturdy group.)

The Covid-19 pandemic caused Davos Man to break out of his Alpine closet and reveal the secret but suspected plan: the whole world is to become a giant Davos—humorless, style-less, unspontaneous, unrelievedly materialistic, as long as the accumulation and application of capital is directed by the little Alpine gnomes of Davos and their underlings and disciples. This is a slight overstatement, and Klaus Schwab would earnestly dispute that the purpose of Davos is so comprehensive, anesthetizing, and uniform. His dissent would be sincere, but unjustified: the Great Reset, a Davos expression, is massively ambitious and is largely based on the seizure and hijacking of recognizable capitalism, in fact and in theory.

On sale Oct. 18: pre-order now at the links above.

There has indeed in the last thirty years been a war on capitalism conducted from the commanding heights of the academy and very broadly assisted by the Western media that has been gathering strength as part of the great comeback of the Left following their bone-crushing defeat in the Cold War. As international communism collapsed and the Soviet Union disintegrated, it was difficult to imagine that the Left could mount any sort of comeback anytime soon. We underestimated both the Left’s imperishability and its gift for improvisation, a talent that their many decades of predictable and robotic repetitiveness entirely concealed.

By some combination of intuition and tactical cunning, the hard Left crowded aboard the environmental bandwagon. Until the nineties, the environment was the concern of authentic if sometimes tedious conservationists such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, and despite their harassment of nuclear testing by the French around Tahiti and their demonstrations against goodwill visits of American aircraft carriers, they were sincere people making an arguable case.

Suddenly they were overwhelmed by the hard Left imposing a new agenda of strangulation of capitalism by coming through the rear windows and attacking practically every industry as a threat to human survival for ecological reasons. We can only salute their ingenuity and persistence as they co-opted susceptible members of the scientific community to produce asinine arguments like Dr. Michael E. Mann’s infamous conjuration of the “hockey stick,” which held that global warming proceeded horizontally for a long time and then suddenly shot upwards at a forty-five-degree angle as a hockey stick does when the stem reaches the blade. This and spurious calculations based on reading the rings on the trunks of trees and other superstitious opinations won the approval of a huge gallery of gullible, faddish, and cynical people. They made an unlikely coalition: Al Gore became a centimillionaire on this issue; the Prince of Wales mounted a great hobby horse that he still rides, and the most vocal airheads of Hollywood have ben howling like banshees on the issue for decades.

Aggressive green parties arose in many countries and harvested the naiveté and narcissistic ambition for attention of large numbers of people championing antipollution causes that in the abstract no reasonable person could oppose. They were allied or infested with the old left and skulked forward, ideological wolves in paradisiacal lambs’ clothing. Germany has no petroleum resources but had built an extensive and absolutely safe nuclear power capacity, but the aggressive German Green Party came snorting out of the Teutonic forests like a Wagnerian monster and bullied Angela Merkel’s government into abandoning the entire nuclear program. Germany in effect became an energy vassal state of Russia through the Nord Stream pipeline, the completion of which the Biden administration facilitated in withdrawing the Trump administration’s intervention to prevent the pipeline’s completion. With the Ukraine war, it is again suspended. Thus the second most important country in the Western Alliance is almost detached from it, all by the apparently innocuous and meliorist actions of Germany’s peppiest environmentalists, and with the ultimate complicity of the current U.S. president.

Even the outgoing prime minister, Boris Johnson, an authentic if idiosyncratic Tory, has bought into the global warming danger, though to those who know him, it is hard to imagine that he believes a word of it. The objective evidence is that to the extent that it can be measured at all, the overall temperature of the world has risen by one degree centigrade in the last hundred years and will rise by another centigrade degree this century. This is not in itself harmful, and it is not outside normal historic climate cycles. There has been no rise in the in the world’s temperature in this century, and the whole task of gauging the world’s temperature including thermometers at various depths of the oceans and all over the surface of the earth is quite imprecise.

In the future, historians will look with astonishment on the speed and zeal with which the post-Cold War world burdened itself with bone-cracking expenses and severe social costs radically altering its economy to avoid a rise in the world’s temperature that we have no reason to believe will occur on anything like the scale the alarmists have been wailing about. And if it does occur in any measure, we still have no scientifically serious evidence that it is anthropogenically caused. It will be seen as something like the alleged seventeenth-century Dutch tulip hysteria, which had people paying the equivalent of $25,000 for a single potted bulb.

Rarely in the Cold War did capitalism’s Marxist enemies do anything that earned the respect one gives a gallant or brilliant adversary. In these initiatives, our enemies leapt from the jaws of bitter and total defeat, hijacked the careening gadfly of esoteric conservationism, and transformed it surreptitiously into a well-camouflaged battering ram that has inflicted immense costs and opprobrium on the corporate world and great sadness and inconvenience on the laboring proletariat on whose behalf the Marxist Left has supposedly been crusading these past 150 years.

A companion unpleasant surprise to the ingenuity and resilience of the international Far Left in its environmental assault upon capitalism has been the venality, cowardice, and invertebrate tactical stupidity of much of the corporate world. We find oil companies putting up slick television advertising praising and purporting to be part of the heroic march to a fossil fuel-free world. As corporations fell over themselves agreeing that the U.S. state of Georgia’s eminently sensible voting reform statute, passed in the wake of the disputed presidential election of 2020, was a reversion to Jim Crow if not slavery itself and demanded that Georgia be punished by moving the Major League Baseball All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver (where restrictions to ensure verifiable voting are more severe than in Georgia), the leadership of corporate America was largely revealed, once again, at least in public policy terms, as contemptibly enfeebled and morally bankrupt...

Next week: an excerpt from "Socialism and the Great Reset" by Michael Anton.