Almost 100 years have passed since the publication in 1923 of the book “The Decline of the West” by the German philosopher and historian Osvaldo Spengler. In this work it was raised for the first time that our civilization is approaching a collapse. Years later his colleague Arnold Toynbee agreed with Spengler that our Western civilization is facing, at least the prelude to, a collapse. The best example of this is right before our eyes in the dramatic situation that the US is going through today. This once great nation, like no other, has dominated our world culturally, economically, technologically, militarily since the time of the Roman Empire. The parallels of the path towards the decline of both empires is really surprising and we should review the texts of scholars on the subject so as not to make the same mistakes. There are several common elements of the decline of Rome and the US Among them we highlight three broad categories: social decline, cultural decline and moral decline. In the social decadence we would include the lack of economic discipline, the excessive taxes and an exorbitant bureaucracy. In Rome it is claimed that there were more civil servants than people who regularly paid their taxes. And in the US, civil servants went from 600,000 in 1930 to 16 million in 1999. Then we would have cultural decline and moral decline, which go quite closely together. Here we go to an illustrious father of the North American country, Edward Gibbon, who a year before the ratification of the US Constitution, had published his book “The history of the Decline of the Roman Empire”, a text that the first president from the United States had read very carefully. There Gibbon preached that the new nation should be very careful not to lose civic virtue and individual morality, key reasons, according to him, for the fall of Rome. He shared his philosophy at that time with the English statesman Edmund Burke, who in a letter to a Bristol bailiff wrote: “All who have written on governments are unanimous that, among a generally corrupt people, liberty cannot exist for a long time”. Gibbon, Burke and Washington believed that a high morality and a sincere religion were essential for the safeguarding of a society. Regarding the cultural and moral decadence that Rome faced and the United States faces today, several historians agree that the family collapse in Rome also brought the fall of the Empire, and today it is evidently and to a large extent causing the crude moral and cultural debacle of the North Americans, which weakens the country even more. In the case of the United States, we must mention the evil influence that cultural Marxism has had in universities, schools and the media, mainly since the Obama administrations, based on theories imported from Europe of the Marxists of the Frankfurt School. Under the current Biden Administration it is evident that the moral, economic, politics has increased dramatically. Galloping inflation, the impoverished population with cultural and moral decisions foreign to the majority of citizens make the general feeling of North Americans currently gloomy, disappointing and that they seek a change as soon as possible. A presidency headed by a politician with serious cognitive problems and tainted by serious corruption, mainly by his son Hunter Biden, who is protected by high-ranking authorities from the Department of Justice, the FBI and the CIA, is a major scandal for a functioning democracy. The impoverished American population knows it and the latest statistics reflect it. According to Gallup, 50% of the population believes that the state of moral values in America is very poor.
And how can this once great country get out of the ideological nightmare that has now invaded it? The renowned British magazine The Economist, in a special report on the index of democracy in the world, places the US among the countries that have only an “imperfect democracy”, while in our continent they appear as “imperfect democracies”. full “Uruguay and Costa Rica. A real shame for the once lighthouse that inspired us.
In the past, the United States has shown that its people have the moral strength to emerge victorious from crises such as this one, and the beginning of its moral, cultural and economic reconstruction could very well be marked by the next mid-term elections, on the 8th of november. Elections that are traditionally held every two years through which the House of Representatives and a third of the Senate are elected and completely renewed. In addition, 36 of the 50 governors that the country has will be elected. They are elections that are also considered a kind of plebiscite on the management of the current ruler, in this case Joe Biden. Given the chaotic situation that the nation is going through, it is considered that the Republican Party is likely to win the majority of the deputies, perhaps he will also achieve a narrow majority in the Senate. Such a victory could begin to correct many of the ideological excesses of the Biden Administration, which are leading the country to a moral, cultural and economic decline.
José Antonio Friedl Zapata
Political Scientist – Latin Americanist – Independent Journalist
“The opinions published here are the sole responsibility of their author.”
