Degringolade: How Western Decline Could Lead To Western Conflict

MEMRI Daily Brief No. 755

We live in an age where doomsayers and techno-optimists fight to control the narrative. Despite that ongoing struggle, polls show that majorities in both North America and Europe tend to be pessimistic about the future. There is great uncertainty about what is to come but also a palpable sense that it will likely be worse than today, just as today is worse than a generation ago.

On April 6, 2025, UK Prime Minister Starmer said that “the world has changed, globalization is over and we are now in a new era.” That was mostly about the question of tariffs but the sense that “everything is wrong, everything is changing” transcends trade and commerce. Because the political vertigo is quite real, it is easy to say that catastrophe beckons, that we are on the edge of a precipice. Much more likely, in my view, is less a spectacular collapse than a steady, relatively slow decline into that new era emerging before our eyes.

Change is coming to the West. The old liberal order seems exhausted. The white collar “new class” described by Christopher Lasch that ruled through access to knowledge and specialized expertise seems to be fracturing. Overeducated and underemployed masses is a recipe for instability. What are the factors that will play into an unstable conflictive future world in the West and what could that conflict look like? Three key elements will feed into such a potential conflict, one has already appeared and the two others seem to be on the way, although the time of their full arrival is not completely clear.

The first element is extreme political polarization and that is clearly happening in both North America and Europe. Each election is presented as a dire, once-in-a-lifetime test, the possibility of the other side winning is described in apocalyptic terms. Leave aside angst about Trump. Just look at the white heat rhetoric that accompanied the election of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni in September 2022. The rhetoric today – mostly about populist right-wing parties winning an election – is even more extreme. Polarization also means the hollowing out of the supposed “center” and that seems to be happening both politically and economically.

The second element, clearly on its way if not fully here, is a deep-seated sense among key parts of the electorate that, no matter the election results, democratic results will be blocked by the permanent regime already and always in power. This could go either way but today in the West that “permanent regime” is the mostly left-leaning conglomeration of unelected bureaucracy, lawfare, and activism. In Europe we see this in efforts to block immigration control by democratically elected parties despite polls showing that a majority of Europeans want less migration into their countries, both legal and illegal. We see the same situation playing out in the United States with millions being able to enter (some might say “invade”) while ignoring the rule of law and then the courts and activist community blocking their removal, wrapping themselves in the same rule of law that was flouted by foreign migrants and their enablers in the first place.

We see it in attempts at lawfare against candidate Trump in 2023-2024 and today against European rightist candidates in Romania, France, Spain, and Germany. Even if they do get elected, the broadly accepted goal is to quarantine such unacceptable winners from power sharing, whether at the national level or in the EU bureaucracy. In such scenarios, this looks more and more like a type of authoritarian “managed democracy” rather than the real sort. Meanwhile the EU Parliament actually elected a violent hammer-wielding leftist, Ilaria Salis, as a member in 2024.

Should voters fully internalize that elections do not matter, that “the fix is in no matter what,” they will — many of them — become politically apathetic. But others will look to non-democratic means at projecting power, including direct action and open violence.

The third element in this toxic brew that could lead to Western domestic violence is economic crisis. We are not quite there yet, but how it may come about – through some combination of the debt bomb, population decline, and massive job losses as a result of AI – seems relatively clear.

This financial jolt would not be something like the ordinary boom and bust of the economic cycle but rather something more like the 2008 credit crisis that would both further discredit government institutions and cause big jumps in unemployment. The consensus today is that while banks may be less exposed than they were in 2008, other sectors of the economy, in the so-called “shadow financial system,” are less protected and we are much more in debt, less able to bail out failing economic sectors, than we were 17 years ago.

So, what sort of instability could a perfect storm of political polarization, post-democratic disgust, and deep economic crisis lead to in the near future? I do not expect a “real” civil war or fantastical Mad Max scenario caused by a total breakdown of institutions. It could be a future of greater “control” and repression. Part of the result would be a deepening version of the present, as desperate and cynical populations pick over the carcass of an imploding economy and government.

But in addition to a repressive future, a situation of low-intensity conflict, akin to say, Latin America’s dirty wars or Italy’s “Years of Lead” from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, with far-left and far-right direct action against each other and against the state, also seems possible.

While the Biden Administration and liberal media talked much of right-wing or supposedly Christian nationalist “domestic violence,” actual leftist violence has spiked, and been lionized, in recent months. At least one of Trump’s attempted assassins leaned left as did the pro-Palestine arsonist who in April 2025 set alight the Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania’s mansion right after a Passover Seder. The vandalism and arson against Tesla cars and car dealerships are broadly left-wing as is most of the turmoil on many a university campus since October 2023. Luigi Mangione, the American assassin of an insurance company executive in December 2024 has become a leftist icon, and maybe even a progressive sex symbol. Here is an image from Spain combining local football team colors, “Free Palestine” and Mangione.

A further accelerant in such a violent domestic state of play is the ethnic or religious dimension. Political polarization, anti-system disgust and economic crisis are not directly connected to the great controversy in the West over migration, but the ethnic/religious element found there can serve as an additional spark or destabilizing element in an already volatile situation. Lebanon in the 1970s saw polarization and violence for a variety of local reasons, but the Palestinian factor was a key element in making a volatile situation even worse, turning bitter, violent politics into outright armed conflict. With migrant – especially Muslim – populations increasingly becoming key constituencies for leftist political parties in France, Germany and the United Kingdom, the ethnic factor is almost built into the equation, in a way to further destabilize unstable situations along ethnic lines.

We have already seen, in several European countries, crackdowns on dissent by locals for fear that it would incite the Muslim migrant population. These are efforts that may win momentary calm but can also erode trust in the political system and encourage a type of forced “retribalization” in societies that prided themselves on their liberal tolerance. The political combustibles are already in place or well on their way. The question remains whether statesmen in the West can weather or, even better, avoid a coming storm.

AUTHOR

Alberto M. Fernandez

Vice President of MEMRI.

EDITORS NOTE: This MEMRI column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.