The Z-Man has a good post on the inertia of the more traditional elite and their inability to recognize or do anything about the problems that their neo-liberal world order cannot address:
The first time I did any serious reading of the Roman Empire, the thought that was always with me was why they never thought to downsize. The cost of conquering Gaul was relatively low, so it made sense to do it, but the cost of hanging onto it never seemed to make sense. The same was even more obvious with Britania. By the third century, it should have been obvious, at least from our perspective, that the Empire needed to be downsized and re-organized. Yet, that was never a part of the logic of the Empire.
I had a similar thought when reading about the Thirty Years War the first time. The Habsburgs were exhausting themselves trying to preserve something that was probably not worth the effort. Of course, we look at these things in hindsight and from a modern perspective. It seems silly to care about the local religious practices, but important people did care about these things and still do. Still, when I read about the rise and fall of empires, I end up thinking through the alternatives, wondering why they were never considered.
The answer is probably the simplest one. People, even the shrewdest rulers, live and plan within their allotted time on earth. Even the Chinese, who take the very long view of things, act in the moment most of the time. People can think about how their actions will impact their descendants a century from now, but it will never have the same emotional tug as how their contemporaries think of them in the moment. That’s just human nature. Most men will trade the applause of today for being remembered long after he is dead.
That’s probably what we are seeing with the current struggles of Western elites to keep this house of cards together. The “liberal international order” is the perfection of a solution to problems of the long gone past. From the French Revolution through the Cold War, the great challenge in the West was over borders, economics and conflict resolution. After a long bloody series of experiments, the West finally figured out something that worked to keep the peace, maximize material wealth and settle disputes in an orderly fashion.
The trouble is, the current arrangements are not answering the questions of this age. In fact, they appear to be exacerbating the problems that face the West.
This isn’t the whole problem, of course. But it does explain some of the mysterious ineptitude and ineffectual handwaving of the governing elites to even begin to do anything about the problems that are so readily apparent to so many people throughout the West.
Unlike the Romans, however, the West is also burdened by hostile interests, some of them foreign, some of them not, which actively want to destroy all three of the pillars of the West, Christianity, the Graeco-Roman legacy, and the European races.
