Emmanuel Todd asks ‘What is the West?’ Protestants and professors won't like his answer

This year’s French-only bombshell ‘The Defeat of the West’ labels the roots of Western failure

(This is the 3rd part in a multipart series on Emmanuel Todd’s political it-book of the moment The Defeat of the West (La Defaite de l’Occident). Please forgive the slight delay: I had a short vacation and then a move to Mexico City to cover their upcoming elections and learn more about Latin America.)

In Chapter 1, “Russian Stability”, Todd explained why Russia has thrived despite the Western imposition of Iran-level sanctions: essentially, Todd asserts, Western analysts didn’t want to admit that all the readily available data on Russia’s economy, society and leadership was as good as it obviously was. In order to follow the actual thread of the data and conclusions he presented, I suggested renaming Chapter 2 from “The Ukrainian Enigma” to the more honest “The Ukrainian Suicide”, and the article analysing that excellent chapter is found here. In Chapter 3 Todd turned to Eastern Europe and explained with one word the baffling and swift historical shift from a pro-socialist Bloc allied with Moscow into a Russophobic, liberal-loving, 2nd-class citizen of Western society: “inauthentic”. The article analysing that chapter is found here, and it’s worth reading because I think we often forget that no other global region has undergone as (counter-)revolutionary a change in the last 35 years.

Chapter 4, which this article analyses, is titled “What is the West”, and Todd’s answer explains why a rich Parisian in high finance I was talking with last month told me, “Nobody likes Emmanuel Todd.” That’s true, but Todd is too big to ignore - in March even The New York Times had to write an article on the popularity of this new book, and it was almost completely laudatory.

It’s a very good book and I’m happy to provide the first serious English analysis of it, because it’s interesting to know what Todd’s conclusion: “The West, for its part, is not stable; it is even sick.” The latter adjective is a bit value-laden - Todd admits it is a “cruel truth” - I would have used “dysfunctional”.

The stability which the “unipolar” world assumed would last until the “end of history” has been upended since the pan-European project went on-line in 2009, and its domestic dysfunction has been undeniable since the Great Financial Crisis of 2007. While (not very observant) people over 50 may believe the West is as rock-solid in its self-confidence as in 1992, that’s probably only because they aren’t listening to their struggling children and grandchildren. The West is not stable - it is even sick.

I don’t agree with Todd when he writes that, because of three centuries of dominance, “its crisis is the world’s crisis” - I would say that its crisis is the world’s annoyance and hindrance, but also its deliverance (from the evils of Western-style capitalism) and its reward (for resisting imperialism).

It is with this chapter that Todd, who say he’s proudly Breton, French and Jewish, reveals his book to be one that is decidedly pro-religion. Indeed, it’s a huge, surprising turn which is much to my happiness.

It’s as if Todd wants to say what Iranians say: Western Liberal Democracy has left no place for morality in public policy, and thus Iran’s adding in of some religion (via what I refer to as the “Supreme Leader branch”) to their anti-monarchical legislative, judicial and executive branches is a progressive, revolutionary advancement.

(Iran’s President Ibrahim Raisi and others were just killed in a helicopter crash. I’m sad, but I am not worried. The “Supreme Leader branch” charts policy and direction in Iran, while the executive branch is charged with putting it into practice. Iran’s revolutionary (new) social structure is sophisticated, resilient and deep - this tragedy will cause no crisis, nor affect any changes to any major policy of Iran’s and Iran will soon elect another servant as dedicated to public service as the constantly-travelling Raisi truly was, Inshallah.)

Iran is obviously a personal focus of mine, but isn’t everybody desirous of morality in their nation’s public policy? Objectively, it’s fair to call socialism a religion - one without a cosmology but with a huge amount of society-centred morality. Liberalism, which is also faith-based (in the “invisible hand” guiding free markets), also lacks a cosmology and has an individual-entered morality. This greatly helps explain why socialist-secular countries like China have such very different trajectories and outcomes than liberal-secular countries like in the West, no?

Indeed, I cannot stress enough: this is a book which, while not promoting a Western velayat-e-faqih - a governmental guardianship by Islamic jurists - whatsoever, laments the loss of the West’s religion, and he has some very interesting concepts based around this idea. To quote The Times: “But parts of his case involve deeper, long-term cultural shifts perennially associated with prosperity. We used to call them decadence.” Indeed, the West used to actually talk about “decadence”, but when Todd is citing the worse infant-mortality statistics - which he used in 1976 to predict the collapse of the USSR - in the US compared to Russia we are reminded that decadence is not a joke - it’s often deadly.

Isn’t ‘the West’ essentially a Protestant conception? Todd says it was good while it lasted

Probably the most important reason for Todd’s declaration of The Defeat of the West is the petering-out of Protestantism.

Before some get triggered by this un-PC accusation of Protestantism’s collapse as the cause for Western ills, first learn that others will be triggered by his very high esteem for it: “At the origin of Western development we don’t find the market, industries or technology, but, as I announced in my introduction, a particular religion - Protestantism.” This is not a popular idea anymore. However, it was good enough for Max Weber, who put the “Protestant work ethic” - via Luther and Calvin - at the center of his influential works.

What is Protestantism? I say it is something both profoundly right and profoundly wrong. It was profoundly right to criticise a Vatican which was selling off places in heaven to sinners via infamous “indulgences”, and it is profoundly right that the relationship between God and man needs no intermediary, and it is profoundly that man needs a personal relationship with God. Protestantism is also incredibly wrong in its idea of a predestined “elect”, and the dismissal of the importance of a religious community as an essential part of worship, and the idea that faith alone is the key to salvation and not works. Todd only focuses on its fault of arrogant predestination.

I think it’s fair to ask: Were Northern Europeans stuck up and conceited before Protestantism, or did Protestantism convince them out of nowhere that they were the “elect”? Was the chicken or the egg first (and arrogant pride is the primary sin of humans, after all) but ignore my limited sociology and focus on Todd’s assertion that the failures of Protestantism have produced the West’s current instability:

“If, as he (Weber) claims, Protestantism was indeed the matrix of the West's take-off, its death today is the cause of its disintegration and, more prosaically, its defeat.”

Thus, why “The Defeat of the West”? To Todd the answer is: the collapse of Protestantism.

It’s hard not to agree with his assessment of Protestantism’s impact: “Protestantism is therefore doubly at the heart of Western history, for better with the educational and then economic boom, and for worse with the idea that men are unequal.”

Indeed, the word “catholic” means universal, and thus it’s critical to admit that it was the French - not the English or Americans - who had a revolution which was truly based on egalitarianism. I have known many Catholics and they are as proud of their religion’s universal embrace as strongly as Protestants do not want to talk about the elitist nature and endlessly segregationist outcomes of their ideology.

Todd, ever the anthropologist, notes that France - unlike England and Germany - does not share in the limited nuclear family, but that equality among brothers existed in the French (and Russian) family. Of course, how can racist America ever claim to have followed a truly egalitarian ideology? I can’t stress enough how much emphasis Todd correlates between a nation’s family structure to its political structure.

Todd even gives credit for the idea of a “nation-state” - the idea of a particular, exceptional collective conscience - to Protestantism. He insists his fellow French are wrong that 1789 invented this concept. He is wrong on both counts: surely the idea of a “nation” was one of the many, many political ideas which Western colonists learned from American Indians and exported back to their home continent. The idea that a continent of serfs under the yoke of conquistadores and nobles did not look at the tremendous “liberty” of an Indian brave with admiration and envy, and only then appropriate the idea of modern “liberté”, is a fundamental - yet ignored - key to understanding humanity’s political development, I insist. Would there be Protestantism without the  worlds-shattering discovery of the Western Hemisphere? I have always said no, but Czechia’s Jan Hus would disagree.

So are we surprised that the Anglo-Saxon world - a phrase used constantly in France but openly detested in the countries it describes; often treated with bewilderment there, even! - do not like Todd’s book? Not only does it “side” with Russia - via refusing to tell lies about it; not only does it sin by exhuming the common view of Ukraine in January 2022 - that it is corrupt and dysfunctional; the book blames the dominant religious group in the Anglo-Saxon world - Protestants. The irony is that Protestants are mad at Todd, who is mad at them for giving up Protestantism!

However, the problem with Max “liberal imperialism” Weber’s elevation of Protestantism for Western dominance is shared by Todd: there’s no discussion of the role played by the illicit gains of imperialism. What “work ethic” or “evidence of being one of heaven’s elect” was there in the Persian, Irish or Bengali famines, to give one of billions of individual examples? Protestantism’s innovative demand that the average person become literate - in order to acquire salvation via reading the Bible - was progressive indeed and Todd is right to champion it, but Todd, as I have often lamented in this series, totally excludes the Marxist view from his intellectual toolkit.

Thus, in lamenting and analysing the defeat of the West Todd seems to wholly ignore that WASP rule was not at all benevolent, even if it may have been successful for WASPs!

This is a major omission. However, blaming arrogant Calvinists and Lutherans isn’t as deep or productive as taking a class analysis, which Todd also eschews. Of course, if he writes that type of a book - a truly Marxist one - then the major publisher Gallimard and The New York Times aren’t working with it.

So what is the West? Like pornography, we all know it when we see it

After the short introduction to this chapter - which radically reorients the moral ideology of his book from political realism to political moralism - Todd’s first section describes “The Two Wests”.

Todd gives us two options:

1. England, the US and France - the countries which truly had Liberal revolutions. And adding to them plus Italy, Germany and Japan… even though those three countries have histories which include huge doses of fascism, Nazism and racial militarism. (Of course, accomodating ills like monarchism, racism, imperialism etc. are part and parcel of liberalism’s past and present.)

2. All countries which currently participate in the “liberal and democratic revolution”, thus NATO plus its protectorate of Japan. Todd chooses this larger view, but mainly because it corresponds to the system of American power, which I agree really is a proper way to view the West: via the strength of its ties to the US (thus Todd notes that Russia from 1990-2006 could have been included in “the West”). Todd cleverly calls this the “Americanosphere”.

I could also give a third definition: those countries which participated in imperialism or currently uphold neo-imperalism, but Todd is no Marxist and thus “imperialism” is a word I don’t recall ever seeing in this book.

Todd accepts the larger definition of the West, but he concludes with: “The West today proclaims that it represents liberal democracy against Russian autocracy (for example). But in its Anglo-American-French hard core, which actually invented liberal democracy, it is in decline.”

So the West is what we thought it was, essentially. It’s not totally Protestant, after all, and it even has some Shinto. Todd isn’t really breaking new ground here, but I suggest another definition:

In 2024 “the West” can be defined as a series of countries which are in decline because they are strongly and genuinely allied with Washington.

Does this generalisation not largely hold up?

‘Defending a Democracy Which Doesn’t Exist Anymore’, but when did it for anywhere’s 99%?

That is the title of his next section - it’s nice to hear a Westerner admit it, but many Western Marxists knew this 175 years ago when France’s Second Republic crashed and burned upon ignition. Liberal Democracy is not a democracy; Liberal Democracy - when the 1% is threatened - inevitably (and often immediately, and often enduringly - like with the US Patriot Act) denounces and then suspends any “Liberal” rights of the 99%.

Todd says - but I am expanding logically here on what he writes - that the West can only claim to be a functioning Liberal Democracy when it is at war against an alleged autocracy/dictatorship. This expands on my assertion, as a longtime dweller inside the pan-European project, that desperate Western Liberal Democratic elites see Russophobia as the only way to create unity and support for the most spectacular political failure of the 21st century.

Todd doesn’t go this far, unfortunately. What he stresses explicitly is that everyone inside the West knows that for the past 20 or 30 years their own internal discussion has been that “Western democracy” has become an oxymoron. He cites works from 1996 onwards which prove that a new oligarchy has created a “post-democratic” condition.

Personally, I find his term “post-democratic” to be a complete evasion - it is totally undescriptive and not even mildly pejorative. Todd writes that his 2008 work After Democracy was not even that original because he cites plenty of concurrent works from England, Germany and the US which prove that the idea of a democratic catastrophe - which is worse than a mere, temporary crisis - in the West is totally commonplace. And it certainly is - what has changed since 2016 is the virulence of the obvious catastrophe.

Again, what he fails to point out is that Western Liberal Democracy repeats the same thing over and over: the rise of the Second French Empire (conquest of Algeria began in 1830) dovetails with the rise of failed Liberal Democratic reforms (1830 Revolution ousts the House of Bourbons with the more Liberal House of Orleans) - imperialism long been officially manipulated as a distraction and safety valve from inadequate, undemocratic Liberal Democratic “reforms”. In 2022 Liberal Democracy needed war in Ukraine to rally the pan-European project. The pattern is clear: Western Liberal Democracy uses war to distract from its own internal crisis, which is permanent because the 99% doesn’t benefit from Liberal Democracy but is instead exploited by it.

This is so obvious to a leftist that here’s another answer to the question posed by this chapter’s title, and it such broad answer as to include a West-skeptic like Todd:

The West is a place which doesn’t believe in imperialism.

When we accept the reality of imperialism (seemingly unlike Todd), then the class struggle makes sense, then identity politics is gutted, then the benefactors of monarchism and privilege get tossed down, then we can have morality in public policy and a public policy which aims to support the 99% and not the 1%.

How to defeat a whole region: Adding bad education to a gone-bad religion

Todd lists some basic traits of what a Liberal Democracy is, but he essentially focuses on its ultimate flaw, which I reported as indisputably true as a daily hard-news journalist in France since 2009: people in the West feel that that there is no public opinion allowed in the formation of public policy. Todd’s explanation for this is excellent history, and it builds upon his assertion of the importance of the educational reforms brought by Protestantism:

“Reading and writing, once the preserve of priests, are now the preserve of all men. Now, at the beginning of the third millennium, this feeling of basic democratic equality seems to have dried up. The development of higher education has ended up giving 30 or 40% of a generation the feeling of being truly superior: a mass elite, an oxymoron that introduces the oddity of the situation. […] If the people and the elite can no longer agree to work together, the notion of representative democracy no longer makes sense: you end up with an elite that no longer wants to represent the people and a people that is no longer represented.”

Undoubtedly accurate, no?

Alleged educational dominance in human history has gone from a brahmin class which kept Sanskrit alive to fool the masses to a 23-year old with a communications degree insisting that he or she is so much smarter than a 58-year old craft worker or a woman who raised three humans from helpless babies into boons to society. Todd’s analysis of the problems wrought by higher education are as instinctively correct as they are derided by those who consider themselves, undemocratically, to be among the intellectually superior. It’s a major democratic failure.

Should we put the blame on higher education itself? Of course not, as this problem is not as pronounced in places like China, Cuba or Iran - the problem obviously lays with the ideology which is being taught, i.e. fundamentally aristocratic Liberal Democracy.

Here Todd is on the cusp of moving beyond mere “post-democracy” in order to redefine the West as a “liberal oligarchy” - and kudos to Todd for once again not letting us down. What he is describing is essentially the Western “upper-middle class” which has openly colluded with the king/aristocracy/bourgeoisie/industrialists/high finance/tech titans/CEOs/executive class to oppress the middle and lower classes.

Indeed, the world has changed a great deal, and credit Todd for not being asleep at the wheel - like so many - regarding the fundamental changes after WWII in the West.

“The democratic ideal, without going as far as the dream of perfect economic equality for all citizens, included the notion of a rapprochement of social conditions. In the phase of maximum democracy following the Second World War it was even possible to imagine, in the United States and then elsewhere, the proletariat and bourgeoisie merging into a vast middle class. In recent decades, however, we have witnessed a rise in inequality, albeit to varying degrees depending on the country. This phenomenon, associated with free trade, did indeed pulverise the traditional classes, but at the same time degraded the material conditions and access to employment of the workers and the middle classes themselves. Once again, what I am describing is confoundingly banal: an observation on which everyone agrees.”

World War I finally ended feudalism and powerful monarchies and also introduced the first example of Socialist Democracy. The continued sacrifices of the 99% saw World War II impose at least mere Social Democracy on the West’s defeated but not dispossessed ruling class. 1946 was indeed the apex of actual power of the 99% in the West, and thus there actually was this notion that the proletariat would slowly rise and the bourgeoisie would slowly descend which Todd describes. In Social and Liberal Democracy this is supposed to be achieved by “gradual reformism”, which is the bane of true socialists; which is the essence of English conservatism; which is destined to fail, I would assert, and Todd is asserting here that everyone knows that this definitely has failed in the West today. What’s key to keep in mind is the evolution: everyone didn’t know this in 1946 or 1980 or 1992, but they do now - how times have changed for the better, truly!

It has failed because: what is Todd even referring to with simplistic jargon such as “traditional classes”? Must one have a multi-thousand year Asian conception of time to agree that the time of the Western “proletariat” was so short as to be anything but traditional? Due to offshoring, we are truly generous to say it lasted a full century, no? How is that more “traditional” than the privileges of the rich, of militarists, or of monarchists? How is the Western middle class, which truly was not an empowered minority until after the Social Democratic reforms post-World War I and II, a “traditional” class - “30 glorious years”, as the French call 1945-75, is enough to qualify as “traditional” even though that is just one generation? What I am describing here is a strong opposition to the traditional views and jargon of historians like Todd.

I really encourage the reading of my book on France because it shows - with over 100 quotations from actual, marching Yellow Vests interspersed throughout - that the fight since 1789 has been against elitism, privileges and the aristocracy. 1789 marked a sea change from the millennia before it. The 99% and the 1% - these are the “traditional” classes and the once-in-a-century Yellow Vest revolt (which went far, far beyond 1968) reminded us all of this.

Todd’s conclusion of this section should be lauded for its assessment that higher education has created a new, slightly expanded “bourgeois” class, if I am forced to used the outdated “traditional” terms of Todd (even though it’s not as if a college degree is a guarantee of joining the upper-middle class, much less the 1%), but he should be criticised for failing to point out that fostering a tolerance, admiration and even love for elitism is part and parcel of Liberal Democratic history, ideology and practice:

“The representative of the people, a member of the mass elite who has had a superior education, no longer respects the people of primary and secondary education and cannot help feeling, whatever his partisan label, that the values of higher education are the only legitimate ones. He is one of them, these values are himself, and everything else is, in his eyes, devoid of meaning; he will never be able to represent any kind of alternative.”

You likely had to read that concluding sentence twice because it is typical of Todd: he has chosen confused psychological speculation instead of drawing the simpler, skeptical, leftist conclusion which I did - that the elitism of the modern-day Western college graduates is due to the bogus “values of higher education” which Western Liberal Democracy instills. Indeed, the Western 23-year old with a communications degree is hardly some sort of Confucian sage who loves education for its own intrinsic worth… in between drinking bouts on college football game day.

Pity poor Westerners - choosing between ‘Liberal Oligarchies against Russian Authoritarian Democracy’

Todd’s next section lays out this almost totally uninspiring, yet accurately described, battle taking place in Ukraine.

One is deluded to fight for the former, but one is deluded if thinking the latter isn’t very far yet from openly re-championing Socialist Democracy - China and Russia are allied, but their political structures and laws are oceans apart.

Todd promised earlier in the book to explain that the West cannot be fighting for Liberal Democracy because they are not Liberal Democracies themselves, and here is his long-awaited explanation:

“In the case of the West, the dysfunction of majority representation means that the term 'democracy' cannot be retained. On the other hand, there is nothing to prevent us from retaining the term 'liberal', since the protection of minorities has become an obsession in the West. We most often think of the oppressed, Blacks or homosexuals, but the best protected minority in the West is undoubtedly the rich, whether they represent 1% of the population, 0.1% or 0.01%. In Russia, neither homosexuals nor oligarchs are protected. Thus our liberal democracies are becoming 'liberal oligarchies’."

Admirable honesty - and leftism - from a critic on the fringe of the acceptable mainstream, as Todd is.

However, many socialists have had this realisation - that Liberal Democracy is the barely-adulterated aristocracy of the type which reigned supreme in 1847 - since truly mere months after the Revolutions of 1848. Western Liberal Democracy is not “becoming” oligarchical - it has always been oligarchical.

Todd lists some failures which result from Liberal Oligarchism, and many of these were explicitly decried by Marx so very long ago:

• The chaotic functioning of this system produces incompetent elites, who then make major, deadly errors in international diplomacy.

• They adopt sanctions as a major strategy because the elite are never touched economically by any blowback.

• The educated class and elite think they are superior to the lower classes, thus they refuse to democratically represent the people.

• Democratic mores are (allegedly) present - universal suffrage, parliamentary politics, a free press, free elections - but only in a formal sense, not a true sense.

• The minor obsession of Western politicians is merely to win re-election - hardly a path to a well-ordered society. Todd incorrectly calls this their “new occupation” when it has been obvious since the Second French Republic.

• The major obsession of Western politicians is: “The oligarchic dysfunction of liberal democracies must therefore be ordered and controlled. What does this mean? Quite simply that, even as elections are still held, the people must be kept out of the running of the economy and the distribution of wealth - in a word: deceived. This is work for the political class, and it has even become the work to which they devote themselves as a matter of priority.”   

Look at Todd going leftist!

Examine the final quote: Todd is indicative of the growing part of Western society which cannot embrace socialism - for whatever absurd reason; most likely because they have lived through the era of when it “failed”, as opposed to a youth class which has lived through the era where it obviously succeeded in China - but which also refuses to lie anymore about the failures of Western Liberal Democracy. This is progress, and Todd is denounced in the West as a mere “Putin  sympathiser” for trying to push his society even a little bit to the left.

Todd’s emphasis is his own that “the work” of Western politics is to avoid any redistribution of wealth downwards. To me this is somewhat reminiscent of how the Nazis and Mussolini used the correct analyses of Marxism to win over their people, but would ultimately reject socialism and chose totally non-socialist goals with this Marxism-gained knowledge. Todd is no fascist, but his assertion that the fall of Protestantism and stuck-up college graduates are more to blame than the elitism inherent in nearly two centuries of Liberal Democracy is simply erroneous and unsatisfying.

Todd relates how the above problems with Liberal Democracy in producing good leaders becomes obvious when they have to go face to face with true adversaries, asking what is Macron or Biden compared to Xi or Putin? Millions of people just turned out for Raisi’s funeral - can anyone imagine millions marching if Macron or Biden die tragically? Surely there would be marches celebrating Macron’s demise, as there were in England upon the death of Margaret Thatcher.

Is the West defeated because they relied on clerics and elites but not the masses?

The answer to me is undoubtedly yes - the above describes aristocratic rule and Liberal Democracy is aristocratic, after all - but Todd does not draw that conclusion himself.

A key part of Todd’s model is indeed this new, rarely discussed arrogant educational stratification - the college-educated against those without advanced education -, but: "Religion, or rather its disintegration, as I said earlier, is at the heart of my model.”

Todd very interestingly dissects Western countries into three types: those nations with “active” religion, those who are in a “zombie” religious state, and the lamentable - for Todd - countries which are in a state of “zero” religion. Zombie-religion states only have religious services for baptism, marriage and death, and avoid regular churchgoing. Zero-religion states can’t even muster these efforts and are places like England, where a stunning 80% of people now choose unChristian cremation, compared with just 0.07% in 1900. To those who object on these examples, Todd is an anthropologist and a historian, after all - he’s looking at certain markers, drawing inferences and deducing declarations.

Todd says, as an excellent objective anthropological marker, the official date for the disappearance of the Christian form of marriage (in France) and the establishment of a state of “zero-religion” state was the “marriage pour tous” campaign - “marriage for all”/gay marriage. Thus, Todd says we can say the average of 2015 is when Christianity ceased to be a social force across Western Europe (except Italy) and the Anglophone nations.

Those are not the things you can say in the West and not get condemned, no matter how serious an anthropologist you are. I’m probably the only English-language journalist in France who still brings this historical event up, but a better example of Western fake-leftism is hard to find: President Francois Hollande announced his support for marriage pour tous the day after he announced his Mitterrandean, anti-democratic u-turn on austerity. Stunningly manipulative politics, but true - from my France book.

“On November 6, 2012, Francois Hollande made a U-Turn as bad as Francois Mitterrand did in 1983 when he also backtracked on his anti-austerity promise. His 2013 budget contained basically all the neoliberal, economically-regressive measures proposed by Sarkozy during the presidential campaign. It was a total shock to the average Frenchman, who had not grasped the power of the Lisbon Treaty. France’s two-party system was officially a uni-party system: pro-Brussels.

On the very next day Hollande submitted to parliament a divisive, deflecting law to legalise gay marriage and gay adoption - it was a stunningly cynical move. November 7, 2012, is a perfect incarnation of what Western democracy has become: class-obscuring identity politics combined with far-right economics, which is then ludicrously passed off as progressive politics. Such preposterously false politics can be achieved only via forbidding Socialist-inspired analyses from regular public debate: Insisting that all political analysis promote Liberalism, combined with Fascism’s obsession with tribe and identity politics, allows for “left” and “right" to lose solid definitions based on class, history and consensual agreements on reality, and to create nebulous definitions which are so grounded in personal whims and individualist nonsense that they are clearly reminiscent of the illogical rule of an autocrat.”

That democratic debacle is one which should not be forgotten, in my opinion.

Todd relates the recent history of dissatisfaction and deChristianisation in the Parisian basin and the South-Southwest Mediterranean in the mid-18th century, then a similar fall in belief for Protestants for 1870-1930, and then a final blow in the West after the 1960s. This has serious consequences:

“This is when the nation-state disintegrates and globalisation triumphs, in atomised societies where it is no longer even conceivable that the state can act effectively. I say 'the individual deprived of all collective belief' rather than 'liberated', because, as we shall see, he is diminished rather than enlarged by the vacuum.

[…]

The original religious matrix was slowly built up between the end of the Roman Empire and the central Middle Ages, and then ultimately densified by the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. If it is the arrival of a zero-religion state that has led to the disappearance of national feeling, a work ethic, the notion of a binding social morality, the capacity to sacrifice for the community, all those things whose absence makes the West fragile in war, it is obvious that they will not reappear in the next five years - the time frame I have given the Russians to bring their war to a successful conclusion.”

Indeed, the West is done with imperialist crusades - they will have to be content with, as I predicted earlier in this series, only a partial gobbling up of a partitioned Ukraine. They cannot win it all anymore (and their Crusades only held Jerusalem for less than a century, anyway).

However, we must point out the obvious exception to Todd’s religious rule: China. They do not have a collective religion, but their commitment to socialism inculcates all these virtues that Todd lists. So we cannot say that religion is necessary worldwide to impart morality in public policy, but Todd asserts that the lack of religion means that the West has no chance against Russia.

All this is why rich Parisians say, “Nobody likes Todd”, and to Todd’s credit.

Is Liberal Democracy worse than nihilism?

Todd ends this chapter on what the West is with a section that returns to what he says is motivating Ukraine’s desire for a suicidal war - A Headlong Rush Towards Nihilism.

This book began with political realism regarding Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe, but this chapter - the first focused on the core of the West - has become focused on morality. What Todd is honest enough to say is that Western-type morality is obviously less and less appealing to the Global South (and even to many within the West). Todd was apparently a part of this failed movement, but not any more.

Todd issues a “maximum mea culpa”: he, too, apparently, believed that the Anglo-American-Franco sexual revolution of the 1960s would result in greater power for an individual once they were freed from the collective, but now he knows it is actually the contrary. “Alone, he is doomed by nature to shrink.” Todd now believes that the collective transforms the Freudian superego not negatively, via repression, but positively, by giving a structure for the individual to rise above their immediate desires.

Todd notes that before the Freudian concept of ego there was this little concept called a “conscience”, which implied the actual existence of others (and their importance), and that Christianity was just a bit big on listening to one’s conscience. In a zombie-religion state the idea of a conscience still remains active, but in a zero-religion state there is a deficiency of superego, thus of conscience, and this leads to the idolatry of nothingness - nihilism.

Ah, a Western intellectual obsessed with nihilism! About as rare as magic carpet stories in the Muslim world or dragon stories in China. I do not find Todd’s repeated psycho-sociological “conclusion” of nihilism to be a sufficient explanation for the hows and whys and whats in the issues of contemporary politics. Politics is not a science, of course, but it’s clear that Todd - and others - resort to this Frankish psychological magic to deflect from a simple condemnation of Western Liberal Democracy and a simple vote of support for Socialist Democracy.

Is nihilism worse than Liberal Democracy? This I know: I am quite tired of the West’s post-WWII obsession with nihilism!

Todd concludes with what some will say is mere French resentment, or the anti-Protestant view of a Jew from a Catholic country, or “the continent” versus English-Gaelic-American world-islanders:

“It's hardly surprising, then, as we're about to discover, that the Anglo-American world, characterized by zero Protestantism and the absolute nuclear family, is currently the scene of the most blatant manifestations of nihilism.”

The next section is titled, “The Assisted Suicide of Europe”. However, we should hope that Todd does not pin all the blame for the West’s defeat on the negative influence of Anglophones, Protestants or Americans - continental Europe has foolishly chosen Liberal Democracy and opposed Socialist Democracy over and over and over.

An excellent chapter, and one whose weighty moral ideas required a bit longer of an article, which I hope you enjoyed.

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Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. His latest book is France's Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West's Best Values. He is also the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese. Any reposting or republication of any of these articles is approved and appreciated. He tweets at @RaminMazaheri2 and writes at substack.com/@raminmazaheri