Emmanuel Todd beats Democrats by 6 months: The US is an oligarchy

‘The Defeat of the West’ explains what the US only realised after Biden’s debate debacle

(This is the 6th 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).)

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 Todd 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, liberalism-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 in the last 35 years no other global region has undergone as counter-revolutionary a change. In Chapter 4 Todd asked “What is the West?” and I noted how his book changed from realism to moralism: per Todd, the West is not just “unstable” but “sick”, and he blames it on the decline of their Protestant clerics and college-educated intellectuals. Todd would have done better to not pull his punches and title his 5th chapter thusly: “The assisted suicide of Europe”. Or he could have hit upon my new phrase - the “EU-icide” - to quickly describe the obvious failure of the pan-European project, which is the biggest political story of this century. Chapter 6 is titled “In Great Britain: towards a zero-nation (Croule (Crumbling, not Rule) Britannia))”, as bitter Remainers latch on to Russophobia as a way to stay connected with Europe, but the dominant political force in this wayward island is mere “disarray”.

Chapter 8 is titled, “The True Nature of America: Oligarchy and Nihilism”.

I have not written about the US presidential election circus (I write this from a plane on my way to cover the US elections, after having just covered the leftist wins in France and Mexico), mainly because it’s just so eye-rollingly stupid. Joe Biden’s post-1st debate fall from grace led to the use of the word, finally, “oligarchy” to describe the leadership of the Democratic Party, the Biden entourage and the US elite currently in power. But who did not already know this? Why would I waste the time of my truly dear readers to write on subjects which everybody is totally aware of and fully understands? I’m trying to provide something useful and new to you. So many of my peers often write just to vent their spleen or to say “I told you so”, it seems - I hope I can avoid articles which merely tell you that the sky is blue.

What I can say - which is very different from most of what we read regarding global events - is that our era simply keeps getting better and better and more exciting and keeps giving us more and more reason for optimism, activity and hope! The defeat of NATO in Ukraine, the victory of Gaza, how Bitcoin has guaranteed itself a place in the world, the leftist sweep in Mexico, the left’s plurality in France, etc. - the warmongers and oligarchs of the West are being battered at a rapid pace and in places which 10 years ago many would have said it could never lose. This is not an opinion but a historical fact - think back to 2014 and how much has changed.Their losses are coming fast and furious, and it is just fantastic!

Who knows how far the decomposition of the US can go? Let’s dream big: just as the Republican Party splintered into two factions, with Trumpism prevailing over the 100% liberalist version, what if the same happens to the Democratic Party following the Biden-led real-time decay of the 40-year Bush-Clinton political oligarchy? What if the US develops a Mexican Morena or France Unbowed to fight out with the world’s fake-leftists nonpareil? Who would have thought The New York Times editorial board would ever come out against the mainstream Democratic Party candidate?!

It’s an exciting time, and the Biden debate debacle is just another wonderful political development for those in favor of peace and equality.

Just before publication there was an attempted assassination on Donald Trump. Stunning. You decide for yourself where that fits into the decomposition of the US - we have other things to tackle here.

Let’s chalk another one up for Todd: The Defeat of the West was published 6 months ahead of the realisation that the US is not run as a democracy but as an oligarchy. Of course, only proponents of socialist democracy realise the depth of this fact, and nearly all of those now admitting the US is run by an oligarchy believe it can be easily reversed (and merely by replacing Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party candidate - LOL!) but we can add this to Todd’s incredibly impressive list of accurate historical-political predictions.

As far as the “Nihilism”: Todd obviously continues with his thesis that what’s caused the defeat of the West is not the oligarchy-preserving structures of liberal democracy (the actual reason), but a decline in Protestantism’s vitality, which allows for the growth of non-belief, or nihilism. However, nihilism - which he describes as a moral emptiness, or absence of morality - is not just the province of vapid royal courts but right at home in all aristocracies, i.e. oligarchies, i.e liberal democracies.

Todd’s book is truly a mixture of political realism - he refers to some of the undeniable, factual Western losses which I termed “just fantastic! - and moralism. As I always ask those who criticise the Iranian Islamic Revolution: show me where is the moralism in Western liberal democracy?

They are always at a loss to answer….

The New York Times siding against decadence?

In all of Todd’s other chapters he has finished with the assessment of “nihilism”, but that’s where he starts his three chapters on the US.

It’s interesting that Todd says he was impressed and influenced by the book The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success by The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. Douthat is the paper’s only openly conservative and Catholic regular columnist, though he toes the party line by being a never-Trumper.

After 2016’s election of Trump Times columnists became unreadable: in seemingly every single column, regardless of the subject, it seemed as if columnists were ordered to inject at least one sentence which trolled Trump. Such obsession is boring - to say the least of its flaws. A seismic, whistleblowing, in-depth December 2023 article from The Economist, How The New York Times Lost Its Way, pinpointed the reasons for the decline in the ability (I don’t write “quality”) of their columnists: mainly, they stopped hiring actual journalists and instead tapped social media stars who cut their journalistic teeth with an ethos of “getting likes”. These were not people trained in the craft of journalism, and it shows! I can verify that a university degree in journalism isn’t necessary, but it does force you to do a difficult amount of very simple busywork which properly inculcates an obsession with accuracy, even on minute points. The best newspaper journalist I worked with didn’t go to college. What he did do, and what is indispensable to being a good reporter, which these social media stars never did (as I have), are things like quadruple-checking the funeral service times while writing an obituary in a small-town newspaper. You don’t do that to get “likes” but to avoid somebody coming to the newsroom and shaming you for ruining grandma’s funeral; and because such rigour and devotion to accuracy is what makes a true journalist. Accuracy doesn’t care if you click “like” or not. I’d like it if you clicked like, sure - and thanks for taking the time - but every word I write isn’t to get anyone’s approval. That wouldn’t be journalism or anything resembling public service - it would be cheap art.

Douthat is perhaps the last Times columnist I still read with a marginal consistency. He is certainly the only place you will find non-negative coverage of the Roman Catholic church in the Times (you can find far more reports of theirs which paint Islam in a somewhat positive light than you can for Catholicism), and he’s also their only editorialist who can at least analyse the Trumpism movement within American political history without full-blown TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome).

Todd admires Douthat’s concept of “sustainable decadence”, but disagrees with Douthat’s conclusion that a decadent United States can remain viable in this decadent world. Douthat appears to assume that American-imposed liberal hegemony - despite all the “just fantastic!” failures listed above - is still going to take over the world, both politically and culturally.

Contrarily to Douthat, Todd asks if the US is finally ready to give up “liberal hegemony”. What Todd doesn’t point out is that this is a redundant term: liberalism has waged war on absolutism (rightly), socialism, Islamism, communism and any other ‘ism because they are waging (pro-rich) class war.

“Because the true problem which confronts the world today is not the very limited will of Russian power, but the decadence of its American center, which is without limit.”

That’s a bold statement for a Westerner, and we can see why someone in French high finance told me, “Nobody likes Emmanuel Todd.” Who is more decadent than those in high finance?

In a book which has increasingly rested on the assertion that the West’s decline is due to the collapse of Protestantism, isn’t “decadence” a rather expected and mundane conclusion for Todd’s diagnosis of American ills?

I believe so, and I will try to keep this disclaimer short: As I have repeatedly been forced to object in this series, nihilism is not much of answer to our questions of political science, because our political structures, customs and laws influence the moral behavior of our people and public servants. Todd, not being a leftist, is thus relying on the essentially conservative moral argument of someone who reuses to admit that the actual problem is liberal democracy itself.

Todd apologises for what he must do (but which Palestinians certainly would condone) - compare the US with Nazi Germany:

“German dynamism in the 1930s and American dynamism today have in common a motor of nothingness. In the two cases political life functioned without values, being nothing but a movement towards violence. […] In America today I see, at the levels of thought and ideas, a dangerous state of emptiness, with the residual obsessions of money and power. These cannot be goals in themselves, or values. This vacuum induces a propensity to self-destruction, militarism, endemic negativity, in sum - nihilism.”

Does this sound right? Yes. Could we apply this to any era of the US? Yes.

This is not being overly anti-American on my part. 1776 was a great revolution but - like the other liberal revolutions of England and France - deeply flawed, as the key word there is “liberal””. Just as I can now merely say two words to disprove a claim that France is democratic - “Yellow Vests” - it’s similarly easy to disprove the democratic bonafides o the United States. After all, we can ignore the opinions and experiences of the African-Americans and Native Americans, but why would we, if our goal is not jingoism and self-praise (awarding our “likes” to ourselves, lol) but accuracy?

So it is not difficult to point out that Todd’s above description has always applied to American history: the post-Revolutionary land grab greed after the defeat of the British finally opened up west of the Appalachian Mountains, the drooling and grasping early years of the Industrial Revolution, the post-Civil War reconstruction corruption/final eradication of the Native Americans, the Robber Baron/Gilded Age era, the unequal Roaring 20s, the time of famine in the 1930s (time of mass famine… yet apparently no Americans actually died, per their hagiographic historians), the undoubtedly decadent 1960s and 70s, the greedy 80s, the dot.com boom 90s when apolitical decadence hit a new level from which it has never returned, the jingoism on steroids of the 2000s - blaming “decadence” and “nihilism” for the US tells us nothing about the political and structural causes of these endemic traits.

But fine, let’s go along with Todd’s assertion of a new era in US society, anyway.

To do so it helps to accept a long-running thesis of mine, and others: Western power was fundamentally changed beginning with the US Great Financial Crisis of 2007. Where others go astray is not linking this crisis with another crisis which the West added on top of it: the endemic crisis which is the pan-European Project, which was forced into being in 2009 with the Lisbon Treaty. If Europe had retained its sovereignty and not accepted this liberalist oligarchy-on-steroids then you would have had some individual nations which could have said no to the post-GFC policies which sapped Western economies of their strength and, crucially, integrity: ZIRP (Zero-Interest Rate Policies), QE (Quantitative Easing), TINA (There Is No Alternative… to liberalism), austerity policies for the masses even if it means Brussels (and Macron and other national leaders) force them through undemocratically, etc.

Todd does not choose this clearly appropriate starting date for when the US went from good little angels to - ohmigosh! - greedy, selfish, militaristic nihilists. The section “The triumph of injustice: 1980-2020” shows that he has picked a common choice of a start, and a very big range, for the defeat of the West. It’s not inaccurate to say that Reagan and Thatcher kicked off the decline of their countries, but how does 1980 apply to the continent of Europe, which was half socialist in 1980? It’s a very Anglophone-centered view of history, undoubtedly, though it’s rarely voiced that way.

The section’s title comes from a well-known book of the same name which appeared in 2020 - The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay, by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. It explains why Western billionaires now pay a smaller percentage to tax than their secretaries - the death of even mere social democratic values in the West following the elite’s implosion of the USSR, I’d say.

Todd repeatedly focuses - correctly - on the rise of tax evasion/lowered tax rates on the rich as a vital reason for of the defeat of the US. He gives other proofs - since 2000 a decrease in life expectancy even though the US spends more on medical care than any other country, mass shootings, obesity - but they are mostly well-known.

Todd thus transfers the French idea of “Les Trentes Glorieuses” - the “30 great years” after 1945 - to the US. It’s a common analysis of non-socialist thinkers. So to elevate that era Todd has to give us flash-backs to the “glory days” of the Eisenhower era, when the West was democratic, anti-nihilist, non-oligarchic; a time when their bourgeois class hadn’t played any role in an as-yet uncreated military-industrial complex… if you believe that.

Todd does believe such pap, and he laments how it’s normal to mock US WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), who ran the system during that era. However, he notes that this largely Episcopal (US version of the English Anglican Church) class of elites actually did send their sons to war back then, unlike now, and also didn’t hesitate to approve a 90% income tax rate on the highest earners from 1945-63.

It’s a fair point - and enforcing the tax code (i.e. redistributing wealth) and being less warmongering could solve a host of US problems - but I still don’t accept that the US elite class was so vastly less awful (i don’t write “superior”) than the US elite class of today. The West’s postwar success is far more attributable to the superior example of socialist democracies like the USSR, and also to the redistributive, mere social democratic gains which Westerners (especially West Europeans) wrested from their elites after the bloodlettings of WWI and WWII.

Todd doesn’t believe the above - he believes the problem is nihilism, i.e. bad religion.

Blaming evangelical Christians: Todd’s biggest mistake so far in the book

In his section Towards Protestantism-Zero in the United States Todd takes aim at evangelical Christianity, citing Douthat’s book Bad Religion to determine that, apparently “…evangelism is a heresy with no link to classical Protestantism. Calvinism and Lutheranism were severe: they demanded that man observe a moral, economic and social code, for example, and they birthed progress.” He goes on to accuse evangelical Christianity of the usual sins: being antiscientific, narcissistic and materialistic.

Firstly, I do not share Todd’s view in this book that Protestantism was the key motor to Western advancement: Todd, I must note again, is not only not swayed by Marxism but he doesn’t seem to know what imperialism is. The mass literacy campaign promoted by the original Protestantism was great, but literacy campaigns haven’t made never-imperialist Cuba rich, for example? It’s not reading - its profits from stolen wages, lands, people, etc., which fuelled Western advancement. Of course the West insists it’s not that - it’s their superior ideas.

Secondly, it’s fair to ask: does the Jewish Todd from Catholic France know what he is talking about? Protestantism and evangelism are practically synonymous, as there are evangelicals in seemingly every Protestant denomination?! Martin Luther was an evangelist. John Calvin was an evangelist. Sixty percent of Protestants are classified as “evangelical”. What’s occurring here is that Todd is making an (unexplained) distinction between “mainline” and “non-mainline” Protestantism, but I don’t think his understanding of American Christianity extends that far? So why is he doing that? Here is the answer:

Thirdly, denigrating evangelical Christianity has always seemed to me as a way to unfairly heap opprobrium on US “White trash”, which is to say it is more oppression of the lower class. Whatever the faults of evangelical Christians they are surely equaled - and often bettered - by their older Protestant brethren, even if the latter has the ability to hide their sins with more money, power and history. Furthermore, lily-White, ecumenical (or mainline) Protestantism exhibits all the faults Todd has been assigning to European Christians?! Their churches are as empty as Amsterdam, with their membership plummeting by half since the 1970s and dwindling daily.

To clear all this up we must merely ask, which Todd refuses to do: are the faults of evangelical Christians due to their religion, or to the culture and structure of US society as a whole? Are the various doctrines of evangelical Christians so very different from and so uninspired by the capitalist-imperialist doctrines of US society as a whole? If American society would reform itself away from capitalist-imperialist doctrines, would evangelical Christianity remain impossible to reform?

The problem is not these “White trash” religions operating in poor rural areas, out of storefronts in the poor part of the city, in vibrant suburban megachurches - the defeat of the West is political and economic. I am attached to the idea that people have a right to worship how they choose - I would look the other way if Satanism was repressed, however - and Islam forbids proselytising so all non-Muslims can do whatever they want for all I care. To me the defeat of the West is not caused by how the poor in the West’s leading nation are choosing to follow Jesus son of Mary.

(As a sidebar: I wonder if Todd even realises that many African-Americans belong to non-mainline Protestant sects? It’s my opinion that denigrating “evangelicals” is a long-running American dog-whistle to denigrate poor Whites as being unworthy of attention, democratic power, social programs, cultural influence, etc., but the affinity of African-Americans for non-mainline Christianity is historically understandable and (I would assume) a well-known feature of Black society in America as a whole. Blacks don’t have power - now or in the Eisenhower era - so they aren’t involved in Todd’s discussion of the US elite, but it’s worth remembering that the ease with which the American elite denigrate evangelicals affects both Whites, Blacks, increasingly Latinos and many East Asian greencard-holders.)

Regardless of whether you agree with Todd’s assertion that evangelical Christians are “inauthentic Protestants”, (LOL, I wouldn’t tell one of them that; then what are they - Greek Orthodox?) his inclusion of this argument calls into question either his understanding of America or his intellectual impartiality:

Is Todd denigrating the long-repressed “White trash” who follow non-mainline Christian Protestantism simply because it so obviously directly contradicts his thesis of the US as another “zero-religion” Western state?

Because it clearly doesn’t work: a good chunk of churches in the US are full of believers whereas churches in Western Europe are full of tourists. American evangelical Christianity is thriving and real - regardless of what one thinks of their doctrine - and it’s elitist and undemocratic to say they should be discounted and ignored. Saying that the US is another “zero-religion” Western nation because he disagrees with the theological doctrine of many of its practitioners was a very poor choice by Todd.

Who will object, though? Western intellectual elite looks down on this “poor person’s” religion….

Furthermore, Todd’s admiration for the old WASP leadership and their religions - he only mentions the Episcopalians, but he must be referring to Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians (because he just can’t be only elevating Episcopalianism so highly, LOL) - mirrors a fault which he admitted to having regarding the UK in the previous chapter: he believed in a propagandised view that the English ruling class had merit… until the 49-day leadership debacle of Liz Truss. Todd does not realise that he has been similarly propagandised regarding the leadership of the pre-1960s US. Certainly, Episcopalians have never had such reason to feel so flattered! Maybe the fallout from the Biden debate debacle will wake Todd up, as Truss did?

So Todd is clearly wrong to pursue - with extreme bias in many ways - his “zero-religion” thesis for the US.

However, I can easily render his view useful if we use a lens for which I repeatedly fault Todd for not using: the class struggle: Todd’s thesis of “active/zombie/zero-religion” doesn’t really apply to the US as broadly as it does Western Europe, but his thesis does apply to the US upper class and upper-middle class.

As this is the ruling component of US liberalism, their lack of religious grounding - usually in mainline/ecumenical Protestantism - has major consequences for all of society.

So either Todd truly doesn’t understand US society - the real religious feeling many Americans have -, or he’s denigrating and ignoring the religion of mostly lower-class Americans, or he’s trying to fudge the data to fit his thesis… and all because he’s not a leftist and thus unable to use the lens of the Marxist class struggle. If he did, his religion thesis mostly works.

But like so many non-Marxists, he’d rather talk about nonsense like transgenderism than the class struggle, but we see here that he’s alleging a failure of values in the US upper class and not the lower: “Genetics tells us that we can’t transform a man (chromosomes XY) to a woman (chromosomes XX), and vice-versa. To pretend to do so is to affirm the false (his emphasis), an intellectual act typically nihilist. By worshipping it and imposing it as the predominant truth of society in a social category (rather the upper-middle classes) and its media (The New York Times, The Washington Post), we are dealing with a nihilistic religion.”

(As far as my view on transgenderism, I think I made my position clear in this satire from 2017: "‘Transgender Bathrooms are the Selma of My Generation!’ – Reader Mail". Still funny! I should write more satires….)

Todd says the US exemplifies his interesting theory that once a society reaches a point where 20-25% of people get higher education then that group starts to feel an intrinsic superiority. Thus, the ideal of egalitarianism upon which mass education was founded turns into the legitimisation of inequality. In Chapter 3 he wrote how this helps explain Eastern Europe’s switch from a bleeding, revolutionary Socialist Bloc into an “inauthentic” bloc of Western-aping literalists.

Todd goes further in this chapter: “The development of higher education restratifies the population, silences the egalitarian ethos that mass literacy programs had spread, and, beyond that, all feeling of belonging to a collective. Religious and ideological unity goes flying in shards. It thus sets off a process of social atomisation and shrinking of the individual, who, ceasing to be framed by common values, find oneself in a fragile position.”

Even if we assume that College Town, USA, does indeed have this negative effect, Todd totally ignores the possibility that the cause may not be mass literacy campaigns, secondary education and university courses but the ideology which is inculcated at these schools: liberalism. However foolish he is to ignore this obvious possibility his theory does reveal interesting ideas about the development of contemporary Western society.

The US attained a rate of 25% of college graduates in 1965, a generation ahead of Europeans, and yet Todd cites a fall in SAT scores from 1965-1980, and then another fall after 2005. He also cites a study claiming a fall in US IQ scores from 2006-2018, and his target is curious: “How can we not link this collapse in education efficiency to the disappearance of Protestantism, for which education was one of its strengths? Once again, the heretical nature of evangelicalism is revealed, as its spread has coincided with lower educational levels among white Americans than among Catholics.”

Myself, other leftists and many others can quite easily not make such a link.

It’s a tenuous correlation and Todd sounds like some sort of bigoted religious fundamentalist - or an elitist Western urbanite - here. As I have often noted: Todd keeps railing against the decline of Western Protestantism but nowhere is he calling for more Protestant policies or laws?

Complaints about ”heretical” Protestants (why doesn’t he just come out and call them holy-rolling, snake-handling, tongue-speaking White and Black trash?) reveals a real ignorance of American society: non-mainline Protestantism is not at all recent, and it has always been popular with the marginalised, oppressed lower classes in the US. I did not come out of nowhere, nor start in the 1980s. The “respectable” Anglicans, Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians: Todd might find them to be the true doctrine but the lower classes in America are often not persuaded by the theology of their class oppressors. This is why they founded their own churches long ago, and are probably even founding their own new church right this minute - that’s America.

One could also fairly accuse Todd of having a wholesale prejudice against American-based Protestantism: does he realise that his preferred Protestants are all European? Methodism - the Englishman John Wesley; Baptist - Dutch; Presbyterian - Scottish; Episcopal - English Anglicanism for those with American passports. It’s really rather one-sided.

(Todd doesn’t mention Mormonism, but I’m certain he’d approve of their generally Eisenhower-era behaviour, if not their theology.)

Todd would have done far better to write something like, “America is the exception which proves the rule when it comes the lack of religious feeling in the West.” Instead he has essentially written “America’s non-European-founded, indigenous forms of Protestantism are heretical, render one stupid and are to blame for ruining America.”

Or he could have taken the class angle I mentioned above, but that’s an impossibility for Todd.

Guns-and-God America isn’t religious? I don’t know how this got past his editor….

Coda - American White Trash may have just gotten the last laugh on Todd: Trump’s pick yesterday for vice-president was J.D. Vance, a recently-elected senator who rose from rural White poverty to fame as the author of the best-seller Hillbilly Elegy. “Hillbilly”, of course, is synonymous with “White trash”. It’s a book which essentially explains the decline of the US from the perspective of their heartland; it explains, to me, the “this American carnage” line from Trump’s inaugural speech. Vance is seemingly the very incarnation of the ideology of Trumpism, and he can certainly explain it better than Trump himself. Check out this very interesting and extensive interview with - you guessed it - Ross Douthat of the Times, titled What J.D. Vance Believes.

That’s a longer read than this article, so you might want to just watch the movie version of Hillbilly Elegy. When that big-budget movie came out the US MSM absolutely savaged it as right-wing propaganda; as dangerous; as reactionary - essentially, as I would say, for daring to be “pro-White Trash”. I liked it. With politically-charged movies like this it’s often interesting to note the difference between the critics’ score and the public’s score at critique-aggregating sites like Rotten Tomatoes - the critics gave it just a 25% approval rating, the public a very high 82%.

Shoot a re-elected Trump and you’re getting someone who grew up as poor White trash (and as an evangelical Christian, though he converted to Catholicism in 2019): it’s another step forward in my nearly decade-long thesis of a White Trash Revolution, spanning Trump, Brexit, the Yellow Vests and probably a victorious Trump/Vance ticket.

Regardless of what one thinks of Vance’s ideology: When’s the last time a person from the lower class rose so high in the US? Bill Clinton qualifies, but he truly personifies Todd’s accusation of the US elite as having a nihilistic ideology and certainly never claimed to represent the US lower class. Maybe Vance will prove to be a similar sellout, but he’s risen on a contrary claim.

Biden is old. America is an oligarchy. Liberalism is anti-democratic. Grass is green.

Todd’s theory of the centrality of the collapse of Protestantism as regards the final liberation of the Blacks from their American Apartheid/Jim Crow is worth retelling: “If racism and segregation derived largely, in the final instance, from religious values, one suspects that one of the consequences of the collapse of (Protestant) religion, active or zombie - that is to say a mental and social system which defines men as unequal and some of them as inferior - , will be the liberation of Black people.”

Protestantism allowed for the subjugation of non-Whites, Todd asserts. Certainly, White European Protestants were very big on elitism - via their belief in predestination, which naturally allows for segregation and domination. (I doubt Todd knows that many “heretical” US evangelical Christian doctrines broke with the pro-elites concept of predestination, as did the Methodists.)

Todd goes further, eloquently:

“The inequality of Blacks allowed the equality of Whites to function, and one of the negative, unexpected aspects of Black liberation has been the disorganisation of American democracy. Blacks no longer incarnate the aspect of inequality - the equality of Whites is pulverised. The democratic sentiment is thus more threatened in America than elsewhere. Throughout the advanced world higher education has undermined democratic sentiment. However, in the United States the sudden disappearance of the equality of Whites, founded on the inequality of Blacks, has aggravated this phenomenon. This is the anthropological and religious backdrop to the powerful inegalitarian drift of American society in the years 1965-2022, which we would be wrong to consider only in its economic (the rise of income inequalities) or political (the erasing role of non-educated citizens) aspects. […] Still concentrated in the lower strata (African-Americans), they acquired citizenship in a society where the ideal of equal citizens evaporated.”

That last sentence is especially true - how can one not sympathise with the plight of the African-American? It’s amazing that no one ever calls for a “humanitarian intervention” for them….

It’s a great historical analysis, and it gives credence to the importance of abolitionists as America’s only true leftist revolutionaries: they called the US Constitution a pact with Satan for obvious reasons. It really provides food for thought: did America actually became more unequal - embrace inequality even more - once they had to accept modern democracy and stop oppressing Blacks? It’s hard to say anything definitively other than: US liberal democracy is awful and should be tossed away.

Todd’s attachment to the doctrine of mainline Christianity forces more puzzlement: So it’s too bad that US mainline Protestants aren’t more attached to their religion… because they could have kept American apartheid going, maybe? Todd later admits the truth behind Black emancipation: in order to compete with the USSR on a moral level it had to happen - on a global public relations level.

What’s certain is that the world now knows that few practices are more obvious proof of moral nihilism than slavery. It’s liberalism which worked hand in hand with that institution - socialism could never be tainted with any such accusation. From an African-American point of view, liberalism is just barely starting to honestly reckon with slavery - will liberalism ever be able to create sufficient reconciliation on this point? I doubt it - best to move on to socialist democracy, which has no problem creating unity.

Moving on from the book’s usual critique of the West’s clerics and educational elite, Todd does finally gets to some hard political facts:

“The liquidation of the worker class by globalisation has thus caused the fading away of the middle class. All that remains is an upper-middle class, 10% of the population maybe, attached to the oligarchy of the upmost 0.1%, and strives to stay on their track. It’s this upper-middle class which opposes progressive taxation, more so than the upper class, thus capital largely escapes taxes.”

Todd does not do this, but when we combine the destruction of the factory worker class - i.e. the private worker unionised class (not the destruction of the public worker unionised class, which people like Vance explicitly call for) - with the right-wing/liberalist education at the upper levels we start to understand how the US liberalist oligarchy has been able to destroy genuine leftist thought in America, a country which from Eugene Debs to the Vietnam War protests had a great deal of anti-imperialist and leftist currents. Add in the Islamophobic, militaristic wave after 9/11, codified in the Patriot Act, and we see how any idea of equality has been excised in the US since the 1980s. Furthermore, America doesn’t take pride in the end of Jim Crow as universally as one would expect. What’s certain is that the unofficial government line to the end of Jim Crow is that Blacks are “super-predators”, to quote Hillary Clinton (not Joe Biden, as is often erroneously claimed), and thus since the late 1980s the official government response to Black liberation has been domestic militarism, mass imprisonment and economic plundering: recall that the subprime housing crisis was built around bad housing loans to poor people, often Black. I include these trends to chart the start of a downfall from which there could be no return - the 2007 Great Financial Crisis - and here in 2024 we are reading about The Defeat of the West. Trumpism, with a totally anti-leftist White Trash class-traitor (if not culturally, certainly economically and - while I don’t mean it as a low blow - religiously, due to his conversion away from evangelism) at his side, will not bring about the rebirth of the US lower class, whatever people may hope, and is yet another step in the defeat of the West.

Todd chooses - counter-intuitively - the introduction of the university entrance Scholastic Aptitude Tests (known as the SATs) as the beginning of the end of American meritocracy: the rich still get their legacy admissions or simply donate their way in, while the grasping upper-middle class pays for SAT prep classes which the middle- and lower-classes cannot afford - thus the system is quite clearly rigged, whatever “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps”advocates like Vance can achieve occasionally.

It’s a novel choice, but it’s based on a claim that prior to the SATs the US was an educational meritocracy when women, Blacks, Native Americans and Jews and a small identity group known as “the poor” were long kept out universities. It’s main virtue is that it allows Todd to condemn America and liberal democracy as an oligarchy, something which is usually only found among socialists, and that makes this book from mainstream-accessing Todd important.

“But now comes the ultimate stage in the decay of American democracy, the end of the meritocratic system, the inward-looking nature of the upper classes, the transition to oligarchy. The privileged are tired of playing the meritocratic game, even if they come out on top.”

Todd concludes his first of three chapters on the US with the political reality of this American oligarchy, something which many Democratic Party supporters are only just realising:

“The renunciation of the principle of meritocracy has closed the democratic phase of American history. […] It’s this liberal oligarchy, worked through with nihilism, and not a liberal democracy which leads the West in its fight against Russian democratic authoritarianism,” finishes Todd, returning to one of his overarching theses: that Western liberal democracy no longer exists.

It’s a thesis which I have opposed for years, and Marx 170 years before that, because liberal democracy has always been an oligarchy, merely one with a slightly broader ruling class than the absolutism it replaced. It’s vital to realise that liberalism constantly awards itself “likes" for ending absolutism and “dictatorship” but that they refuse to admit that they are waging upper-class war against the average person. Contrarily, socialist democracy is “the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny,” to quote Trotsky on the importance of 1917. These are all historical facts.

Trump’s amazing luck in avoiding assassination, and his amazingly galvanising response to getting shot, don’t overshadow the fact that his policies are liberalist. The reason an elegy is needed for hillbillies in the US - while during this same era hillbillies in China, Iran, Cuba, etc., have seen astounding elevations to cultural and economic power (perhaps not for impoverished Cuba) - is liberalism. Somebody should tell the 39-year old Vance that, as he has time to change.

Todd’s next chapter will examine the decomposing and duplicitous economic basis of the reactionary political structure of the US, titled, “Deflating the American economy”.

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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, Mexico, South Korea, Switzerland, Tunisia 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