What Republicans and Democrats alike can learn from Oswald Spengler's "The Decline of the West"

If they don't, there are hungry bears out there who will have the final say

“For the Age has itself become vulgar, and most people have no idea to what extent they are themselves tainted.”

Thus wrote the German philosopher and historian Oswald Spengler in his two-volume classic The Decline of the West, published at the end of World War I.

Spengler, who has been ignored by the world’s educated elites for almost a century, largely because he systemically disassembles both of the long-warring ideological narratives of conservatism versus progressivism that have birthed the hyperpartisan toxicity currently stoking chaos at a planetary level, may have finally found his historical moment.

There are numerous other quips from Spengler’s work that can illuminate our current national as well as international situation.

For example, this one:

The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play.

Or this one:

What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears.

Or this:

Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect.

By my absolute favorite quote from Spengler is a rather ambiguous brainteaser:

History is direction—but Nature is extension—ergo, everyone gets eaten by a bear.”

Five weeks into the dizzying juggernaut of second Trump’s presidency, it seems increasingly evident there are more bears out there in the woods than either MAGA or its sworn enemies on the establishment left can possibly imagine.

And the bears are starting to lick their lips.

Our hyperpartisan idiot savants are convinced that they themselves are the “bears”, and that they will shortly, or in the bye-and-bye, have their feast.

On the left you have the prediction of famed Democratic consultant James Carville that the Trump administration’s bold policies will “collapse” within the next thirty days. “It’s collapsing right now,” he said. “We’re in the midst of a collapse.”

He was referring mainly to Musk and DOGE’s full-armored assault on the Washington bureaucracy and the administrative state, from which he surmised the public would quickly recoil in horror.

But just about the same time that Carville, who also confidently forecast that Kamala Harris’ would win the 2024 Presidential election, a Harvard-Harris poll cast substantial doubt on his prophecy about the Trump administration collapsing as well.

In the poll approximately four-fifths of respondents approved of DOGE’s effort, while over half – slightly more than actually voted for Trump last November - approve of what he is doing.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party in the poll received its lowest approval rating since 2018.

Bur MAGA triumphalism could very well prove premature.

During the campaign Trump boldly promised that he will curb inflation and bring a quick end to the war in Ukraine.

He didn’t leave the timetable vague at all for achieving these goals. He asserted it would be much sooner than later.

Since these promises were the mainstay of the agenda which helped him tip the balance among undecided voters, he will have to perform without allowing himself any extra time to repair loose ends.

His badmouthing of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky and suggestion that the besieged country was largely responsible for the bloody, protracted war has angered a lot of key conservative influencers who are critical to Trump’s new populist coalition.

These are not just old-style Beltway neocons, who dominated the George W. Bush administration, but until recently have been hard-core advocates for Trump and his policies. They include popular national radio talk show host Mark Levin, former Reagan speechwriter John Podhoretz, and the New York Post editorial board.

There is also the serious question of whether Trump, despite his vows, can easily bring down inflation.

As economists and whole generation of then young baby boomers learned in the 1970s, once inflation has stuck long enough to become sticky, it becomes increasingly hard to unstick it without throwing the economy into a tailspin.

The so-called Great Inflation of the Seventies ended in the summer of 1981 with one of the worst recessions America ever experienced. It persisted through 1982.

Finally, Musk’s sledgehammer tactics to reduce the federal deficit have run into a number of serious judicial obstacles, especially when it comes to data privacy, as well as pushbacks over DOGE directives from the very agency heads whom the Trump administration pushed recently through Congress.

The Trump administration is finally responding to what economists have been wringing their hands about for over a decade – the ballooning national debt.

The Bipartisan Policy Center ominously warns:

[The national debt] now surpasses $28 trillion, roughly equivalent to the nation’s entire economic output this year. The Congressional Budget Office projects that, absent action, widening deficits and growing interest on the debt will add another $20 trillion of debt over the next decade. At that rate, by 2050 debt levels will reach 155% of gross domestic product.

A Wall Street Journal op-ed asks: “Debt has always been the ruin of great powers. Is the U.S. next?”

Aside from direct entitlement payments mandated by law and vital to the well-being of America’s less affluent citizens, it is the comparably high-end professional salaries of the federal administrative state and the sprawling, if not frequently opaque, budgets sustaining its numerous administrative units that have become the ripe targets for any serious assault on the national deficit.

The Trump administration’s Musk-inspired wrecking crew understands this basic economic and political reality.

But in contrast with earlier government cost-reduction initiatives of previous conservative Republican administrations with mixed results (think Reaganomics during the 1980s), the imperative to push beyond whack-a-mole gambits and send in demolition squads rather than remodeling teams arises from an existential far more than an ideological motivation.

Everyone knows the budget needs to be slashed – today, not tomorrow. But hyperpartisan ruptures within the electorate and among their elected representatives make even the most minimal consensus inconceivable in the short run.

As any financial modeler will tell you, the real choice in crunching the numbers and offering a way forward is not between “good” and “bad”, but between “good” and “not as good”. It is over the margins for making decisions in the last category – as it is with “swing states” in national elections – that budget battles are either won or lost.

The true “existential” question in formulating national political policies and in contemplating the fate of nations as a whole these days is how to secure these delicate margins in such a way that they hold for a governing majority over time.

The seesaw effect of highly polarized constituencies winning thin electoral majorities, then relinquishing them in the next election, is one of the major causes of the generic political turmoil currently sweeping the planet and undermining a viable system of international order.

Populism is not some external pathogen injected into the arteries and sinews of an otherwise healthy and well-provisioned comity of world democracies.

It is certainly not some infection or inflammation triggered through “information warfare” engineered by malign autocratic actors (think “Russiagate”) aimed at degrading the moral sensibilities and communal values of the less educated and supposedly intellectually stunted segments of the populace.

These are the coarse prejudices and self-inflicted delusions of so many among the world’s multicultural elites.

Populism, regardless of how it may manifest itself, has become an authentic and serious alternative to the metastatic growth of the administrative state, abetted by the short-lived, post-Cold War “singularity” of progressive neoliberal hegemony that is slowly coming apart at the seams while sucking all life out of the very economic dynamism and cultural experimentation of the new “knowledge- based” capitalism to which it gave birth in the first place and has now become parasitically attached.

But the idea of “populism” can prove misleading even for its fiercest champions.

Populism is not some indivisible remainder once you split difference between the educated and the uneducated, or the haves and the have-nots.

What is happening now, according to Adam Tooze writing in Foreign Policy, is something even the conventional wisdom among certain contrarian pundits concerning a slow-boiling global “class war” gets wrong.

Tooze argues that the “class struggle”, as Karl Marx framed it, has little to do with the classical two-way tussle between the owners of the “means of production” (i.e., the capitalists) and the workers who “sell their labor” as a commodity at the lowest price point to fatten the wallet of the former.

For Tooze, the “class” division is three-way. But only two of the antagonists actually matter.

The true class war is between the those who make the money and those upon their money-making critically depends – the administrators, regulators, educators, and data prognosticators without whom knowledge-based capitalism would melt instantly away and be consigned to oblivion.

The real “proletariat”, who have increasingly been automated away or severely diminished in their fuctions, are by and large the economic detritus of the entire apparatus who, like street beggars since time immemorial, subsist on the largesse of their wealthier neighbors, except that such “wealth” increasingly is tantamount to the tax-funded remits of government agency employees, social service professionals, bureaucratic overseers, auditors, and of course the health care providers dependent on subsidized insurance premiums vital to supporting an aging and increasingly unhealthy population – taken as a whole, what we term the administrative state, or what Tooze refers to as the “professional managerial class” (PMC).

Tooze writes:

…you can’t understand the politics of the United States right now unless you acknowledge that there’s a third social class, what Barbara and John Ehrenreich called the Professional-Managerial Class, or PMC, whose members are credentialed by the education system, occupy positions of authority within the economy and society at large, and exercise control—directly, often—over working-class Americans. That starts at the beginning, in kindergarten or elementary school, where you have a college-educated person taking charge of working-class kids. By the time you get to elementary school and middle school, it is not just the parents but the children themselves who are making formative experiences that can shape subjectivity for life. In modern society, the PMC is everywhere, starting in the hospital where your kids are born and your parents die, from the folks who regulate what you can build in your front yard to those who run the human resources department where you work. The entire apparatus of managerialism is activated and managed by the PMC.

Trump and Musk represent the traditional “capitalist” class.

But, Tooze notes, by going to war with the PMC, who are mostly Democrats, the MAGA Republicans, who are largely led and financed by the elite business class, may be indirectly sabotaging its newfound alliance with the “third class” – the true working class.

The “proletariat” does not “want to be passive recipients of government benefits”. They wanted to participate in, and personally contribute to, a prosperous economy.

What they want instead is “a strong economy” in which they can personally prosper.

Tooze concludes:

There is a social ideal at work here, one that traces directly to the tripartite class structure of American society. The ultimate aspiration of many of the Trump working-class voters is self-employment because self-employment gives you the means to both assert independence and break out of the constraints—which are very material as well as cultural—of the professional middle class and its assumptions about norms and values.

But let’s get back to Spengler.

The “decline of the West” is not as much about the “wokeness” of the PMC nor the threat of economic recession. Nor is about the much feared but wholly fanciful temptation toward “fascism”.

It is about the devolution of the spirit of creativity and economic, not to mention cultural, innovation that the the enthusiasm for Trump in the last election reflects more than anything.

For all its alleged shortcomings, MAGA definitely has enthusiasm.

But enthusiasm without strategic smarts is a hidden IED ready to explode when someone takes even the smallest misstep.

Whether Trump is a con man as his detractors shriek – if he is, he is less of a con artist than the propagandists of the Biden administration were – is immaterial and remains to be seen.

Con artists are good at what they do because they have keen street intelligence.

As one of the most well-known mythical con artists – “Professor” Harold Hill in the Broadway play and film The Music Man famously put it – “you’ve got to know the territory”.

It’s not clear, however, than anyone yet does.

And if anyone doesn’t, the bears are waiting.