The New Class of intellectuals is getting nervous, as illustrated by the March 19, 2025, piece for The Atlantic, "A Battle for the Soul of the West," by Arash Azizi. He paints a vivid picture of a Western civilisation at war with itself.
He opens with a striking moment: President Donald Trump's recent (February 2025) White House clash with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky, a spectacle Azizi calls "great television" for Trump but a "horrifying realisation" for those watching the Euro-American alliance, forged in 1945, crumble. This isn't just diplomatic theatre, Azizi argues; it's a symptom of a deeper, existential struggle over the West's identity.
Azizi pits two camps against each other. On one side are the guardians of Enlightenment values—openness, pluralism, and liberal democracy—that have shaped the modern West. On the other are nationalists, fuelled by Trump's resurgence and Europe's far-Right wave, who scorn these ideals as weak. They push for a "civilisational ethos" grounded in Christianity, tradition, and exclusionary nationalism—a vision less tolerant, less global, and more rooted in a pre-modern reverence for authority. Azizi points to Peter Thiel, a Trump ally, who in 2007 dismissed the Enlightenment as a "long intellectual slumber," favouring a West of crusades and divine glory over democratic niceties. Thiel's backing of national conservatism and his nods to anti-liberal thinkers like Carl Schmitt give this stance intellectual heft.
Europe, Azizi notes, is a key battleground. He highlights the Patriots for Europe (PfE), a far-Right bloc now holding 86 seats in the European Parliament, including heavyweights like France's National Rally and parties in Dutch and Italian coalitions. Trump's return, Azizi suggests, has supercharged these groups, offering a transatlantic echo to their cause. Meanwhile, EU figures like Kaja Kallas advocate "strategic autonomy," bracing for a West less tethered to America. But Azizi insists this isn't just about geopolitics—it's a fight over the West's soul, with Trump and his ilk dismantling the liberal order that's held since World War II, he supposes.
The stakes, Azizi writes, are monumental. Trump's threats of trade wars and musings on imperialism signal the disruptive potential of this counterrevolution. The article ends on a tense note: the West's Enlightenment legacy is under siege from within, its future teetering between reason and a narrower, more authoritarian past.
Thus Azizi has draw an almost old time movie vision of world events, with the good guys, his New Class, with the white hats, supposedly defending Enlightenment values from the bad guys with the black hats, the nationalists. Only problem is he has got the narrative wrong. It is the nationalists in opposing globalisation and open borders who are the defenders of the West. Open borders, mass immigration and multiculturalism, has massively restricted basic freedoms, as the UK shows, freedoms that the nationalists seek to retore. It is the Leftists and globalists who have used lawfare to imprison people like Le Pen, democratic favourites, for merely doing that they all have done. The lawfare against Trump is another example, oozing corruption and injustice.
These sorts of articles are based upon what I call the Macbeth principle; to portray fair as foul, and foul as fair. It is an inverted reality.