What’s Wrong with the West in 2025? An Update to G.K. Chesterton’s 1910 Diagnosis, By James Reed

Jeffrey Tucker (link below) is right: if Chesterton came back today and saw Britain and the West in December 2025, he would not be shocked. He would simply open his 115-year-old book, point to page 187, and say, "I told you so."

Chesterton's core argument in What's Wrong with the World was brutally simple: A civilisation that abandons the transcendent moral principles of Christianity, will be ruled by whichever fashion happens to capture the educated elite at any given moment. England, he said, had already traded the Ten Commandments for the Trend of the Decade – first Puritanism, then Manchesterism, next would be some form of collectivism – and the aristocracy would administer all of them with equal enthusiasm because none of them were rooted in anything deeper than undergraduate opinion.

Fast-forward to 2025 and the prophecy is in neon.

In 2025 Britain, for example, is no longer "administering" Puritanism or laissez-faire. It is administering Therapeutic-Managerialist Neo-Collectivism – and doing it with the same breezy, principle-free confidence Chesterton predicted.

The symptoms are now so cartoonish they would embarrass a dystopian novelist:

A man is dragged from his home at 9:30 p.m. and locked in solitary for four hours because he reposted a swear-word meme about Hamas and Palestine (Pete North, September 2025).

A 72-year-old ex-soldier is visited by police for clicking "like" on a tweet that criticised local councillors.

The Crown Prosecution Service keeps a "non-crime hate incident" file on a woman who said, on Facebook, that biological sex is real.

The Online Safety Act 2023 is now law: Ofcom can fine platforms up to 10 % of global turnover if British users feel "harmed" by legal-but-awful speech.

Meanwhile, actual knife crime in London is at a six-year high and two-tier policing is no longer a conspiracy theory – it is admitted on the BBC by serving officers.

Chesterton's mechanism is playing out in real time: The educated political class – graduates of Russell Group universities, attendees of the same five summer festivals, readers of the same three news sites – decided sometime around 2015 that the highest moral good is no longer truth, or justice, or even equality, but emotional safety from offence. Once that fashion was set, every institution pivoted with the effortless grace of a weather vane.

The aristocracy (now the professional-managerial class) administers the new creed with gusto: Civil servants draft the speech codes, judges uphold them, police enforce them, and corporate HR departments compete to be more pious than the state. None of them believe they are oppressing anyone; they are merely "keeping people safe" – the same way 17th-century Puritans were "keeping people holy" and 19th-century Corn-Law repealers were "keeping people prosperous." The principle keeps changing; the administrative certainty never does.

Tucker's contrast with America still holds – but the gap is closing fast.

America retains three antibodies that Britain has almost entirely lost:

1.A revolutionary founding myth that is explicitly anti-managerial July 4, 1776, is still the national birthday. The story Americans tell themselves is not "wise elites gradually granted us rights" but "we threw the elites into Boston Harbor because rights come from God, not government." That story is corny, over-simplified, but still psychologically potent.

2.A written Constitution that is treated as quasi-scriptural. The First Amendment is not a gentleman's agreement; it is a covenant. British free-speech advocates quote Mill and Milton; Americans quote a 234-year-old sentence that begins "Congress shall make no law…" and they mean it like Romans meant the Twelve Tables.

3.A living religious culture that still tells a third of the population that there is a higher throne than Canberra, Washington or Brussels. When 70 % of Britons say they have no religion, the state becomes the only available source of ultimate meaning. When 70 % of Americans still pray, the government is permanently downgraded to middle management.

But even these antibodies are weakening. The same elite fashion that captured Britain is now working its way through American institutions: corporate DEI, campus speech codes, the post-2020 explosion of "disinformation" governance. The difference is speed, not direction. Britain is simply further down the same road.

So, what in 2025, is actually wrong with the West?

Chesterton's answer remains the correct one: We have unmoored ourselves from any transcendent order (religious or even robustly philosophical) and handed the steering wheel to a managerial class that mistakes its own emotional weather for the moral law.

The result is a civilisation that can jail you for a meme on Monday, open the borders to a million people on Tuesday, ban your petrol car on Wednesday, monitor your bank account for "hate" on Thursday, and jail you on Friday – all with the serene confidence that it is merely applying the latest best practice.

Nothing is defended on principle, so everything is negotiable – until the next elite consensus forms and the previous position becomes "literally violence."

Chesterton closed his book with a line that should be tattooed on every dissident's forearm in 2025:

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried."

Christianity gives a robust account of human dignity that places final authority outside the state and centralised power; hence the globalists oppose it tooth and nail.

That is what's wrong with the West. The rest is just symptoms.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/3-ways-that-americans-are-different-5951894