We live in a deeply serious time with deeply unserious leaders.
Historian Niall Ferguson has written that the “extreme violence of the twentieth century” was precipitated by three preconditions: “ethnic conflict, economic volatility, and empires in decline.” It is difficult not to see such preconditions repeating themselves in this century. The West is currently tearing itself apart over concerns about birth rate, immigration, and multiculturalism. Economic volatility is raging: after a decades-long reshifting of manufacturing away from the West and a reorientation toward finance and service, the hollowing out of the Western energy sector in pursuit of utopian environmentalism – all punctuated by the Great Recession, the covid mini-depression, and now sky-high rates of inflation — the global economy sits on a razor’s edge.
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