https://archive.md/uQOjD
"We are living in an age of backlash to three decades of revolutions in
different realms. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the world saw the
liberalization of markets, the democratization of politics and the explosion of
information technology. Each of these trends seemed to reinforce the other,
creating a world that was overall more open, dynamic and interconnected. For
many Americans, these forces seemed natural and self-sustaining. But they were
not. The ideas that spread across the globe during this era of openness were
American, or at least Western, ideas, undergirded by U.S. power. Over the past
decade, as that power began to be contested, those trends began to reverse.
These days, politics around the world is riddled with anxiety, a cultural
reaction to years of acceleration.
The opposition to American power is easily visible in the geopolitical realm.
After three decades of unquestioned American hegemony, the rise of China and
the return of Russia have brought us back to an age of great power competition.
These nations, as well as some regional powers such as Iran, all seek to
disrupt and erode the Western-dominated international system that has ordered
the world in recent decades.
But this is not simply a response to the United States’ hard power; it is also
a reaction to the broad spread of Western liberal ideas. Russian President
Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Iran’s supreme leader,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are allied in one crucial respect: They believe that
Western values are alien to their societies and undermine their rule. Far more
worrying: There has developed within the Western world itself a negative
reaction to many of these same values.
The democracies of the West all face a rising tide of illiberal populism that
is skeptical of openness, globalization, trade, immigration and diversity. The
result has been that across the world we are living through a democratic
recession, rising tariffs and trade barriers, growing hostility to immigration
and immigrants, ever-expanding limits on technology and information access —
and even skepticism about liberal democracy itself."
Via
What Could Go Right?: Senegal’s U-Turn
https://theprogressnetwork.org/senegal-election-2024/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
