Almost everywhere we turn these days, there’s talk of a West in decline. Our jobs, our values, our past are all under attack, in the face of which we have become immersed in self-loathing, gone weak at the knees: the West needs to be Made Great Again. We know where this toxic narrative comes from: the nationalist, nativist Right. And now it’s gone mainstream. The thing is, the West is in decline, self-evidently so. But the truth is that it’s not migrants or Muslims or a woke mob which has brought the West to the edge of catastrophe. It’s good, old-fashioned hubris. In this blistering new book, Owen Jones explores how, amid the triumphalist sugar rush that came with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West came to believe that its rule, its economic order, its moral values, would endure for ever – and how, over a quarter-century, this brittle self-mythologising narrative collapsed in on itself. From Afghanistan and Iraq, to the economic crash of 2008 and Gaza today, he takes us on a journey to show how the West went from scoring what it believed was its final victory, to being engulfed in an existential crisis of its own making. And how, along the way, it fashioned an ugly new story: that this was the fault of the most vulnerable groups in society, rather than a power-hungry, venal ruling class. Today, as the Atlantic alliance struggles to hold itself together, The Fall of the West exposes how a generation of Western elites bent on power and self-enrichment at any cost fatally overreached itself, and argues that, if we are to find the solutions to our age of crisis, we must first understand the real reasons for how the West lost it.
