Every political system has arisen in conflict with an older one. This also implies what it is resistant to. A few weeks ago, for example, I reminded you that the Western European system was constructed after the Second World War against the threat of communism. It had already been attacked by market liberals, it collapsed.
But what about contemporary liberal regimes? Propaganda tries to tell us that they were created in conflict with Soviet-style regimes. But in fact they never clashed with them. Liberal democracy grew up in the struggle against the Western European welfare state, against national solidarity, against a technological world view. That is the main opponent! If liberal democrats don’t mind “dictators”, they don’t mind brutal suppression of the opposition. That could be tolerated. Consideration, balancing the interests of different classes or sensible social policies are seen as intolerable.
But it also implies that the current regimes will be able to defend themselves quite effectively against what prevailed in Western Europe until the 1980s. And they are likely to be defenceless against entirely new models. This implies the hard part ahead – finding a model that takes as much as possible from the old while being completely new.
Intuitively, we have felt this all along, distinguishing between people and ideas of the past and the future.