Introduction.
The world goes through revolutionary upheavals every two centuries or so and semi-revolutions every half century. The last one in the UK was in 1997 when Tony Blair acquired a mandate to secure the state’s total moral and social dominion over its people. In the U.S. Bill Clinton achieved the same thing. Their “third way” was based on the idea that the political elite knew better than the public what was good for them.
To avoid change being merely aspirational Tony Blair’s bourgeois socialist (1) elite knew that there would have to be some underpinning economic model that could pour funds into the British Treasury to finance the nation, generate moral renewal and deliver Blair’s New Jerusalem. Blair’s bourgeois socialists believed it would work because they did not really understand the long-term impact of the changes they were engineering. They were not economists.
The economic model that they developed was based on Government spending being used to boost economic growth and this it was believed would empower people to achieve their social and economic potential. In Abraham Maslow’s (2) terms people would ‘self-actualise’ or fulfil their personal ambition. The era of naïve economics and identity politics was born, to a fanfare of “things can only get better” by the band D:Ream.
The public were seduced by this model. Blair seemed like a nice guy and who could argue that in the UK public money had for decades been spent on health and welfare, and now it could achieve a multi-coloured kaleidoscopic Great Britain; a Britain shorn of reactionary forces like national pride, belief in the family, and personal responsibility. Who needs that stuff when the state is there to go beyond intervening from the cradle to the grave and can now usefully occupy itself spending public money so it can interfere with the public’s psychology too? These old ideas thought the bourgeois socialists would be consigned to the dustbin of history, just as bonded serfdom and illiteracy had been.
The only problem was that the economics did not stack up. So along with the Financial Crisis of 2007/8 the other consequences of this model has been growing wealth inequality plus the inability of the state to make good its 1997 social and welfare promises and a burden on the taxpayers of the present and future who pay to keep this system in existence.
This model is what we at Blue Revolution call the Secular Western hegemony or more simply “secular-westernism”. Secular-westernism will need a revolution to shift it. Not a violent revolution because violent revolutions are, like the revolutions in China and Russia, effectively a triumph of the state over the individual, albeit with an initially benign intention but in both cases a lot of killing.
A revolution will be needed because just like the aristocrats in the past, the modern big winners of the secular-western system, the politicians, bureaucrats, charity chiefs, and third sector organisations, the publicsectocracy as we call them, will not want to give up the power, status and wealth that goes with their elevated positions.
If you believe that today the hopeless attempt by western governments to extend democracy, promote welfare, international security and basic rights does not pass the sniff test, you may be right. So Please read on.
