It’s impossible not to agree with Greg Sheridan’s overall thesis, but much of the problem he identifies with Western society and culture stems from leadership in recent decades that time and again has proven itself to be both dishonest, incompetent and incurious.
The torpor, inertia and wrong calls are legend. The latest on revelations of incompetence with respect to our total dependence on China should provide a pivot point.
It was the political leadership that went to war in Iraq for example, on the back of the WMD lie and it was political leadership again that allowed banks to play fast and loose and manipulate and bundle mortgages in the US which precipitated the financial tsunami of the GFC.
In Australia and throughout the West, it’s a totally gutless, supine and inadequate political class, that Donald Horne in The Lucky Country, identified as ‘second rate people’ that has allowed universities and national broadcasters to become ground zero for the proliferation of cultural Marxism, post modernism, anti-Western civilisation instruction and the overall societal breakdown Greg Sheridan highlights.
Is it any wonder people are tired, jaundiced and cynical toward political authority and the academic and expert class who time and again get it wrong and demonstrate they are simply not up to it.