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Description
From the critically acclaimed author of The Establishment, an excoriating take-down of Western hubris ā and the book that reveals why weāre really in the state weāre in. Almost everywhere we turn these days, thereās 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 itās gone mainstream. The thing is, the West is in decline, self-evidently so.
But the truth is that itās not migrants or Muslims or a woke mob which has brought the West to the edge of catastrophe. Itās 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 ā 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.
