A Storm in the West: The Liberal Intellectual Paradigm Is Broken

Alastair Crooke, 24 May 2025

Paper presented at ‘Transforming the World: Problems and Prospects’, XXIII International Likhachev Scientific Readings, St Petersburg University of Humanities and Social Sciences, 22-23 May 2025

Last year in St Petersburg, I asked the question: Will the West come out of its cultural war as a more amenable potential partner? Or will the West disaggregate, and resort to bellicosity in an effort to hold things together? ^[i]

Well, that was then. The ‘counter-revolution’ is now underway in the form of the Trump ‘Storm’. And the West already has come apart: Project Trump is turning America upside down -- and in Europe, there is crisis, desperation and a fury to overturn Trump and ‘all his works’.

Is this then ‘it’? The anticipated revolt against ‘Progressive’ cultural imposition?

No. This is not the extent of the creeping, thunderous changes underway in the US. Those are provoking far more complicated political shifts. It will not be some courteous red versus blue affair. For there is yet another ‘shoe’ to drop -- beyond the MAGA revolution.

The real action in the US is not happening in seminars at Brookings or in op-eds in the New York Times. It is happening backstage, out of sight; beyond the reach of polite society, and mostly off-script. America is undergoing a transformation more akin to what befell Rome in the age of Augustus.

Which is to say, the main happening is the collapse of a paralytic élite order and the consequent unfolding of new political projects.