“I wrote in late February that we are seeing some kind of collapse in the free world. The evidence has accumulated with ominous frequency since then. Perhaps it should not be surprising. The intellectual incompetence and moral turpitude of the fourth estate was diagnosed right from the time Kraus warned against “the intellectual self-annihilation of mankind by means of its press.” Looking ahead to our own era, Gandhi predicted that even “the states that are today nominally democratic” are likely to “become frankly totalitarian” since a regime in which “the weakest go to the wall” and a “few capitalist owners” thrive “cannot be sustained except by violence, veiled if not open.” Vaclav Havel, celebrated as an anticommunist “dissident” in the West, actually argued in his essay “Politics and Conscience” (1984) that totalitarian systems in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe represented the future of the Western world; he warned against the power that operates “outside all conscience, a power grounded in an omnipresent ideological fiction which can rationalize anything without ever having to brush against the truth.””

"Today, each one of the assumptions that underpinned western policymaking and journalism for nearly three decades lie shattered. We live in a world where the future of democracy is not assured even in Europe and America, let alone India. Western-style capitalism has generated far too much inequality and now engenders a vicious backlash. Demagogues and despotic leaders are in the ascendant. Most disturbingly, white nationalism is yet again, after a long hiatus, the explicit ideology of mainstream political parties on both sides of the Atlantic.

At a time of widespread economic distress, ethnonationalists in the United States and United Kingdom as well as Germany, France, Hungary, Poland and Italy are united by their antipathy to immigrants, and targeting of institutions deemed insufficiently patriotic or indulgent of sexual, ethnic and racial minorities. This bleak scenario can be further elaborated. The main economic ideologies of endless growth and global prosperity have come up against environmental constraints and technological innovation, as well as built-in limits, and look unsustainable.

Editors and writers in hallowed periodicals were never mentally prepared for the collapse of their ideology of capitalist globalization and the rapid diminishment of Western power, legitimacy, and prestige. They were too attached, by national and class origin, and training, to the intellectual assumptions developed during the unchallenged hegemony of the West. Personally too implicated in the death-agonies of the old world, they cannot now feel the birth-pangs of the new. Indeed, they struggle to comprehend their own societies as these drastically change around them; they obsess over mere symptoms of a splintered social consensus such as “culture wars” and end up wringing meaning out of abstractions like “populism,” “democratic backsliding,” and “crisis of liberalism.”"