Episode Transcript
It is January 11, 2024, and the weather in Paris is transitioning from a mild autumn to a colder, rainier late fall—typical for the city- so you'd want a warm coat and an umbrella if you are out and about. More significantly, and uniquely, Emmanuel Todd's book, La Défaite de l'Occident" (The Defeat of the West) has just been published in French, but oddly not in English.
The book will blow another gale of controversy in Western intellectual circles because of its subject matter, title, and focus which is America, that he defines as the apex of Western Civilisation.
So, very few understand or agree with his thesis which rests on existential philosophical frameworks of the rise of nihilism, evident decline of Christian values, and the attendant shared values of the West.
Less of a prophecy, many claim, and more a work of fiction because look at the reality.
America at the height of its hegemonic power and while facing new challenges from a rising China and Russia, and possibly India although that is debatable, is still the greatest economic and military power in the world. Yet, his track record bears up scrutiny so what he says should not be dismissed so lightly.
This book builds on his 1976 book, "La Chute Finale: Essai sur la décomposition de la sphère soviétique" (The Final Fall: An Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere), in which Todd argued that the USSR was heading toward collapse due to deep structural issues while the rest of the West, including the apparent Intelligence Agencies, were arguing the opposite.
At the time (1976), most Western analysts believed the Soviet Union was stable and enduring. Todd's prediction seemed radical, but by the late 1980s, his analysis proved prescient when the USSR faced economic stagnation, nationalist movements, and eventual dissolution in 1991.
Emmanuel Todd’s prediction of the Soviet Union’s collapse was rooted in his unique interdisciplinary methodology, combining demography, anthropology, history, and sociology. Unlike traditional political or economic analyses, Todd focused on long-term structural indicators that revealed systemic weaknesses.
This was followed by an even more acute analysis in his book, “After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order" (Après l’Empire, 2002), where he applies his methodology to predict the decline of U.S. global dominance, much like he did with the USSR.
This is one year after 9/11, and America is at its apex as a hegemon. It has launched the War on Terror, bombed Afghanistan to breaking point, is preparing to invade Iraq to re-make West Asia to benefit Israel, and no one dares to raise a hand against its overreach.
So, you can understand the why Todd’s analysis was so quickly dismissed. However, a closer look would have revealed the fissures that two decades later are indeed behind America’s fall from its central position.
He put this down Economic Hollowing Out. The U.S. relies on debt-driven consumption and financial speculation rather than production. Trade deficits (especially with China) signal dependency, not strength. The dollar’s dominance is unsustainable long-term (a prediction now playing out with BRICS de-dollarization).
Military Overextension. The post-9/11 wars (Afghanistan, Iraq) revealed strategic incompetence and wasted resources. Loss of Ideological Appeal. American democracy and capitalism no longer inspire the world as they did in the 20th century.
Demographic and Social Decay. Rising inequality and the erosion of the middle-class mirror late-stage Soviet stagnation.
Yet it is all that but we would like to add our own thoughts as we laid them out in Excluded Part 1, How the American Elite Founded a Country for Themselves.
Quote, ‘Yet, one thing that is always ignored is the role of the human element in the Fall.
The reason is counter intuitive.
The Fall begins just as the Empire reaches its zenith, thinks it is unchallengeable and will last forever.
In their hubris, feeling untouchable, the Fall accelerates when the elite stop pretending that its system was anything but what you see.
All the fine words about civilization, the purported ideals it stands for, the ostensible moral virtues that underpinned its bloody actions, are shown to be merely tools to bind and exploit.
Thus, it reveals fully whose interests it works for, how it does what it does, who gains, and who loses from it.
This revelation begins the process of stripping it of its legitimacy, hollowing it from the inside in ever decreasing and powerful circles, while those exploited within and without its geographic boundaries, who have been yoked, begin the process of overthrowing the constraints that previously bound them.
Once the process gathers pace, the question is not why, but when?
This is America today. End quote.
America is collapsing and like a building with its foundations crumbling, the tremors of imminent fall are being portrayed as normal settling of land in a world of moving tectonic plates.
But for many of us who can divert our eyes from the given Western narrative, like Todd, we can cite so many reasons to agree with his fundamental thesis.
Yet we argue that while his prediction is true, his analysis is too highbrow and based in non-reality in which he states America is the apex of Western civilisation and a civic society.
We would argue that, unlike him, we do not regard America as the apex of Western Civilisation (If that even means something), and we certainly do not accept his definition of it as a civic society.
Do you define a civilisation by the big ideas it attaches to itself or the daily realities of its people? How do you define a civic society when it does not work for its citizens?
We would further argue that his own 2025 addendum outlined later, regarding Trump and the application of DOGE, reinforces our point.
Big ideas, no matter how well expressed, always follow their own logic and in the process separate from the reality from which they originated.
No where is this truer than where the idea and its scope is the greatest, as in Todd’s assertion which is, in fact, telling us five hundred years of Western hegemony is ending.
Yet, while his overall analysis is acute and absorbing, his explanations for the coming defeat are, in essence, part of a resident view. This view, understandably incredibly West-centric and located in one commonality the West can legitimately claim, Christianity, is false.
This fallacy is rooted in, as we say, Western thinking that propounds the notion that the West's position rested in some greater morality and intellectual thought and is failing because it is no longer what it used to be.
We are in agreement with is broad analysis and conclusions but differ in the framing.
Amongst the reasons for the defeat the fact that secularization has left Western societies weak and divided.
He is right in the sense the demographically Western nations used to be more homogenous than countries like India and China which, historically, have had greater diversity in ethnic groupings, language and culture, thus had a greater sense of unity in action.
Yet to suggest that somehow being Christian provided the glue is too great a stretch. The British takeover of India was not great philosophical enterprise driven by the unity of participants because of their religious background. It was purely a lust for wealth for which Christianity was used as a cover to enshrine its control and differentiate itself from the conquered later on. If you had asked the East India Company officers and soldiers what drove them, you can be reassured Christian values would not have featured high in the list of answers.
The drug barons were not on a Christian mission in China but a journey of exploitative treasure hunt.
Empires do not come into existence for the greater good. They are a project by the elite for the elite. The basis of all empires is greed.
While individuals, organisations, and even countries may clothe their actions in moral or humanitarian garbs, think about how human beings are capable of behaving (including yourself within a particular system) and things will become clearer. No one is untouched by this aspect of humanity.
The form that self-interest takes may vary – social, military or economic – but it really is that basic.
Take a look at India, where a deeply philosophical Hindu culture that worships all life, mistreating a cow in public will bring opprobrium, houses the most uncivic of societies.
Quite simply, what a society says about itself does not reflect the actuality of life.
What about the wider forces in play in Asia, and the rest of the world, which are moving on regardless of the West's attempts to stop them?
Let's look at America because his main focus is the hegemon and by his definition represents the apex of Western Civilisation.
Most important is the idea of shared commonality and its loss that Todd attributes the coming collapse to.
Even in a country claiming to be Christian like the USA, there are many strands of Christianity, including cults, that see the world differently.
If he means, a shared set of values that are rooted in the Christian faith, we will ask what that means in centuries of European wars based around the Protestant and Catholic strands? Where does the Eastern Orthodox Church stand in this equation? What about the fact that so-called Christian nations have constantly been at war with each other, and perpetrated two world wars, mass murders, genocides, and atomic annihilation on a nation?
How does that sit with Christian values?
Arguing about the apex of Western civilisation is like arguing that Pax Romana actually existed. It was Roman propaganda to hide its murderous empire building.
America, a nation that is a product of colonialism, built on exclusion of the majority of its people from its democracy and wealth, where the only important thing is material gain, has been nothing but a pursuit of money and power, to make even more money.
So, to explain its decline and fall to the loss of some higher ideals is nonsense.
You have to look at the reality beyond the high-fluting claims that it makes for itself.
What does it mean in a country with a history of systemic exclusion, violence and oppression like America, to today where it is actively supporting a genocide?
The fundamental point about America he misses is that it has never been a united country.
The very narrow definition on which it was founded, 'White, Anglo-Saxon English-speaking Protestantism,' alone ensures that no country founded along those lines can ever be united.
Further, in our thinking, unlike him, we do not believe America represents the summit of Western civilisation and is a civic society.
Whilst America has achieved the apex of economic and military power, we would argue it is not a civic society. It is an oligarchy and a plutocracy.
In 2005, at the apex of the mortgage-backed securities bull run, Citibank published 'The Plutonomy Symposium' report for the eyes only of its wealthy clients.
It outlined their belief that the American economy had morphed into a plutonomy, that is, an economy driven by or that disproportionately benefits wealthy people.
If anything, this process has gathered pace in the post-2008 America where successive Quantitative Easing (money printing by the Federal Reserve) and tax cuts for the wealthy has ensured that increasingly not only the levers of the economy, but the economy itself, has been privatised.
Citibank posited that, "our whole plutonomy thesis is based on the idea that the rich will keep getting richer," as long as "the rest us" could be kept in the dark about its existence, its role, and its over-arching control.
One of the leading banks in a country that claims to be 'the world's greatest democracy' was revealingly not warning its wealthy clients that their economic capture was putting even the appearance of democracy in peril but rather democracy, if it became really representative, would put their wealth grab at risk.
So, no surprise, Citibank saw the most potent threat to this elite economy would be societies demanding a more 'equitable' share of wealth.
While this analysis was correct, the answer that it would come through democracy was a wolf-whistle. The history of America conclusively proves that democracy as currently implemented is little or no barrier to creating an oligarchy that controls all the levers of wealth and power, and, therefore, the basis on which democracy works.
A civic society, in the world's richest country, would be one where the government actively ensures public welfare through strong institutions like universal healthcare, education, housing, infrastructure, and social services.
The neglect and absence of all these frameworks, because it was what proudly separated European nations from the rest of the world, mean it cannot be placed at the apex of Western civilisation, if such a thing even exists, or is something we should discuss after change has swept what it represented, away.
Europe, with its diversity, political, cultural and economic frameworks, until the last thirty years when it gave up its independence, is a better exemplar.
Norway is a more apt reflection of what a civic society can look like.
In what reinforces our thesis even more, that America is a country without a shared equal identity amongst its people, which militates against Todd’s key point, we need only quote him in his recent update, as he exposes the underlying reasons for Trump’s use of Doge to attack Federal Workers.
This, also to us, undermines his previous points about apex America and civic society.
Quote, “When one thinks about the United States and what moves Americans, when one doesn’t understand what’s going on in the US, one should always think about the racial issue, about the (white) obsession with the status of Black people. The opposition to the Federal State is not an economic policy, it’s a fight against DEI policies, intended to promote “Diversity, Equality and Inclusion”. It’s a fight, in fact, against Black people: to fire federal agents, for instance, is to fire a proportionally higher number of Black people. The Federal State has historically protected Black people and provided jobs for them. So, Musk’s Trumpism is also an attempt to destroy the Black middle class.” End quote.
Shades of the 1921, Tulsa Race Massacre, without guns but the same aim.
To stop an independent black consciousness to develop.
This is how it works. While the attack appears economic, in the sense of losing your job affects your daily life, it also has the aim of making black people less conscious of their recently, more empowered identity.
Without money and time, you not only have lost the tools with which to stand up for yourself, you are more easily marginalised into acceptance.
We would reiterate what is one of the prime points of our series, Excluded, is that America always swings back to its resident mindset, MAGA, being a prime example.
It also gives a free pass to those in the populace, 'the colonialist frontier mindset,' which is not confined to a particular class, who want to contribute little or nothing for the greater good.
Take this abstract from an article in Louder magazine this month (August 2025) that describes the aftermath of the plane crash that killed members of the American rock band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, in 1977, ‘Looters reached the site, pilfering the pockets of the dead and the living alike. By dawn almost three thousand people had come to the crash zone – and the carcass of the plane had been picked clean.’
Tell us, is this the height of Western civilisation that Todd speaks of? Is this what happens in a civic society of Christian values because we know that many of those robbing ghouls would describe themselves as fervently Christian?
So, our firm philosophical argument is opposite to that of Emmanuel Todd.
America is not collapsing because it has lost sight of values that made it great but because it has never espoused those values, and in direct contrast, clearly stands for the exact opposite. Its success grew out of representing the most extreme form of colonialism when colonialism was the overriding and most powerful system in the world, industrialisation its greatest turbo-charged weapon, because it was a country funded absolutely on the basis of colonialism. It is its DNA.
America is collapsing because the colonial system is coming to an end. The technology and the attendant tools that helped enforce it are no longer in hands of the colonialists.
America’s coming fall is due to the inherent internal contradictions it rests on. It is collapsing from within as all empires do. Problem is that those contradictions are not only revealed fully but are now working overtime. The very real cognitive dissonance that the American people live with, and was imposed on the wider world, has had its mask ripped off.
American does not have the sectional deep state swamp that its shielded accusers sometimes say it has.
The whole country is a swamp.
An out-of-control oligarchy. An elite without any decency, moral or social values, prevalent throughout its short history, that thinks it is untouchable. Think Caligula, think Epstein. Think Crassus, think Trump. Think Coliseum, think Reality TV, Marvel and DC Universe. Think Rome burning, think America as an inescapable mire into which everything is sinking.
The USA is collapsing because of hubris. It is no longer even hiding what it is, a voracious and exploitative system leader, and the world now fully understands how it works. They need to protect themselves from it.
Look at the people in power. Unqualified, incompetent coterie of the privileged.
But let’s go back to November 6, 2024, Washington DC.
The weather is chilly. Donald J. Trump has been elected the 47th President of the United States, completing one of the most improbable political resurrections in American history. This has completed the most expensive electoral cycle in American history in which billions of dollars, much of it dark money from vested interests, has been spent to buy what passes for American democracy.
Your vote, if you are an ordinary American, will have absolutely no impact on the policies and laws implemented by Capitol Hill.
The whole cycle is a charade. A game of smoke and mirrors. All this while America claims to be the world’s greatest democracy.
The amount of money involved in the American electoral process effectively shuts out real alternatives and ensures that the chosen are chosen. Those with different views who do get through invariably find themselves locked in, and locked out, by the two-party system.
Another of the great ironies of democracy as practiced in the USA and the UK, and not unintentionally, is that all governments elected represent the minority of the population.
While the electorate has increased in two hundred years to encompass the majority of the population of voting age, the electoral system of exclusivity, first past the post (mimicking horse racing, called the 'sport of kings' and reducing it a competition for power rather than a representative means to serve the people), has remained in place to ensure that power stays within the group who have always had it.
Yet, at the same time America has continued to present itself as 'greatest democracy in the world' in line with its ongoing self-mythologizing.
Yet the cracks that are emerging in the system, domestically and internationally, have long been recognised and anticipated by the elite who are in charge of the status quo.
Therefore, ensuring the current system stays unchallenged at home has gone hand-in-hand with the regressive policies of the last forty years.
This has included, in the USA -
" Complete hijacking of the narrative and the mediums that disseminate it,
" The Patriot Act (appropriately misleading),
" Mass, domestic surveillance by the NSA, big tech (Google, Amazon, Facebook and others) in service to the Establishment they are a part of,
" Human rights abuse of immigrant children,
" Militarised police force (the budget of New York police is over $5.6 billion which is greater than the military budget of Vietnam),
" National Guard as shock troops,
" Several secretive law enforcement units,
" Secret trials,
" Attack Press Freedom by arresting/detaining journalists,
" Increasingly politicised FBI,
" A subservient mainstream media,
" Guantanamo,
…and abroad through a vast network of…
" Over 800 military bases,
" Extraordinary Rendition
" Secret Prisons
" Illegal Killing Teams in nations not officially at war with America
" Drone warfare
" A rampant CIA with a budget of approx. $30+ billion, not far off the military budget of South Korea, the world's tenth largest, and a country still technically at war with North Korea,
… which naturally reinforce ongoing wealth and power grab.
Yet the definitions, the words used, the institutions set up, do not matter.
It is the everyday reality of peoples' lives and the devastating effect it is having on people everywhere, and also the planet, that provides the best argument against the system we are in.
The system that America largely controls and represents.
The world we are in today of climate calamity, biodiversity decimation, raging inequality, declining life expectancy, industrial scale tax avoidance, endemic corruption as a way of life, off-shore parking of trillions of dollars, declining middle class and working class incomes, infrastructure collapse, unsustainable private debt, barbaric hedge funds, massive tax cuts for the wealthy, unlimited printing of money which is then funnelled to the elite, and endless, profit-driven wars that are feeding extremism is a direct result of a reinforcement of the values that have characterised America since its inception.
This out-of-time mindset is increasingly at odds with the world that requires common action locally, nationally and internationally, unmotivated by profit alone and the need to work for the greater good of the people and our planet.
Thus, as is becoming clear to people around the world, but not yet in America, that it is anomaly, a rogue nation that stands in the way to a better world. That better world also awaits the American people.
Change in a nation that requires status quo is an existential struggle.
What has always been missing in America is a conversation about what being its citizen entails in civic terms, both the benefits and responsibilities it brings, because it is not in the interests of the elite to establish these tramlines. Doing so would tie them into a broader framework than their self-interest.
The American Constitution, and the democracy it propounds, in fact is a legal fiction, in the sense, that its amendments are assertions that are accepted as true for legal purposes, even though they may be untrue or unproven.
Yet it is vital for the elite to condition the people to accept a certain written framework for their country.
It is there in black and white.
It legitimises and frames what is taking place.
It is little surprise that so many countries around the world have taken on a 'democratic guise' to legitimise their illegitimate regimes in recent years of American hegemony.
Often aided and abetted by Democratic and Republican political strategists, part of what is dubbed the 'Democracy Industrial Complex,' who arrive together in private jets, ten-thousand-dollar suits, handmade silk dresses to offer their very expensive services in the cause of 'democracy' just as they do 'at home.'
They, the undemocratic, have learnt the American lesson well.
Follow the American laid yellow brick road to the best democracy that money can buy.
America today represents the most openly corrupt manifestation of a nation state in all its political, social and philosophical frameworks. It is a system built on lies. It reflects the nadir of what is presented as Western Civilisation because it fails on every level including basic humanity.
It is a grotesque parody of what a country should be with a completely unrepresentative and unfit elite running all its major institutions for self-interest.
Europe is collapsing for abandoning its own social and intellectual values to American dominance. That is where we, as Brits and Europeans, agree with Emmanuel Todd on the collapse.
We may be reaching the end of one history. Unlike Francis Fukuyama, we would respectfully suggest, this means we are moving into another.
What do you think?
Your view of the world we are living in is important as you must help construct it.
