By Victor Davis Hanson, The Daily Signal | December 30, 2025
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Everybody is worried about the status and future of Western civilization.
That’s a broad term, but it mostly denotes what is now Europe, the United States, and North American Canada, the former domains of the British Anglophonic empire, and I mean, specifically, New Zealand, Australia, Britain, Canada, etc., again, and then, more importantly, the Westernized countries, mostly in Asia, and that would be Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan.
And they are in a period of crisis, decline. And what would be the symptoms? We all know what they are. The fertility rate in these countries is falling drastically. People do not want to raise children. They want to satisfy their appetites. They don’t wanna put up with them. They don’t have the money, they feel.
But the fertility rate in these Asian Westernized countries is below 1.5. And Europe is about 1.39. United States is the best, except for Western Israel. It’s about 1.7.
In addition to that, they’ve made horrendous choices by falling prey to ideological mantras about green energy, and they’ve turned their back on efficient fusion, efficient nuclear energy, hydroelectric, natural gas, instead have invested in wind and solar. And that has been expensive, inefficient, and has priced them out of the global market, in many cases.
In addition to that, they’re unarmed. They have not even spent, until recently, 2%, Europe. Even the United States’ Navy is not what it was during the Reagan period.
And when you add up infertility, that’s what it is, and you add up the bane of green energy, and you add being disarmed, it really can’t withstand any other pressures. But there are pressures.
We have open borders in the West, and it’s a very funny type of open borders. We have millions of people who want to come in illegally to the United States and into Europe. But guess what? They don’t wanna fully assimilate, integrate anymore. They want to create their enclaves that are antithetical to the very society they demand to stay in.
And that manifests itself in people in Europe trying to cancel Christmas, even though that is a Western tradition, and they wanted to come into a Western country, or people in Los Angeles waving the flag of Mexico, they don’t want to go back to, and burning the flag of America, they insist on staying. That’s incoherent.
I could go on with these symptoms, but they all point to a period, supposedly, of decline. But all is not lost. There are counterrevolutions, and the counterrevolutions are very strange because they’re occurring in places where sophisticated elite Westerners look down upon.
In the case of Europe, it’s Eastern Europe. It’s Hungary, it’s Poland, it’s the Czech Republic, it’s Romania, it’s the new post-Soviet states. In the United States, it’s the red states, many of them part of the supposed illiberal, old Confederacy. And what’s that counter? And also, places in pockets like Wyoming or Utah or Idaho.
And what do they have in common, the Eastern Europeans and the red states in America? They are saying not yet. Not yet. We’re not done yet. We’re going to go back and find a period of renewal. And we know what that renewal is because we’ve seen what you do in Western Europe, and we’ve seen what you do in the blue states. Your paradigm doesn’t work, and when you know it doesn’t work, you infringe on free speech. You call it hate speech or disinformation. And we know you now, we’ve seen this side of you, the one-eye jack.
So, we’re gonna offer a different paradigm. Instead of atheism and nihilism and agnosticism, we’re gonna go back to a Judeo-Christian tradition with tolerance for other religions. We’re gonna go back to the nuclear family. We’re gonna go back to honoring the role of women, not just as professionals, which is wonderful and great, but also as mothers of two, three, four children. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, that’s the linchpin of civilization.
And we’re gonna rearm. President Donald Trump may say he can bring back the battleship, Europe may say they can spend 5%, but we’re not going to just roll over yet. That is red state America and Eastern Europe. And more importantly, we’re gonna restore free speech.
So, we’re gonna discuss these things and we’re gonna close our borders. There’s gonna be legal-only immigration. And we do not want you coming into Europe unless you want to assimilate, integrate, and be fully European.
That’s what is happening in Eastern Europe. And the same is true in red states. And the question then is, what’s this all about? It’s a verdict for the future of Western civilization.
We’ve had the revolution for 50 years, but we haven’t seen a counterrevolution to the degree that’s taking place. Western European elites in the former British Commonwealth and blue state elites all are very critical of the Yahoos in Eastern Europe and the Yahoos in the red states. But only for a while because their paradigm is collapsing as we speak. And the people who are gonna save Europe are the people who they thought they were embarrassed of.
It’s quite ironic, but it’s also a hopeful time for Western civilization.
Victor Davis Hanson, a senior contributor for The Daily Signal, is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and host of "The Victor Davis Hanson Show."
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