How to Save the West, by Ed West
What is our civilisation?
I sometimes wonder if my career and political leanings are partly a form of nominative determinism. If you wanted to create a fictional baddie whose insane Right-wing views led him to believe he was saving his superior, arrogant civilisation, you could hardly come up with a better supervillain name than someone with my surname.
Maybe that’s why I feel an attachment to the ‘West’ as an idea, a shared heritage, which shapes my views on Ukraine and my mixed feelings about closer ties with Europe. I love the West (me), but like Kenneth Clark talking about civilisation, I’m not sure I can define it – and I often feel some confusion or even cynicism when people claim to speak on its behalf (see also: British values). If you see yourself as saving the West, the chances are that some people believe they’re saving it from you.
Conor Fitzgerald recently wrote about the popularity of the Save the West discourse, pointing out that ‘Everyone who seeks to make a profession from channeling the populist instinct, or sees it as a part of their job to do so, talks about “The West” continually. We see it in JD Vance’s address to the Munich security in February 2025 where he argued a retreat from western values like freedom of speech was a greater threat to Europe than Russia; we see it in the recently published American National Security Strategy which states part of its aim as supporting “our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.”
‘We see it constantly in mass media from books (Charlie Kirk’s “How to Beat Woke and Save the West”, Liz Truss “Ten Years to Save the West”, Douglas Murray’s “The War on The West”) to YouTube videos… At the bottom of the barrel you have various statue-faced posters on Facebook and Twitter with names like Revenge of the West or Save the West who exist to monetise pornographically demoralising short-form video content on the collapse of European identity.’
Many on the Right do genuinely believe that the West is under threat, and with good reason; in contrast, for liberals such as Francis Fukuyama, it is the national conservatives who more likely threaten the West, both by their rejection of tolerance and human rights, and their at-best ambivalence towards the Kremlin – ‘the West’s’ great enemy.
