Socialist political leaders have recently made substantial gains in the American political system, especially in urban areas and cities like New York, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Burlington (Vermont), South Fulton (Georgia), Cheektowoga (New York), Richmond (California), Allegheny County (Pennsylvania), and in congressional districts in New York, Colorado, and elsewhere following in the footsteps of New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who some speculate will run for the White House in 2028.

Recent polls suggest that younger Americans favor socialism over capitalism, and 61 percent of Democrats say that they are more likely to vote for socialist candidates. Politico reported late last year that “the socialist brand is on the rise” in America. Fox News reports that “Socialism is gaining ground with voters.” (RELATED: Yes, They’re Communists, and Yes, They’re Lying About It. For Now.)

[A] “new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman…”

Socialist political victories and favorable polling among citizens of the most powerful and important country in Western Civilization raise the specter of a Spenglerian decline of the West. The German philosopher Oswald Spengler wrote his massive two-volume work The Decline of the West during and after the First World War. Influenced by the ideas of Goethe and Nietzsche, and anticipating arguments later made by Arnold Toynbee in his epic A Study of History, Spengler sensed the beginnings of a Western cultural crisis emerging from the war. “Cultures are organisms,” he explained, “and world-history is their collective biography.” “Culture,” he continued, “is the prime phenomenon of all past and future world-history,” and “great Cultures accomplish their majestic wave-cycles” when they “appear suddenly, swell in splendid lines, flatten again and vanish.” And the elements of culture — science, religion, art, social life, economy, and politics — “fulfill themselves and die down … in all Cultures.”

Spengler wrote that every culture produces its own civilization. “Civilization,” he explained, “is the inevitable destiny of the Culture.” The principal problem that the West was living through, according to Spengler, was the “world-city,” which he described as producing a “new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.”

The world-city and its inhabitants have an

uncomprehending hostility to all the traditions representative of the Culture (nobility, church, privileges, dynasties, convention in art and limits of knowledge in science), the keen cold intelligence that confounds the wisdom of the peasant, the new-fashioned naturalism that in relation to matters of sex and society goes back far beyond Rousseau and Socrates to quite primitive instincts and conditions.

The defining feature of the West’s cities is the cosmopolitanism of their intelligentsia, who are “timeless, a-historic, literary men, men not of destiny, but of reasons and causes, men who are inwardly detached from the pulse of blood and being” and anti-nationalistic. Spengler describes them as “men at home in a world of truths, ideals, and Utopias; bookmen who believe that they can replace the actual by the logical, the might of facts by an abstract justice, Destiny by Reason.” They also exhibit what Nietzsche called the “will to power.” The political and geopolitical success of the cosmopolitan city dwellers “means the historical abdication of the nation in favor, not of everlasting peace, but of another nation.”

After exposure to the anti-Western worldviews of Mayors Mamdani, Wilson, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, and other successful political socialists, it is clear that Spengler in The Decline of the West was describing the socialists of his time… and of ours.

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