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Modernity is inimical to Christian living and the undiluted Faith.
– Gary Potter
The Twilight of Empire
And I will give children to be their princes, and the effeminate shall rule over them.
– Isaiah 3:4
Depending on circumstance, habitual optimism can be both an American virtue and an American vice. Currently, there is a pervading atmosphere of misplaced political optimism regarding the Trump administration’s policies among many Catholics. I say misplaced, not only because of the false hope in Liberalism that it assumes and engenders, but because it distracts Catholics from taking advantage of one of the great potential benefits of the Trump administration – an afforded ‘breathing-space’ opportunity to think strategically about long-term Catholic political action.
One of the late-Bishop Williamson’s favourite phrases was: “It’s over.” As Dr Alan Fimister has pointed out, the Trump phenomenon is not a herald of recovery, much less a ‘golden age,’ it is a symptom of terminal decline. Trump has been described as a personality for the elite to ‘sell’ the diminishment of the American Empire to the population in a palatable manner.
To understand this inevitable twilight of Empire, it is helpful to consider that paradigmatic case of imperial collapse – the Fall of the (Western) Roman Empire, from the crisis of the third century through to the deposition of the last emperor in Rome in 476 AD. This complex decline can be summarised thus: fiscal and demographic implosion with chronic currency debasement and large-scale barbarian inflows. The American Empire, and the Occidental nations more broadly, clearly exhibit all four of these major horsemen of civilisational calamity.
Firstly, the demographic winter is already too late to reverse before massive architectonic forces are felt throughout the Liberal welfare states of the West. The median age of women in nearly all western nations is now beyond child-bearing age (see figures 1 & 2). Even with radical pro-natalist policies of the kind proposed by conservatives who admire such incentives in Hungary, (which has only managed to raise its birth rate to 1.5 despite devoting 5.5% of GDP to family support,[1]) the trend now cannot be reversed before the onset of massive systemic shocks. Of course, as Catholics we know that these afflictions are, and will be, just since they are the result of the suicidal choices that the multitude of the western populations made when they embraced the Sexual Revolution and repudiated the family as the fundamental cell of society.
It is not possible to reverse this last catastrophe [the Sexual Revolution] by legislative fiat. It requires grace and conversion and that requires a restoration of faith and discipline within the Catholic Church. Oral contraceptives created a culture of ubiquitous recreational sexual activity and this culture needs the option of murdering the products of contraceptive failure if it is not to be goaded back by nature into marriage and virtue.
– Alan Fimister[2]
Carl Schmitt and Karl Lowith (though occupying opposite poles of evaluation) believed that the political theology of modernity serves as a hidden legitimisation of earthly powers. Taking one data point, to understand the kratology of the modern world we might compare the relative prestige and salaries of politicians and bankers. Following the Financial Crisis of 2007-08, Anglo-German Professor Richard Werner empirically proved that, far from being merely the financial intermediaries that they present themselves as, banks do, in fact, individually create money out of nothing (which they then charge interest on).[5] This institutionalised combination of usury and fraud lies at the heart of contemporary terminal western decline.
Western countries all have structural fiscal deficits, i.e., a permanent imbalance between tax revenue and government spending. These permanent deficits exist no matter how poorly, or how “well” the economy is doing.
At present, all monetary expansion required by economic expansion is carried out by bank issues of credit lent at interest… Since the burden of interest imposes repayments greater than the issues, the maintenance of economic activities needs other loans equally loaded with interest. The effect is twofold: the inflation of prices, to pay this rent for money; the accumulation of debts, industrial and public, which are collectively unpayable.
– Felix M.ª Martin Antoniano[6]
Due to the continuous expansion of the money supply by private financial interests there is a concurrent decline in purchasing power (just like in the falling Roman Empire). This continuous currency debasement steadily erodes savings; further incentivising owners of capital to invest in assets and seek rent to protect their wealth. This dynamic has helped propel unstoppable asset price inflation and the consequent “end of ownership” that we are seeing in our time. The prospect of a hard-working family man living in modest comfort and acquiring some private property for his family is getting more and more beyond the reach of most western men. The inner logic of compound interest steadily concentrates wealth into fewer and fewer hands, while the middle and working classes suffer more and more from an increasingly unreal economy that does not guarantee the material prosperity of the nation and condemns ever-wider layers of the population to mere subsistence and debt slavery.
To come on to our fourth horseman of catastrophe: the West is not dying because it is being invaded. Rather, it is being invaded because it is dying, and because it committed suicide. Criticism of immigration has become the premier right-wing theme across the West (permitted by the Regime) and it is misplaced, not because it is per se wrong, but because it effeminately locates the problem in the other and discourages western man’s examination of his own sins and apostasy, thus putting off the necessary repentance. What is neglected by the “nationalist-populist” Right is the fact that our interest-bearing, debt-created fiat money system must have growth (on average, over a period) or it will collapse under the weight of the unrepayable debt. Capitalism and the fiat banking system therefore must replace non-breeding populations with immigrants, or they will die.
The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.
– Alexis de Tocqueville
The US is on the verge of a sovereign debt crisis. At this stage, a minimum viable programme for the stabilisation of western polities, let alone their renewal, would involve western governments reversing the Sexual Revolution and ending fiat currency and private credit creation. They will not do this, so, to repeat Bishop Williamson: “it’s over.” Collapse is now baked into the system.
For all of these reasons, I believe it is now past time to disabuse ourselves of misplaced optimism and any proposed courses of action which involve trying to work within Liberalism and its structures, to ‘convert it from the inside.’ Catholics have tried this for decades, if not centuries, and it has not worked. Working within the frame of our enemies, Catholics don’t convert the Liberal system, the Liberal system converts us. New ideas and new visions are needed.
Spiritually, we should not rue the collapse of such an abominable system but give glory to God for confirming His goodness by punishing the wicked and welcome the opening vistas of new possibilities that are emerging before us.
To be continued.
References
Ang, C. (2020, July 10). Mapped: Each Region’s Median Age Since 1950. Retrieved from Visual Capitalist: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/median-age-changes-since-1950/#:~:text=Since%201950%2C%20the%20worldwide%20median,only%20increased%20by%201%20year.
Antoniano, F. M. (2025, February 2). The correct financial arrangement of the circular economy. Retrieved from La Esperanza: https://periodicolaesperanza.com/archivos/26667
Fimister, A. (2024, November 13). Say not the struggle nought availeth. Retrieved from Voice of the Family: https://voiceofthefamily.com/say-not-the-struggle-nought-availeth/
MTI-Hungary Today. (2023, February 14). Government Spent 5.5 Percent of GDP on Family Support. Retrieved from Hungary today: https://hungarytoday.hu/government-spent-5-5-percent-of-gdp-on-family-support/
Werner, R. A. (2014). Can banks individually create money out of nothing? — The theories and the empirical evidence. International Review of Financial Analysis, 1-19. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.irfa.2014.07.015
[1] (MTI-Hungary Today, 2023)
[2] (Fimister, 2024)
[3] (Ang, 2020)
[4] (Ang, 2020)
[5] (Werner, 2014)
[6] (Antoniano, 2025)
