In his Washington Post column Fareed Zakaria quotes JD Vance’s claim that the West faces “civilizational erasure,” which Vance attributes to Europe’s approach to immigration and identity. Zakaria replies that this is a misunderstanding: what truly defines the West is not culture or ethnicity but the gradual limitation of state power: Magna Carta, independent courts, private property, civil society; and that Trumpism represents an erosion of those traditions.
I find this framing problematic, even though I agree with much of Zakaria’s underlying concern.
The problem is that Zakaria accepts Vance’s dramatic civilizational language while quietly redefining what “civilization” means. Vance uses the term in a cultural-historical sense: peoples, continuity, inherited ways of life. Zakaria replaces that with a procedural-institutional definition: courts, rights, constraints on rulers. These are not the same object. Borrowing the rhetoric of “civilizational erasure” while substituting a technocratic definition of civilization is philosophically incoherent.
Once the word “civilization” is taken seriously, a deeper dilemma appears. Either constraints on rulers are essential to Western civilization, or they are contingent achievements. They cannot be both.
If they are essential, then episodes like Germany from 1933 to 1945 or the United States under prolonged emergency governance, are not mere political deviations but civilizational events. In that case, the real problem is not Trump or MAGA, but the inherent instability of modern mass societies, which repeatedly concentrate power despite constitutional forms. Civilizational “erasure” would then be structural and recurrent, not exceptional.
If, on the other hand, constraints on rulers are contingent, historically impressive but fragile, then “civilizational erasure” is simply the wrong category. What we are witnessing is ordinary institutional decay: factional capture, bureaucratic expansion, symbolic law, declining competence. No special metaphysical status for “the West” is required to explain any of this.
Mr. Zakaria wants to occupy an impossible middle ground, limited government as the West’s defining essence, but its repeated collapse as merely incidental. Logically, that position cannot hold.
Where I agree with Mr. Zakaria is that the United States is indeed in serious decline. Where I disagree is in treating this primarily as a Trump-era or even MAGA-era phenomenon. What we are experiencing looks more like forty years of cumulative institutional entropy driven by party polarization, intra-party factional control, and incentive decay across the political class. The erosion is not a betrayal of Western principles so much as the predictable behavior of large bureaucratic democracies under modern conditions.
In that sense, “civilizational erasure” may be rhetorically powerful, but, like a fan-dancers fan, it obscures more than it reveals. The more honest diagnosis is not moral failure, but systemic drift and the unsettling possibility that no modern mass society is capable of sustaining the rule of law indefinitely without sliding toward managerial or factional control.
