The West: What Jordan Peterson and the Right Get Wrong
Reason, values, free markets, and one million other myths that have become a weaponized ideology as America and Europe flounder
I’ve been thinking about doing a piece on what I see as the main right-wing misconceptions and myths surrounding the term: the West. And highlight the problems that arise from its over-use in today’s political discourse in American Christian nationalism, European nativism, and the perceived ‘civilizational battle’ being waged.
In mainstream media, the West typically refers in geopolitical terms to the US, Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but the definition, values, and pop history vary depending on who is speaking. It’s a catch-all term that wraps in some ahistoric Judeo-Christian roots mixed with Greek rationality, science, capitalism, and ‘Enlightenment values’ best represented by the US constitution surrounding rule of law, rights, and freedoms.
Whether it be the Proud Boys, famed white nationalists, far-right EU politicians, Jordan Peterson, or every right-wing nutty pundit on the internet, they claim any and all historical progress in the world has come from the West, that it is under ‘attack,’ and that we should be doing everything we can to ‘defend it.’
