Thomas Fazi on How Western Hegemony Has Entered a Phase of Irreversible Decline

Writes David Bracewell in response to the quote below by writer and filmmaker Thomas Fazi (pictured at right): “The creepy Western political and financial chancers scragging the planet won’t go gently from the domination game, though they’ve already unwittingly built their own public square cages from their own crooked timber. Few outside the West admire them now. They can’t any longer rag-doll a global south state while condemning its leaders and weeping for freedom without evincing even greater contempt – not since Gaza and the hyper-valorisation of the fascist state suffocating it with our elites’ help. That loss of perceived authority and its direct effect on Western force projection will reverberate in your diminishing life choices, your kids’ opportunities, your freedom to travel . . . or bank without oversight . . . or choose political views, friends, organisations, words . . . since our societies will almost certainly be the last supper of that horrible ruling class, as it faces a slow, generational exclusion from real power by the rising world majority. The West is being sidelined because our elites are institutionally supremacist and incapable of peaceful adaptation.”

Aside from his likely role as an intelligence asset, the Epstein Files portray [Jeffrey Epstein] as a middleman, . . . a broker connecting powerful actors in ways that maximised the political and economic interests of a transnational superclass. This superclass is not an anomaly but a structural feature of capitalism itself, a system in which wealth – and therefore power – inevitably concentrates in the hands of a small minority that comes to exercise disproportionate economic and political influence regardless of formal electoral mechanisms. Capitalism is thus intrinsically oligarchic or plutocratic: a dictatorship of capital operating beneath a veneer of democratic ritual. This has always been the core insight of Marxist critiques of capitalism. But recent decades have significantly intensified this pattern. The neoliberal era has produced a historically unprecedented concentration of wealth, extensively documented in economic data, and with it an equally unprecedented concentration of political leverage. Epstein – or what might be called the “Epstein class” – is a direct product of this development.

In such a context, democracy becomes largely illusory even as its technical procedures – universal suffrage, multi-party elections constitutional formalities – remain in place (though even these procedural norms are increasingly challenged, as demonstrated by episodes such as the annulment of elections in Romania). The public’s capacity to challenge entrenched power through the ballot box is systematically neutralised through a wide array of mechanisms: electoral systems designed to marginalise smaller parties; consensus-manufacturing propaganda and censorship enabled by compliant, elite-aligned mass media and social-media platforms; character assassination campaigns against unwelcome candidates; virtually unlimited financial resources deployed to purchase political loyalty; and the steady transfer of sovereignty from national governments to supranational institutions structurally shielded from democratic accountability. And this is not even considering the willingness of elites to bend or break the law outright in order to suppress dissent, as the prolonged legal persecution of Julian Assange, or the sanctioning of critical journalists in the EU, starkly illustrate.

. . . So yes, there is no doubt that the Western ruling classes are morally degenerate. The good news is that their centuries-long global dominance is visibly eroding as new centres of economic and political power rise and Western hegemony enters a phase of irreversible decline. The danger, however, lies in the refusal of entrenched elites to accept this loss of primacy. A class that has grown accustomed to unquestioned supremacy is more likely to escalate conflict than relinquish control voluntarily, which is precisely what we are seeing. This is why the times we are living through are so bloody – and so dangerous.

– Thomas Fazi
Exceroted from “Western Hegemony Has Entered
a Phase of Irreversible Decline”
ThomasFazi.com
March 2, 2026

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• “A Blatant Call by the U.S. Empire to Resuscitate Western Colonialism”
• Chris Hedges on the End of the American Empire
• John Pilger on Resisting Empire
• Resisting the Hand of the Empire
• “Our Anti-Imperialism Must Be Consistent”
• The Queen and Colonialism
• Remembering Lumumba
• Israel’s and the United States’ Rationale for War on Iran Is “All Bullshit”
• “It Is Up to Us”
• “We Must Challenge the Entire System”