Steph Paton: How the West views itself is a contrast to the reality

It’s not that I don’t know the broad strokes of the alleged moral underpinnings of the West: democracy, freedom, human rights, equality, tolerance and so on.

The issue for me is that the loudest culture warriors beating the drum of western exceptionalism – the figures modelling themselves as the great defenders of civilisation itself – are also the furthest removed from the values they lionise.

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Could anyone, hand on heart, say that the new Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch embodies the values of tolerance and care for human rights?

Badenoch is currently under scrutiny for claiming that “not all cultures are equally valid” when it comes to the issue of immigration.

Her leadership campaign was defined by division and intolerance; a manufactured image of the anti-woke warrior sticking it to the Left. Now she leads a political party that has demonised minorities, stripped away the right to protest, and has spent the last decade sniffing around the Human Rights Act like a wolf at the gate.

This is not the Conservative Party of David Cameron, who at least made a passing effort at maintaining the illusion of those values while in office. That was nearly a decade ago, and neither the Tory party nor Labour have survived the past tumultuous years as they were; both veering further to the Right to capture the same voter base while leaving anyone with even a soft Left position in the cold.

We can talk about the value of democracy, but what can any British politician say that could convince us we live in a functioning one? For a start, our head of state is a parasitic monarch bleeding money from the NHS and education through the royal family’s vast portfolio of land and assets. But outwith the monarchs and barons and Orders of the British Empire, our electoral politics does little to varnish the illusion of choice either.

The last UK election was between a collapsing party of incompetents who brought the Nasty Party back with a vengeance, and an ineffectual Labour Party chasing after them.

Polling indicates that most who voted for Labour did so to keep the Conservatives from taking power again. Just 5% supported the party for their policies. Only 1% believed in Starmer’s leadership.

What kind of democracy is that? What kind of choice do we really have, when the British electoral system is geared toward trapping us into an endless cycle of millionaires passing power back and forth with one another.

Any challenge to that system is met with the full force of the British press, itself in the pockets of oligarchs and, in many cases, populated by the failed politicians of those same political parties.

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It’s uncanny how similarly the US election has followed the United Kingdom’s – albeit in that uniquely American way that tends to dial everything up to eleven.

On one side, the possibility of outright fascism in America; on the other, a genocide-supporting continuity candidate who will offer Americans little in the way of meaningful change.

It would be no exaggeration to state that Donald Trump represents a moment in American history that will irreparably change the nation – and faced with that, many are reluctantly supporting Kamala Harris.

That is no endorsement for the Democrats. That is desperation. Much like the same desperation that drove the Conservatives from power here.

The Land of the Free. If the election is as close as it seems it will be – if nearly half of American voters endorse an unmasked fascist – who could call America such again with a straight face?

Then again, the McCarthy era did little to dent America’s reputation as a bastion of free speech, so who could say? I suppose it’s easier to believe in one’s exceptionalism when you’ve never been the target of state repression – and its loudest advocates so rarely have been.

And so we face the rub of it all. Two countries, their national identities so deeply entwined with the concepts of life and liberty, at total odds with their supposed values.

The reality is that, for nations with such a storied history of imperialism and foreign interventionism, we have needed to believe that we are the good guys. It didn’t matter how many civilians were butchered in the Iraq War.

It didn’t matter that Britain set up some of the first concentration camps in the world, well before the atrocities of Nazi Germany. No dammit, we’re bringing democracy to the Middle East and western values to the savages, by bullet or bulletin. Rule Britannia.

The myth of western exceptionalism is a smokescreen. America can call itself a beacon of freedom and democracy while reigning terror through botched coups and installed dictators the world over.

Britain can call itself a beacon of tolerance and social justice while migrants drown offshore and human rights are stripped away. And the West can sit pretty on the altar of international law while arming and supporting a genocide in the Middle East.

The West’s self-appointed role as guardian and moral arbiter of the world has taken a beating recently, in part due to social media’s ability to finally put the whole rotten endeavour under the spotlight. But also because the escalating violence in the Middle East has sparked a very public fight between the West’s image of itself and its reality.

But rather than reckon with it, the Right have instead found solace in protecting the image of the West that sets it above the rest of the world; unique in its values and wealth.

It is a weak person that would choose to live in a fantasy that only serves the powerful, rather than confront their country’s complicity in horrors, both past and present.

What can change that cannot be spoken about honestly?