The West is Falling

In 2016, I believed I knew exactly what, or who the danger was.

I supported Hillary Clinton - not because I believed she was perfect or unblemished, or the answer to all of our problems, but because I believed in her temperament, her experience, and what she symbolized. I believed the United States was ready for its first woman president, and I believed in kindness, restraint, and competence mattered more than bravado.

That belief didn’t exist in a vacuum.

It was the same hope I carried at home just a year earlier, when Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party of Canada swept into power in 2015. Like many Canadians, I believed in the promise of a more thoughtful, compassionate politics - one rooted in inclusion, transparency, and respect for democratic norms.

I believed that tone mattered. That leadership was as much about character as it was about policy. That empathy and civility were not weaknesses, but strengths the West desperately needed.

And so, when Donald Trump emerged, I hated him.

I didn’t hate him quietly, either. In January of that year, I stood in Washington, D.C., protesting his presidency. I believed - sincerely - that he represented a threat to democratic norms, to decency, and to the moral direction of the West.

I was certain history would prove me right.

But here I am, a decade later, and I find myself asking a question I never expected to ask: If Trump was the danger, if he was the problem - why has everything I feared accelerated without him?

The erosion I feared didn’t happen under his leadership. It accelerated after him. And it didn’t arrive with tanks or troops, but with language, policies, platforms, and a growing intolerance for dissent.

What I See Now

What I see now is not a single policy gone wrong, or one leader failing to live up to their promise. It’s a pattern, subtle, cumulative, and deeply unsettling.

In Canada, public discourse has narrowed in ways that would have once alarmed even the most progressive voices. Questions that should invite debate are increasingly treated as moral transgressions. Disagreement is no longer something to engage with but something to manage, suppress, or erase, often in the name of protection, safety, or compassion.

I see a government willing to align itself with regimes whose values fundamentally conflict with the liberal democratic ideals we claim to uphold, while insisting that these partnerships are pragmatic, necessary, or misunderstood. I see privacy, online safety, and hate-prevention laws proposed - sometimes passed - with language so broad and malleable that their future use depends less on principle than on who happens to hold power.

I see antisemitism rising, not at the fringes, but in the open - reframed as activism, excused as resistance, or dismissed as an unfortunate byproduct of “necessary conversations.” I see Jewish communities told their fear is exaggerated, their history inconvenient, their pain conditional.

And perhaps most troubling of all, I see ordinary citizens growing quieter.

Not because they’ve become more hateful or less informed - but because they’ve learned, often through experience, that speaking honestly carries consequences. Posts disappear. Accounts are flagged. Conversations end abruptly. The message is rarely explicit, but it is unmistakable: some concerns are acceptable; others are not.

That is not what authoritarianism looks like in movies - or in history books. There are no uniforms, no midnight knocks, no tanks in the streets. There is instead a persistent pressure to conform - socially, professionally, digitally - and a growing sense that the boundaries of acceptable thought are being drawn ever tighter, by people we didn’t elect and cannot question.

What I see now is a country still calling itself free, while becoming increasingly uncomfortable with freedom’s messiest requirement: the right to be wrong, to dissent, to speak without prior approval.

And once that discomfort takes hold, history suggests it rarely stays contained.

The Conquest Without Tanks

What connects all of this is not a secret party or group. It is something quieter - and far more effective.

The conquest without tanks is not about armies crossing borders. It is about ideas crossing institutions, until the culture itself begins enforcing them.

In this kind of conquest, power does not announce itself through force, but through language. Words are redefined. Meanings shift. Concepts like safety, harm, inclusion, and progress are expanded until they become moral absolutes - capable of justifying almost any restriction, so long as it is framed as protection.

Institutions follow. Media, academia, public service, and digital platforms begin to converge around the same assumptions. Not because dissent is illegal, but because it is increasingly unwelcome. Debate becomes risk management. Questions become liabilities. Over time, only certain concerns are treated as legitimate, while others are quietly filtered out - not argued against, simply removed from view.

This is how conquest works without tanks.

Citizens are not forced into silence. They are trained into it. They learn, often subconsciously, which opinions invite approval and which invite scrutiny. Which words are safe. Which questions cost social capital, employment, or community standing. The most effective control is not coercion - it is anticipation.

And because this process is gradual, it feels reasonable at every step.

After all, who wouldn’t want to prevent harm? Who wouldn’t want a kinder society? Who wouldn’t want to stop hatred, misinformation, or violence before it spreads?

But somewhere along the way, the goal quietly changes. Preventing harm becomes preventing discomfort. Protecting communities becomes policing thought. And pluralism - the ability to coexist with deeply opposing views - is replaced with enforced consensus.

The result is not tyranny in the traditional sense. It is something softer, cleaner, and harder to name. A society that still votes, still protests, still speaks - but only within increasingly narrow boundaries.

No tanks required.

Only the slow, steady erosion of the assumption that free people are allowed to think aloud.

I saw this play out in real time when my brother shared a thoughtful, non-violent, non-partisan post expressing concern about the direction of our country - and it was quietly deleted. No explanation. No warning. No rebuttal. Just gone. That moment mattered more than any headline or policy announcement, because it demonstrated the thesis perfectly: dissent wasn’t defeated by argument, but erased by process. No tanks. No laws cited. Just an invisible line he had crossed without ever being told where it was.

Why Trump Is Not the Conqueror

If the conquest without tanks has a villain, Donald Trump is the one most often cast in the role.

He is portrayed as an authoritarian threat, a would-be dictator, a man intent on dismantling democracy and seizing power by force. For years, this framing has dominated political discourse, particularly in liberal democracies like Canada - repeated so often it has become unquestionable. 

But accusations, no matter how loudly repeated, still require evidence.

Trump is many things - crude, narcissistic, volatile, deeply undisciplined. He speaks recklessly, governs impulsively, and often seems driven more by ego than principle. None of that is in dispute. What is in dispute is whether he fits the definition of a conqueror.

Authoritarians consolidate power by controlling institutions, criminalizing dissent, suppressing opposition media, and expanding the state’s ability to monitor and punish citizens. Trump did not do these things. He did not nationalize media. He did not outlaw protest. He did not imprison political opponents. He did not rewrite constitutional limits to remain in office. When his term ended, he left - angrily, gracelessly, and disgracefully, but within the existing legal framework.

Contrast with what has expanded without him: the normalization of censorship through policy, the moralization of speech, the outsourcing of discourse control to unelected platforms and institutions, and the growing insistence that disagreement itself constitutes harm.

Trump did not build that system. If anything, he collided with it.

This is why the dictator narrative persists: not because Trump successfully conquered institutions, but because he disrupted a consensus that had gone largely unchallenged. He refused the language. He rejected the etiquette. He said the unsayable badly, and in doing so, exposed how narrow the boundaries of acceptable speech had already become.

That does not make him a saviour.

It makes him a symptom.

Trump is not the architect of the conquest without tanks. He is an abrasive, deeply flawed reaction to it - a counterforce that many find intolerable precisely because it refuses the norms through which the conquest operates: politeness, credentialism, moral signaling, and quiet compliance.

Calling him a dictator may feel righteous.

It may even feel necessary.

But if we mistake disruption for dominance, we risk missing the far subtler forces reshaping our societies - forces that don’t shout, don’t threaten, and don’t need tanks at all. 

And by the time we recognize them, they rarely announce themselves as enemies.

The Unintended Canadian Fallout

Trump’s impact does not stop at the American border. I think we can all agree on that. That’s why a U.S. election is global news.

Without intending to - and without holding any formal power in Canada - he fundamentally altered our political landscape by becoming the template through which dissent was interpreted.

In the years that followed his presidency, Canadian politics became increasingly filtered through an Americanized lens of moral panic. Populism, skepticism of institutions, concern about speech, borders, or national identity - all were reflexively framed as precursors to “Trumpism,” regardless of context, policy, or tone.

This reframing mattered enormously when Pierre Poilievre emerged as a serious political force.

Rather than being evaluated on his platform, his parliamentary record, or his critiques of government overreach, Poilievre was persistently framed by mainstream, left-leaning media as a Canadian echo of Trump - abrasive, dangerous, unserious, and unfit to govern. The comparison stuck, not because it was accurate, but because it was emotionally effective.

For many Canadians, Trump had already become the embodiment of chaos. Attaching Pierre Poilievre to that image was enough to erode trust before policy was even discussed. Debate collapsed into association. Skepticism became suspicion. And once again, voters were encouraged not to examine ideas, but to fear where they might lead.

In this way, Trump altered Canada without ever campaigning here.

He didn’t conquer our policies. He haunted them.

And the result was not greater clarity or civic confidence, but narrowing of what kinds of leadership - and which kinds of questions - were considered safe, respectable, or electable.

The Question We’re Afraid to Ask

If Donald Trump is not the architect of this unraveling - if he did not build the systems now shaping speech, culture, and civic life - then a far more uncomfortable question emerges.

Who did?

Or, more precisely: how did this happen without our consent, and often without our notice?

It is easier to believe in a single villain than to confront a diffuse responsibility. A demagogue is simple. A tyrant is familiar. A crude man with a loud voice makes for a convenient explanation. But slow cultural transformation rarely works that way. It unfolds through institutions we trust, language we adopt without scrutiny, and moral shortcuts we tell ourselves are temporary. 

The hardest truth to face is that much of what now feels oppressive was introduced as benevolent. Each step came wrapped in good intentions - to protect, to include, to prevent harm, to move us forward. And because each individual step felt reasonable, few people objected loudly enough to slow the momentum.

Over time, however, the center narrowed. 

Not because citizens demanded it, but because they adapted. Because speaking became exhausting. Because disagreement carried social cost. Because silence felt safer than being misunderstood. And because many of us believed - sincerely - that the restrictions were aimed at someone else.

History suggests this is how democratic cultures lose their confidence. Not through conquest by enemies at the gate, but through a gradual loss of faith in open disagreement, shared memory, and the assumption that free people can be trusted to argue in public without supervision.

So perhaps the question we are afraid to ask is not whether we are being ruled badly - but whether we have slowly accepted being managed instead of represented.

And whether, in our desire to be on the right side of history, we stopped asking who was writing it.

What Saving the West Actually Means

If the West needs saving at all, then we should be honest about what is happening - and who is enabling it.

Western culture and civilization are being eroded, not through invasion, but through surrender. Through a steady relinquishing of confidence, memory, and moral clarity - handed over, often willingly, to ideologies that do not share our values and have no intention of preserving them.

This is not alarmism. It is observable.

Across Western democracies, foundational principles - freedom of speech, equality before the law, secular governance, women’s rights, and pluralism - are increasingly treated as conditional rather than universal. They are upheld selectively, enforced unevenly, and compromised whenever they conflict with fashionable ideology, geopolitical convenience, or the fear of appearing intolerant.

Extremism does not need to seize power when it is accommodated. It only needs space, silence, and a culture willing to draw boundaries.

That erosion is not happening in spite of Western leadership - it is happening with its assistance.

In Canada, successive Liberal governments have positioned themselves as moral leaders on the world stage while aligning with regimes and movements that openly reject liberal democratic values. Under leaders like Mark Carney and the Liberal Party of Canada, the language of inclusion and human rights has increasingly coexisted with strategic partnerships that undermine both.

At home, this contradiction deepens. Speech is narrowed in the name of safety. Debate is constrained in the name of harm reduction. Citizens are told that cohesion requires silence, that disagreement is dangerous, and that social peace depends on compliance rather than consent.

This is not pluralism.

Pluralism does not mean accepting every belief as equal. It means allowing difference within a shared framework - one grounded in secular law, equal rights, historical memory, and mutual restraint. A pluralistic society can only function when it has boundaries - when it is confident enough to say this is the civic culture you are joining, not this culture must dissolve to accommodate everyone equally.

This reluctance to draw boundaries is especially dangerous when it comes to Islamist extremism and other illiberal ideologies that explicitly reject secular law, equality before the law, freedom of conscience, and women’s rights. This is not a critique of Muslims; it is a recognition that Islamism is a political ideology, not a religion, and one that has consistently demonstrated hostility toward liberal democratic norms wherever it gains influence. When Western governments and institutions refuse to name this distinction clearly - out of fear or appearing intolerant - they do not promote harmony. They create blind spots. And blind spots are precisely where extremism embeds itself, not through force, but through accommodation, intimidation, and the steady erosion of equal standards. In Canada, this failure to draw distinctions has been especially costly - leading policymakers hesitant to confront illiberal movements openly, while communities committed to liberal democratic values are told that naming the problem itself is the greater threat.

Memory matters here.

The West did not emerge by accident. Its freedoms were built through hard-won struggles against religious absolutism, monarchic power, ethnic hierarchy, and state control of thought. Forgetting that history - or recasting it solely as a catalogue of shame - leaves us defenseless against movements that are far less apologetic about their own ambitions.

Saving the West does not mean idolizing it. It means remembering why it worked at all.

And that requires courage - not the performative courage of slogans and protests, but the quieter courage of defending free speech when it is uncomfortable, of insisting on equal standards when it is unpopular, and of refusing to outsource moral judgment to institutions that no longer tolerate dissent.

Finally, saving the West requires restoring debate.

Not curated dialogue. Not sanctioned conversation. Real disagreement - where bad ideas are confronted, not erased, and where citizens are trusted to think without supervision. A society that cannot argue openly cannot correct itself. And a society that cannot correct itself does not remain free for long.

If Western leaders will not defend these principles - if they actively undermine them while claiming moral authority - then the responsibility does not disappear.

It shifts.

To citizens willing to remember.

To citizens willing to draw the lines.

To citizens willing to speak - even when it costs them comfort, reputation, or approval.

That is what saving the West actually means.

Ⓒ January 2026. Beki Lantos. All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, or transmitted in any form by any means without prior written permission of the author.

This essay is offered in the spirit of open inquiry, not final authority, and disagreement - thoughtful, informed, and in good faith - is not only welcome, but necessary.

Thank you

Further Reading

For readers interested in exploring the ideas discussed here more deeply, the following words provide historical, philosophical, and contemporary grounding for the concerns raised in this essay:

1. On Liberty - John Stuart Mill

A foundational defense of free speech and pluralism. Mill warns that the greatest threat to liberty in modern societies comes not from governments alone, but from social pressure, moral conformity, and the silencing of unpopular opinions in the name of certainty or protection.

2. The Origins of Totalitarianism - Hannah Arendt

Explores how authoritarian systems emerge gradually through bureaucracy, ideology, and the erosion of shared reality - often before citizens recognize what is happening. Particularly relevant to the idea of “conquest without tanks”.

3. The Constitution of Knowledge - Jonathan Rauch

Examines how open debate, disagreement, and free inquire are essential to democracy I truth-seeking - and how societies falter when they replace these processes with enforced consensus and moral certainty.

4. Freedom House - Annual Reports

Documents democratic backsliding across Western liberal democracies, including the narrowing of civil liberties, speech constraints, and institutional overreach - supporting the claim that erosion is observable, not speculative.

5. Pew Research Center - Public Opinion Data

Provides data on declining support for free speech, rising polarization, and growing acceptance of speech restrictions in Western societies, particularly among younger demographics.

6. The Strange Death of Europe - Douglas Murr

A controversial but widely cited examination of cultural confidence, historical memory, and the consequences of refusing to articulate boundaries within pluralistic societies. Included here for engagement, not endorsement.

On Extremism, Illiberal Ideologies, and Democratic Boundaries:

1. UK Government Prevent Strategy - Official Documentation

Clearly distinguished Islam (a religion) from Islamism (a political ideology), defining the latter as incompatible with democratic values, secular law, and individual rights. This distinction directly supports the argument that naming Islamism is not bigotry, but necessary clarity.

2. United Nations - Special Rapporteur Reports on Freedom of Religion or Belief

These reports differentiate legitimate religious freedom from religious extremism and warn against both state repression and ideological movements that undermine human rights, women’s equality, and freedom of conscience - reinforcing the need for principled boundaries in pluralistic societies.

3. Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Infidel/Heretic

Ali’s work offers a first-hand account of life under Islamist ideology and its collision with Western liberal values. While controversial, her perspective is widely cited in discussions of women’s rights, freedom of conscience, and the dangers of ideological accommodation.

4. Gilles Kepel - Scholarly Work on Islamist Movements

Kepel is one of Europe’s leading scholars on political Islam, documenting how Islamist movements operate within Western societies - often exploiting democratic freedoms while rejecting democratic norms. His work supports the argument that extremism embeds through accommodation rather than force.

5. Pew Research Center - Public Opinion Data on Sharia, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy

Pew’s global surveys provide empirical data on attitudes toward religious law, secular governance, and liberal democratic principles, offering evidence-based context for concerns about value divergence and the limits of pluralism.