Arnold Toynee blew up a set of very perceptive ideas about the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, into a set of views of the development of all of human history.

He said that the Empire fell when the External Proletariat -- the Barbarians, as the Romans called them -- made common cause with the Internal Proletariat -- the slaves, the Christians, the conquered peoples. The Empire could not be sustained after that confluence of interests, against the interests of the elites who had constructed the Empire in the first place.

In the 1930s in the course of the appearance of the many volumes of Toynbee's Study of History, the External Proletariat was obvious: the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, interpreted as the standard-bearer of the world-wide overthrow of the capitalists system; and the Internal Proletariat were the working class organizations of the U.S., France, Great Britain, and other western democracies.

It sure looked like a viable interpretation, that the eternal and internal proletariats were combining for the downfall of the so-called Western Civilization.

Another popular conception of the Inter-War period was, that the External Proletariat was the Colonial World -- Africa, India, China, the Pacific Islands -- instead of the Soviet Union. Linkage in that interpretation was harder to see.

With that as preface, let us see what Mr El-Arian has to say about the Decline and Fall of so-called Western Civilization.

Wow, there IS NO External Proletariat! The New World Order includes everybody; not from a principle of the inherent dignity of the individual but on the simple pragmatic basis that China, India, Brazil, and Russia are entitled by virtue of their Gross Domestic Product to be included in the institutional framework of adjustment of commercial intercourse.

We're gonna screw the Internal Proletariat -- that's certain. In El-Arian's formulation, the percentage of the world's wealth going to the U.S. is going to decline (and, combined with the undiscussed fact of the concentration of U.S. wealth into a smaller and smaller subset of the U.S. population, it follows), putting the U.S. workers on a par with workers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

A grim prospect, from the progressive point of view. The good part is that it is inherently a peaceful process. The Rich everywhere dominate the Poor everywhere, and there's not a goddamn thing the Poor can do about it. That's the vision.

... that Sovereign Wealth Funds will happily keep investing into the US because of the stability guaranteed by the respect for the rule of law.

Maybe he read a bit too many of these Wall Streets Journal editorials.