To me it’s clear in the concluding paragraph:

> The situations of Asian countries and the United States differ sub­stantially in the details, but both face the same core problem: how to offer as many people as possible a decent job with a family wage.

The argument is everything stems from this failing (declining birth rates, cutthroat testing culture, woke language games to signal elite status etc)

As a leftist Asian-American who recently went through US university, I found much of it to be alarmist and incongruent with my own experiences and observations. I was unsurprised to see it was written by a European conservative think-tank. It's definitely unique, but I wouldn't say it's convincing.

There was no "wokeness" at my midwestern engineering state university. In my opinion, the best solution to the increasingly out-of-reach American dream is just to build millions of apartments in cities where housing is very expensive.

The article itself lurches all over the place and takes some bizarre turns - e.g. the weird conspiracy theory thrown out about how attempts at more egalitarian college admissions are simply a backhanded dig at Jews and Asians, the barely concealed indignation at anything "woke" and the re-definition of elite to mean "literally anyone with a college degree".

The views he holds seem pretty average among worried Beltway center-right elites (actual elites), although not in any way representative of average Americans.

Agree with most of your analysis. However, one place I take issue with is your claim that "the weird conspiracy theory thrown out about how attempts at more egalitarian college admissions are simply a backhanded dig at Jews and Asians". Given that we have it on good historical evidence the up and rising Jewish population in elite colleges in early 20th century made Caucasians in those institutions feel threatened, which caused them to change applications to add extra-curriculars as a metric, which was the mechanism to decrease the number of Jewish students admitted---given it's played out this way before where a rising racial minority group has been discriminated against in favour of White applicants, surely you cannot blame people for suspecting the admission process is again being made (a) less meritocratic, (b) decreasing number of Asian and Jewish admissions, and (c) increasing White admissions all in the name of racial equity?

Except A) there's no evidence for it and B) it's not the early 20th century any more.

Other than that, yeah, I guess it's a cast iron indictment of woke politics. Or at least the most scathing indictment the author was intellectually capable of.

yes it's a good piece. As a non-American reader I'm kind of impressed with the stuff they're putting out because they're representing a much missing view in US discourse which is a Marxist economic point of view for a Conservative audience, basically what you'd call a 'Red Tory' in the UK or a 'Christdemokrat' in Germany.

It's getting people to think and at the same time it's also a reasonable antidote for the 'culture-war' steeped people.