Checking in on the West’s slow-motion suicide

The clash in Gaza has created a crisis of faith for many of those in the West who have dedicated themselves to the liberal project. While the actual conflict is centered many thousands of miles away, a mixture of ideological fanaticism and hubris has convinced most Western nations to import large populations who have carried their centuries-old feud into their new host countries.

As Hamas supporters smash the doors of Grand Central Station in New York City, tear down American flags, and clash with pro-Israel protesters in the streets across the United States, many good liberals have started to wonder how their nation seemingly changed overnight.

The answer, of course, is that it didn’t. None of this was sudden. The consequences of transforming the population of Western nations should have been obvious, and progressives have been keen on doing exactly that for decades.

It is only now, as the symbols of Western nations are pulled down by mobs of protesters bearing foreign flags, that liberals begin to grasp the consequences their ideology has wrought.

“Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide,” wrote the conservative political theorist James Burnham. “When once this initial and final sentence is understood, everything about liberalism — the beliefs, emotions and values associated with it, the nature of its enchantment, its practical record, its future — falls into place.”

At the core of liberalism sits the mistaken belief that humans are a blank slate onto which any form can be pressed. It is the culture and institutions of a civilization that form the people, not the people who form the culture and institutions. This means that any individual or group could be replaced with any other individual or group with more or less the same result.

Ultimately, liberalism is the opiate meant to allow the West to accept its dissolution without a fight, but Burnham said this need not be the case.

If people are fungible and the West is simply an “idea” or a set of institutions, then there is no reason to restrict immigration to maintain the culture. The floodgates may be opened and the magical dirt of America or Britain will suddenly transform any new arrival into a good citizen.

Liberalism holds that humans are rational actors who, when presented with compelling arguments, will sort through the available options and select from among them the ideas that are most advantageous to the civilization in which they live. No systems or beliefs are objectively true or inherently superior but only those that can provide the most efficiency or prosperity to the individual.

The invisible hand of the marketplace of ideas should, in theory, guide the democratic process that will produce the most rational and advantageous outcome. But it is difficult to watch armies of clashing protesters re-enact a conflict half a world away and believe that liberalism has selected what is best for the citizens of the United States.

When a nation has no identity, no core understanding of its own distinct culture or traditions, it has nothing to defend. Liberalism serves as the ideology of Western suicide because it strips the nations of that which is necessary for basic self-preservation.

For a nation to survive, it must prefer its own culture, traditions, language, history, and folkways above any other. Throughout history this preference was usually seen as innate because these aspects of civilization were understood as emanating from the character of a nation’s people, not a checklist of ideological preferences accumulated through rational discourse. By exposing every societal axiom to the cold deconstruction of the marketplace, liberalism stripped away the fundamental nature of Western nations, leaving them spiritually rootless and open to attack.

A nation without a strong foundation is incapable of defending itself against hostile ideologies or populations, and this has become painfully evident in the West.

In America, university students and faculty have been preaching about the evils of the United States and whiteness for years, but only now that those chants have been turned on Israel do many see the need to fight back.

In Britain, migrant grooming gangs have victimized countless young English girls, but only now that those same mobs are chanting “From the river to the sea” are there calls for deportation.

While it is nice for those who warned about immigration to finally receive some level of vindication, it is a cold comfort that comes too late for the many victims who have suffered as liberals put their ideology before the well-being of the nation. The rise of wokeness and the fact that such a hateful, illogical, and destructive belief system could gain hold in Western nations speak to the incredible spiritual vulnerability liberalism creates.

Ultimately, liberalism is the opiate meant to allow the West to accept its dissolution without a fight, but Burham said this need not be the case. For Western nations to endure, they need only find the will to survive.

In America, borders could be closed, immigration could end, English could become the only language of the land, a strong preference for Christian tradition could be restored, and an unshakable commitment to the culture that founded the nation could be re-established. This would mean discarding the notions of an open cosmopolitan society, multiculturalism, and the blank slate. This would mean the end of liberalism.

But if liberalism does not end, the West most certainly will.