Eulogizing Western Values

Editor’s Note: I’m away the rest of this week for a long weekend of decompression and wanton consumption. The publishing queue is stocked, but I may be slow to respond to questions, and my social media presence will be curtailed. As always, if you like something you read, please share!

Eighteen years ago, Canadian political columnist Mark Steyn published a book, America Alone, that forecast the cultural demise of Europe due to a combination of below-replacement fertility rates among the domestic populations and a large influx of non-assimilating Middle Eastern and North African migrants. The book is worth reading for the demographic analysis alone, and while I didn't agree with all of Steyn's conclusions, it was and remains impossible to refute the population trends he detailed.

The societal clash we see in Europe is between Western liberalism and Islamism, with the latter's illiberal beliefs standing in opposition to values and liberties that have long been taken for granted by the "native" populations (including those who assimilated) of the western European Union nations. The latter, long vilified by the multiculturalist elites, are reacting and sometimes over- or mis-reacting to what they have long been told would never happen. That is, the Best-and-Brightest informed the unwashed masses that there was no need, and indeed that it would be wrong, to insist that newcomers to those nations learn and respect the value systems of their new homes. Those values include secular government, acceptance of others' lifestyles, equal treatment of women, and similar fundamentals of liberty and equality.

As a result, countries such as France have large pockets of unassimilated Muslims and Islamists (and others) who do not respect those Western values, and instead cling to the illiberal ways of their former homelands, including the Sharia law that treats women as second-class persons or as property, that elevates religious beliefs to law, that calls for harm or death to gays, apostates, and atheists, and sees the faithful of other religions as subordinate citizens. And more.

Escapee-from-Islam Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote of the idealized multicultural acceptance of her adopted homeland The Netherlands, and how reality smashed that idealistic worldview into bits. Unfortunately, that lesson remains unheeded by the smart folks running things.

I write this, today, with the sad conclusion that Europe as we know it is f***ed, that I don't see a path back from the unfolding cultural shift away from Western liberalism. This is as much the fault of the deluded and arrogant Best-and-Brightest that encouraged non-assimilation as it is the fault of the immigrants who left bad situations behind in their own homelands but brought the proximate cause of those situations with them.

Here in America, we see a similar cultural clash, albeit with different players. While there are a couple pockets of non-Westernized Islamism in the US, the real conflict is between those of us who embrace the nation's traditional values born of the premise of individual liberty and those who reject individual liberty and equality in favor of "group above person" identity politics, socialistic economic ideas that reject property rights, a collectivist and redistributive attitude toward wealth, and fealty to a big, unrestricted, and coercive government. That the nation's governing document is all about distrust of government is considered either a relic or an obstacle, not a fundamental premise.

That stands apart from America’s immigration issue. Whereas Europe's problem is unassimilated migrants, America has a long history of people coming here to embrace America's premise of liberty, and I don't doubt that a significant portion of those who've entered or who seek to enter the country would do the same. Certainly, there are freeloaders and other takers, and certainly, there are some who bring their ruinous cultures with them. The challenge is to figure out how to embrace the liberty-minded while informing the rest that neither freeloading nor cultural infection are on the table.

The upcoming election offers us Kamala Harris as the Democrats' option for President, and by any measure of past proclamations and present behaviors, Harris has no use for America’s traditional values of individual liberty and property rights. She is joined by (and would head up) what I have taken to calling The Machine, a toxic stew consisting of the left-leaning legacy media, the faculty and student bodies in our elite universities, the Big Tech Big Money folks in Silicon Valley, the Democratic Party's apparatchiks, and the entrenched and persistent bureaucracies.

The Machine has already signaled that it will lie, both overtly and by omission, to get Harris elected. That it will act as a row of pawns protecting the queen rather than as sunshine illuminating who she is and what she's about. That it will use its clout to mute or silence her detractors, by direct force or by intimidation. These behaviors and more are themselves an abandonment of Western values of liberty, equality, and above all distrust of government. That they are in service to someone who has made it abundantly clear that she hopes to take a wrecking ball to those values - and to the structure that preserves them (see: packing the courts to put them in thrall to the Machine) - is doubly tragic.