Cultural Collision: Immigration And The Battle For Political Supremacy
Cultural Collision: Immigration And The Battle For Political Supremacy
In his 2011 book "The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order," political scientist Samuel P. Huntington observed the following:
"Some Americans have promoted multiculturalism at home, some have promoted universalism abroad, and some have done both. Multiculturalism at home threatens the United States and the West; universalism abroad threatens the West and the World. Both deny the uniqueness of Western culture."
Immigration lies at the heart of multiculturalism, as the unrelenting influx of immigrants, whether via legal pathways or illegally, has not just deeply influenced American and Western culture overall but also poses an irreversible shift in political power toward the left.
As I explained in a recent essay, the chaos at the U.S. border and the cultural and political ramifications of U.S. immigration policy are due to deliberate choices made at the highest levels of our public and private sectors.
Demographics are, indeed, destiny, and what we're seeing across the West is part of a political project that dates back almost 80 years.
As told in R. R. Reno's excellent book "Return of the Strong Gods," the cataclysmic upheavals of World War I and World War II left an indelible scar on the Western world, characterized not only by the staggering toll of death and destruction witnessed between 1914 and 1945 but also by the ominous shadow they cast over the future of Western civilization itself.
In the aftermath of these devastating wars, liberal elites found themselves engaged in a desperate struggle to avert World War III. This led them to delve deep into the root causes of these global conflagrations. Among the voices rising to prominence in this tumultuous era was that of the philosopher Karl Popper, whose monumental two-volume work, "The Open Society and Its Enemies," provided an answer.
Popper contended that humanity's propensity for dwelling within tribal or "closed" societies contributed to both World Wars and believed civilization had a crucial decision to make: either choose to continue to live in these closed societies that valued inherited culture, moral truths, hierarchy, authority, and the prioritization of the common good over the individual, or break free from this collectivist mentality and create an "open society" that liberates the individual from all unchosen bonds and obligations.
On the economic front, Popper's friend, economist Friedrich Hayek, sought to combat the return of fascism not through the critique of Western philosophy but through economics. In his book, "The Road to Serfdom," the "free market" would be the bulwark against the collectivism that gave rise to totalitarianism.
In Hayek's mind, economic freedom was the foundation of an "open society" as the more unplanned and uncontrolled forces of the market rule society, the safer the world would be from authoritarianism.
After witnessing the command economies of the Allies during WWII, Hayek had concerns about the inefficiencies of central planning that might continue after the war. His belief in the freedom of choice naturally aligned with his faith in the power of the "free markets," as individual liberty meant giving people the most freedom to act without being restricted by higher authorities or transcendent obligations.
According to Hayek, when we look at society, the desires, needs, and interests of individuals, both personally and economically, are the only factors that should guide responsible leadership.
Numerous academic elites in the Western world aligned with the viewpoints of both Popper and Hayek, believing that the future of the West hinged on embracing "openness" in both cultural and economic realms. They viewed the prospect of a resurgence of totalitarianism and the accompanying specter of another global conflict as utterly inconceivable. As such, the vital truths found within the West's religious, cultural, and moral foundations needed to be deconstructed, and American education, specifically, needed to be thoroughly revised.
In 1945, twelve Harvard faculty members developed a new approach to education. Their work, titled "General Education in a Free Society," was designed to promote democratic values among Americans without uncritical adherence to tradition. They questioned "inherited culture," advocating scrutiny and abandonment of strong beliefs like loyalty to God, King, and Country. They believed dictators could exploit such bonds.
Consequently, the rejection of the established norms, values, and ethics that were the achievements of Western culture has given rise to outright hostility by the activist class towards their respective host nations and the promotion of even higher levels of immigration to effectively replace those, who they feel, are responsible for all the evils in the world.
This "culture" of anti-culture (which is no culture at all) has mutated into a strain of neo-Marxist theory, which we refer to as wokeism.
Multiculturalism, aided by unrestrained immigration, has led to a militant form of identity politics, where people and groups primarily identify themselves according to characteristics such as their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual proclivity, etc., at the expense of the shared history, values, and national identity of a native citizenry.
When a nation ignores the importance of its borders and discards its core principles and values, such as patriotism, faith, family, morality, and tradition, that nation will inevitably see an increase in societal dysfunction and turmoil. Such conditions elicit a populist backlash, with citizens turning to strong leaders who pledge to restore order and stability as the current government loses legitimacy.
Unsurprisingly, this is precisely the trend evident in America and much of the Western world today—an outcome that both Popper and Hayek endeavored to prevent.
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