Mass Migration and the Failure of Civilizational Nerve

Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

... Seven thousand migrants from Central America are still making their way through Mexico on their way to the U.S. These “caravans” appear to be organized and funded by the international left. In recent years such vast movements of people have become more common in Europe, which has been enduring such exoduses from the Middle East and North Africa for years.  They accelerated in 2015 after German Chancellor Angela Merkel issued an open invitation to migrants...

This is an existential crisis the West should have seen coming, because it was predicted by French travel-writer Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints.... For Raspail doesn’t just tell a compelling story. He also lays out the West’s fashionable self-loathing and failure of civilizational nerve that create this disaster.

Raspail’s novel begins when millions of Third World peoples simultaneously start hijacking ships and sailing for Europe. Once there, the migrants swarm the villas and resorts of the Côte d’Azur while the French flee in panic to the north. One reason for the failure of the French to resist the invaders is the fashionable civilizational guilt over alleged Western crimes like racism, colonialism, and imperialism....

Of course, at one level, the globalist progressives claim not to recognize that cultures and peoples can be divided by deep-seated, dysfunctional beliefs irreconcilable with the political-social order of the West. With remarkable ethnocentric arrogance, they see the world’s peoples as prototypical Westerners who desire prosperity, political freedom, unalienable human rights, tolerance, and peaceful coexistence with their neighbors. Only the evils of religion, custom, Western historical crimes, and tradition continue to impede this development. Admitting large numbers of migrants becomes a mechanism for advancing this noble goal, as is agitating for open borders...

But this brings us to the fatal incoherence of the globalist project. We have also embraced “diversity” and “multiculturalism,” the unquestioning acceptance and idealization of those who live differently than we do... Yet these modern diverse “others” are at the same time bestowed with all the specifically Western political and social preferences like sex equality, tolerance of homosexuality, equality before the law, and separation of religion from government. Nowhere is this incoherence more obvious than in the idealization of Islamic cultures whose sharia law admits none of these Western boons, and indeed sees them as mortal enemies of the faithful....

Finally, predicating policies on flabby sentimentalism rather than the realist calculation of cost and benefits, and the tragic acceptance that we cannot be the world’s social welfare agency, lead inevitably to polices that damage our interests and security, and further erode our confidence in our right to determine our national identity....

We are witnessing this process in Europe, which is much farther down the road to cultural suicide. But we have shown no will to address the problems of immigration, and divided government has simply confirmed that we will continue to bluster and threaten, and in the end do nothing substantial. And this appears to suit a critical mass of voters just fine.