The West Isn’t Liberalism

Quite honestly, I cringed when I heard the excerpts from Trump’s Warsaw speech:

“How did progressive intellectuals get themselves into this mess? The confusion comes in part from loose language: in particular, a conflation of “liberalism” and “the West.” Liberalism is an ideology — defined by, among other things, freedom of religion, the rule of law, private property, popular sovereignty and equal dignity of all people. The West is the geographically delimited area where those values were first realized on a large scale during and after the European Enlightenment.

So to appeal to “the West” in highlighting the importance of liberal values, as Trump did, is not to suggest that those values are the exclusive property of whites or Christians. Rather, it is to accurately recognize that the seeds of these values were forged in the context of the West’s wars, religions and classical inheritances hundreds of years ago. Since then, they have spread far beyond their geographic place of birth and have won tremendous prestige across the world.

What is at stake now is whether Americans will surrender the idea of “the West” to liberalism’s enemies on the alt-right — that is, whether we will allow people who deny the equal citizenship of women and minorities and Jews to lay claim to the legacy of Western civilization. This would amount to a major and potentially suicidal concession, because the alt-right — not in the opportunistically watered-down sense of “immigration skeptic,” or “social conservative,” but in the sense of genuine white male political supremacism — is anti-Western. It is hostile to the once-radical ideals of pluralism and self-governance and individual rights that were developed during the Western Enlightenment and its offshoots. It represents an attack on, not a defense of, of the West’s greatest achievements. …”

It sounded to me like Trump was saying the West is liberal values.

Western civilization is the magic dirt we live on combined with the liberal catechism. In order to be a Westerner, you have to be a citizen of a liberal state. In other words, if you have a driver’s license or Social Security number, then you are a Westerner in good standing.

The Alt-Right certainly doesn’t believe the West is “liberal values.” Western civilization existed for centuries before the Enlightenment. It was the product of a particular people, their religion, history and culture. It used to be a very illiberal place in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Early Modern Era. The Left admits this by saying we should be ashamed to be Westerners because we weren’t always so liberal.

We believe that liberalism is destroying Western civilization. It has led to this crippling sense of racial guilt and cultural malaise. It has opened our borders to the ongoing Third World invasion. It has unraveled and debauched our culture. We’ve degenerated to the point where we celebrate the death of our own children as “freedom.” We can’t even reproduce ourselves anymore or assert our own identity and interests. It will suffice to say that liberalism is the philosophy of Western suicide.

Liberals believe there can be a West without Westerners. They believe this when liberal ideology is such a weak source of solidarity that it can’t even unite Americans. Their paradigm is failing everywhere across the West and they know it. The Alt-Right is condemned for extrapolating present trends and warning that this experiment is going to end in a total disaster for our descendants.

Every year the fogs clears a little more and the future we have always warned about comes into clearer view. We are progressing toward the abyss.