The Western War on Itself

 

Douglas Murray isn’t a liberal. He isn’t a race or gender realist either. So there isn’t much in the way of serious goodness or truth in his current best-seller The War on the West (2022).

Still, he defends Western Civilization far better than most. Or, at least, he attacks its attackers far better.

As everyone educated and virtuous should know by now, Western society took a turn for the worse around 2015 with the advent of what could be called Monster Leftism, but which most people call Woke Leftism. This could be seen in the unprecedented rise of Antifa, B.L.M., social media de-platforming, impeaching Trump, transexual-mania, defunding the police, and more.

The Right has its own problems, and also in about 2015 it turned to conspiracy theory. But the Left embraced socialism, fascism, racism, sexism, censorship, cancel culture, anti-Enlightenmentism, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and Big Brother in a way, and to an extent, previously unknown. Current Leftists are illiberal, postmodernist, and anti-Western to a remarkable degree.

Murray responded to this new evil and threat to the world with the books The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, and Islam (2017) and The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity (2019). Both are solidly good, relatively speaking. And they’re quite similar to the work of his colleagues David Horowitz, Bruce Bawer, Pamela Geller, Ann Coulter, Ben Shapiro, Jonah Goldberg, Pat Buchanan, Mark Stein, Andy Ngo, and a few others.

All these ferocious writers and intellectuals are religious conservatives. But they also lightly or moderately promote the philosophy of classical liberalism. Thus they somewhat rise above the trivial Right-Left divide and partially do advocate the noble philosophy of Westernism and modernity.

But not one understands that life is a battle between liberalism and illiberalism. The Right-Left conflict which consumes them is minor and a distraction from the real war which confronts us.

And not one of these deep thinkers admits that blacks and women are inferior to whites and men. No serious discussion of the nature, nurture, and morality of whites, blacks, Hispanics, Orientals, men, and women is to be found in any of their semi-polemical books.

So these supposed defenders and promoters of Western liberalism are close to philosophically impotent. And their level of intellectual honesty, courage, and integrity on the pivotal issues of race and gender is close to non-existent. Ultimately, their intellectual incompetence and profound illiberalism offer the Western world virtually no hope.