Is liberal democracy, the nation held together as such by a constitution of liberty, the genuinely open society, no longer able to sustain itself?

If so, why?

We know what enemies assail it, what developments continue to weaken it, but wonder why it has not proved strong enough to withstand them, if it is failing to do so.

Is there a fatal weakness in the best political system ever devised, exemplified by the Constitution of the United States of America?

Or do you think the long established libertarian nature of the US, Canada, Australia – perhaps even of Britain, far gone as it is – will yet prove stronger than the ruinous pull to the Left and the encroachments of Islam? Will it stop and reverse the trend now well underway towards tyranny?

John O’Sullivan wrote recently at the National Review:

I doubt Wokeness will triumph in the United States or anywhere in the English-speaking world where democratic and liberal traditions are deeply rooted, if at present very far from flowering. Those traditions will almost certainly be strong enough to contain a Woke regime long enough for an election to punish its preordained chaos, failure, and authoritarianism.

Are democratic and liberal traditions deeply rooted enough in the English-speaking world? Are they strong enough? Will electorates punish an authoritarian regime if they mistakenly put it in power? (What if such a regime abolishes elections?)

We look forward to our readers telling us any answers they may have to these questions.

(You can be as cynical about human nature as you need to be, if the answer, or part of it, lies there.)

The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray is soon to be published. This, you will find at Amazon, is what the book is about:

The Strange Death of Europe is a highly personal account of a continent and culture caught in the act of suicide. Declining birth rates, mass immigration, and cultivated self-distrust and self-hatred have come together to make Europeans unable to argue for themselves and incapable of resisting their own comprehensive alteration as a society and an eventual end.

This is not just an analysis of demographic and political realities, it is also an eyewitness account of a continent in self-destruct mode. It includes accounts based on travels across the entire continent, from the places where migrants land to the places they end up, from the people who pretend they want them to the places which cannot accept them.

Murray takes a step back at each stage and looks at the bigger and deeper issues which lie behind a continent’s possible demise, from an atmosphere of mass terror attacks to the steady erosion of our freedoms. The book addresses the disappointing failure of multiculturalism, Angela Merkel’s U-turn on migration, the lack of repatriation, and the Western fixation on guilt. Murray travels to Berlin, Paris, Scandinavia, Lampedusa, and Greece to uncover the malaise at the very heart of the European culture, and to hear the stories of those who have arrived in Europe from far away.

This sharp and incisive book ends up with two visions for a new Europe – one hopeful, one pessimistic – which paint a picture of Europe in crisis and offer a choice as to what, if anything, we can do next. But perhaps Spengler was right: “civilizations like humans are born, briefly flourish, decay, and die.”

Spengler? Oswald Spengler. Author of The Decline of the West (published in 2 volumes, 1918, 1923), more lyrically titled in German, Der Untergang des Abendlandes – literally, The Going Down of the Eveninglands – which might raise an image of a crimson Western sunset.

There is a brightness of crimson fire accompanying the decline of Europe. It is caused by the explosion of bombs as the hordes of Islam surge over the continent and the warriors of Islam’s holy war blow up Europeans and the shrines of their culture.

Spengler’s theory is that successive civilizations rise and fall, and the civilization of the West is falling. One falls, another rises. It will not, however, be another civilization that follows the death of Europe, but the barbarism of Islam.

The Amazon blurb for The Strange Death of Europe includes the “self-distrust and self-hatred” of Europeans among the causes of their civilization’s “eventual end”.

Who dares to say that the culture so many Europeans apparently despise IS the best, the highest, intellectually, morally, governmentally, and physically ever achieved in the history of the human race?

Well, we say it.

It is the best intellectually as a result of the confluence of two streams: the culture of classical Greece and Rome, and the values enshrined by reason in the Enlightenment. (NOT so-called “Judeo-Christian values”; NOT Christianity whose darkness covered Europe for a thousand years before the new dawn of Greco-Roman culture was followed by the bright day of the Enlightenment.)

It is the best morally and governmentally because it recognized that the individual person mattered more than his tribe; it therefore held individual freedom to be the highest value and protected it by law; established equality before the law; taught tolerance and abolished the age-old practice of slavery. Yes, there was slavery before it was abolished. Yes, there was still much injustice. And some Western tribes betrayed their civilization, most notably the Germans with their attempt at eliminating the Jews. But the Constitution of the United States enshrined the values of freedom and equality before the law, making the best hopes of humankind possible to achieve.

It is the best physically because most people live prosperous, safe, healthy, comfortable lives in the West. Anyone who doubts that the standard of living of Europeans and Americans is far higher than that of most Africans and most Asians cannot have travelled in those realms of hardship.

It is the best not only because of its own great cultural achievements, but also because it has recognized and been hospitable to the best ideas, techniques, works, discoveries and inventions from everywhere else.

But Western thinkers see no glory in their inheritance. They blame themselves for having carried their values, their culture, and often their prosperity, to those realms of hardship, the Third World. They see “colonialism” and “imperialism” as national crimes; crimes so terrible as to require the penance of national self-destruction. 

Such thought inspired politicians to facilitate the end of their civilization by surrendering to Islam.

They welcome the Muslim “refugees”; they give them houses and education and medical services and money; they let them off when they commit crimes; they suppress all criticism of them; and still the newcomers shoot their European hosts, run them over, stab them, torture them, rape them, and blow them up with nail-bombs.

The political leaders simply cannot understand why. What more could they do for them? Will even giving them the whole of Western Europe be enough?

Mark Steyn writes about the Muslim nail-bombing of a concert audience in Manchester, England, on May 22, 2017:

Angela Merkel pronounced the attack “incomprehensible”. But she can’t be that uncomprehending, can she? Our declared enemies are perfectly straightforward in their stated goals, and their actions are consistent with their words. They select their targets with some care.

For a while, it was Europe’s Jews, at a Brussels museum and a Toulouse school and a Copenhagen synagogue and a Paris kosher supermarket. But Continentals are, except for political photo-ops on Holocaust Memorial Day, relatively heartless about dead Jews, and wrote off such incidents as something to do with “Israeli settlements” and “occupation” and of no broader significance.

So they moved on to slaughter 49 gays in a nightclub in Orlando – the biggest mound of gay corpses ever piled up in American history and the worst terror attack on American soil since 9/11. But all the usual noisy LGBTQWERTY activists fell suddenly silent, as if they’d all gone back in the closet and curled up in the fetal position. And those Democrats who felt obliged to weigh in thought it was something to do with the need for gun control …

So they targeted provocative expressions of the infidel’s abominable false religion, decapitating a French priest at Mass and mowing down pedestrians at a Berlin Christmas market. But post-Christian Europe takes Christianity less seriously than its enemies do, and so that too merited little more than a shrug and a pledge to carry on.

So they selected symbols of nationhood, like France’s Bastille Day, Canada’s Cenotaph, and the Mother of Parliaments in London. But taking seriously assaults on your own nation’s symbols would require you to take your nation seriously, and most western citizens are disinclined to do so. As the great universal talismanic anthem of the age has it, “Imagine there’s no countries/It’s easy if you try…”

So the new Caliphate’s believers figured out that what their enemy really likes is consumerism and pop music. Hence the attacks on the Champs-Élysées and the flagship Åhléns department store in Stockholm, and the bloodbath at the Eagles of Death Metal concert in Paris and now at Ariana Grande’s “Dangerous Woman” tour. …

“Carrying on exactly as before”, as The Independent advises, will not be possible. A few months ago, I was in Toulouse, where Jewish life has vanished from public visibility and is conducted only behind the prison-like walls of a fortress schoolhouse and a centralized synagogue that requires 24/7 protection by French soldiers; I went to Amsterdam, which is markedly less gay than it used to be; I walked through Molenbeek after dark, where unaccompanied women dare not go. You can carry on, you can stagger on, but life is not exactly as it was before. Inch by inch, it’s smaller and more constrained.

And so it will prove for cafe life, and shopping malls, and pop concerts. Maybe Ariana Grande will be back in the UK – or maybe she will decide that discretion is the better part of a Dangerous Woman’s valor. But there will be fewer young girls in the audience – because no mum or dad wants to live for the rest of their lives with the great gaping hole in your heart opening up for dozens of English parents this grim morning. And one day the jihad will get lucky and the bomb will take with it one of these filthy infidel “shameless” pop whores cavorting on stage in her underwear. You can carry on exactly as before, but in a decade or two, just as there are fewer gay bars in Amsterdam and no more Jewish shops on the Chaussée de Gand, there will be less music in the air in western cities. Even the buskers, like the one in Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens today serenading a shattered city with “All You Need Is Love”, will have moved on, having learned that it’s a bit more complicated than that.

I am currently reading Douglas Murray’s fine book, The Strange Death of Europe, which lays out, unsparingly, the central illusion of the last half-century – that you could demographically transform the composition of hitherto more or less homogeneous nation states on a scale no stable society has ever attempted, and that there would be no consequences except a more vibrant range of local restaurants. Mrs May [amazingly the Prime Minister of Britain] declared this morning on the steps of Downing Street that she had held a top-level security meeting …  I’ll bet the mood around the table was one of fatalism and resignation, outside a few micro-adjustments to the budget of counter-terrorism agencies and the number of CCTV cameras and the amount of security checks at “sensitive” “high-value” targets like department stores, and theaters, and restaurants and football grounds and pubs and chip shops … 

But the arithmetic is not difficult: Poland and Hungary and Slovakia do not have Islamic terrorism because they have very little Islam. France and Germany and Belgium admit more and more Islam, and thus more and more terrorism. Yet the subject of immigration has been all but entirely absent from the current UK election campaign. Thirty years ago, in the interests of stopping IRA terrorism, the British state was not above preventing the internal movement within its borders of unconvicted, uncharged, unarrested Republican sympathizers seeking to take a ferry from Belfast to Liverpool. Today it declares it can do nothing to prevent the movement of large numbers of the Muslim world from thousands of miles away to the heart of the United Kingdom. It’s just a fact of life – like being blown up when you go to a pop concert.

All of us have gotten things wrong since 9/11. But few of us have gotten things as disastrously wrong as May and Merkel and Hollande and an entire generation of European political leaders who insist that remorseless incremental Islamization is both unstoppable and manageable. It is neither – and, for the sake of the dead of last night’s carnage and for those of the next one, it is necessary to face that honestly. Theresa May’s statement in Downing Street is said to be “defiant”, but what she is defying is not terrorism but reality. So too for all the exhausted accessories of defiance chic: candles, teddy bears, hashtags, the pitiful passive rote gestures that acknowledge atrocity without addressing it …

What’s the happy ending here? In a decade it will be worse, and in two decades worse still, and then in three decades people will barely recall how it used to be, when all that warmth and vibrancy of urban life … is but a memory, and the music has died away, and Manchester is as dull and listless as today’s Alexandria. If Mrs May or Frau Merkel has a happier ending, I’d be interested to hear it. If not, it is necessary not to carry on, but to change, and soon – before it’s too late.

Is it not already too late for Western Europe? Its sun is sinking fast.

Of course nobody can stop the collapse of Western civilization.

What do those of us who speak and write in favor of that colossal achievement and cry out warnings that it is under threat, think we are achieving?

Persuading multitudes to resist the flood? Can we? Can they?

Perhaps, at most, a few among us – Nigel Farage, Donald Trump – can try putting a finger in the dyke.

Mark Steyn defines “the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia and call into question the future of much of the rest of the world”.

“The key factors” he lists are these:

i) Demographic decline;
ii) The unsustainability of the social democratic state;
iii) Civilizational exhaustion.

And here’s our abstract of his article:

Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30 per cent of the global population to just over 20 per cent, and the Muslim nations increased from about 15 per cent to 20 per cent. Is that fact less significant to the future of the world than the fate of some tree or the endangered sloth hanging from it? In 1970, very few non-Muslims outside the Indian sub-continent gave much thought to Islam, but in little more than a generation the world is utterly altered. By 2020, it will be impossible to compare statistics between “the Muslim world” and the West because Islam is currently responsible for most population growth in English, French and German cities, and the principal supplier of immigrants to Canada, and already 25 per cent of the population of the European Union’s capital city, Brussels. September 11th 2001 was not “the day everything changed”, but the day that revealed how much had already changed. We’re seeing one of the fastest population transformations in history, whereby an aging ethnic European population is being replaced by a Muslim population. And the Muslims understand that, in fact, Europe, as they see it, is the colony now. I think the average Muslim does, in some basic sense, when he immigrates to the Netherlands, when he immigrates to the United Kingdom, when he immigrates to Canada or Michigan, want eventually to live in a Muslim society in those places. I am not saying he wants to fly planes into buildings, but his expectation is that the host society will assimilate with him rather than the other way around. This is the biggest story of our time, and the West’s leaders still can’t talk about it to their own peoples, not honestly. And they’re increasingly disinclined to let you talk about it.

Civilizational decline: whatever its causes – and the reluctance of Europeans to have children is certainly one of them – it is a fact.

You cannot miss it. It is here in America.

It is in the universities which have largely been transformed from institutions of disinterested learning into fortresses of Orthodox Thought.

It is in the schools, where text books teach that Islam is a beautiful pacific religion, not the primitively superstitious creed of a ruthless warlord which is what it really is.

It is in the media, which defend Orthodox Thought, the advance of Islam,  and the dissolution of the West, with passionate pertinacity.

It is in the failure of conservatives to accept that it is happening at all, so they cry out against the last hope America has of holding back that tide for a little while at least – the possible presidency of Thumb-in-the-dyke Donald Trump.

Acolytes of the Left like to say that they are “on the right side of history”. Whether it is the right side or not, they are on the side of what is happening. The side of civilizational decline, of Muslim colonization, of the dissolution of borders, of Orthodox Thought. 

Hillary Clinton, the Left’s candidate for the presidency, wants to increase Muslim immigration into the United States; wants “open borders”; wants to forbid the criticism of Islam. Hillary Clinton is on the side of civilizational decline.

Conservatives complain that Donald Trump is immoral in that he talks boastfully of his sexual conquests as most men do. But they seem not to have noticed that far more important moral principles are being discarded – to widespread popular indifference. At least half the voting citizens of America do not give a toss that Hillary Clinton is a corrupt, venal, lying scofflaw. Not that they don’t know she is all that – it’s just that they don’t care about her immorality. They see her as the right person to be president of the United States at this time.

And is she not? Isn’t she perfectly suited to the time?

Millions of voters who have resided in America their whole lives have immigrated without moving an inch. They don’t live in the country of their birth even if they’ve never travelled outside its borders. This is not your father’s America. It’s not even your older brother’s. 

So writes Daniel Flynn, in an article at Front Page.

The electorate that voted Ronald Reagan into the presidency in 1980 was 88 percent white, ten percent black, and two percent Hispanic. The body politic that reelected Barack Obama in 2012 was 72 percent white, thirteen percent black, ten percent Hispanic, three percent Asian, and two percent “other” …

But –

The changing complexion of America may be the most superficial of the major demographic shifts. Getting married and bringing children into the world are less popular now than at any point in U.S. history. In 1980, just 18 percent of births occurred to women not married to their child’s father. Now, that figure exceeds 40 percent. Without a daddy in their house, many single mothers look for a daddy in the White House. …

So many Americans now depend on government for food, shelter, retirement, education, health care, and even jobs that the party of government almost guarantees itself a majority long before the campaign has started. Consider that in 1980 slightly more than twenty million Americans received food stamps. In 2012, the number approaches fifty million. From bailed-out Toledo autoworkers to the comfortably unemployed approaching 99 weeks of benefits in Detroit to Georgetown co-eds desiring free birth control, the Democrat constituency is the coalition of the bought. …

Republicans Tuesday suddenly came to grips with the changes that have been slowly transforming the United States of America. …

There has been a revolution within the form.

The nation’s name remains the same. Its habits, and inhabitants, have changed beyond recognition. 

A majority of Americans chose socialism. They may not call it that, but that is what they’re getting with their choice of Obama.

As Daniel Flynn says, the transformation of America did not come suddenly. The November 2012 election was only the consummating event. Preparation for it started decades ago. To choose an arbitrary date, one might say 1968. But the realization that it has happened has come suddenly to the Republican Party.

The change came to the West in general.

Since the advent of the “New Left”, generations of children have been educated to believe that socialism is good, capitalism is bad. In American public schools, the teaching of every branch of the humanities is an indoctrination of socialism. American history is taught as a shameful tale. The books of modern fiction prescribed for student reading more often than not carry the messages of the left: anti-capitalism, egalitarianism, environmentalism, multiculturalism. The nation state and military strength are bad. Pacifism and world socialist government are good. Business is a bad thing. (“Making a profit is a disease in our society”, declares that icon of the left, Noam Chomsky.) The person who succeeds in making money in business is ipso facto a bad person.

All this they were taught. It was a long concerted campaign. “The  long march through the institutions” (the slogan that became a program, first uttered by Antonio Gramsci, founder of the Italian Communist Party) was patiently undertaken by the footsoldiers of the left, and steadily achieved. One by one the institutions were conquered: the schools and universities, many of the churches (easily turned from irrationalism to irrationalism, from one faith to another), the media, the entertainment industry; in Europe, and parts of America, even the police and the courts of law; eventually the government, and so the military and the intelligence services.

And conservatives did not notice the march. Or if they noticed it, they didn’t think it worth the effort to stop it. And now it cannot be reversed. It is a one-directional movement, a political ratchet.

So America goes socialist. The spectacle of other societies failing under socialism/communism/collectivism/statism should, in reason, make Americans shudder, not emulate them. But it hasn’t. Americans have caught the disease that is destroying the West.

What is its name?

As a failure to notice that socialist experiments have failed, it’s mental blindness.

As a failure to understand why they’ve failed, it’s mental feebleness.

As an open-eyed, fully conscious commitment to self-destruction, it is, in the medical term, suicidal ideation.

Democracy kills itself.