Social Matter

The doctrine of multiculturalism is increasingly facing pressure from populist protest movements across Europe. PEGIDA in Germany and the groups associated with the National Front in France — both buttressed by popular books decrying the ideology (“Germany Abolishes Itself” and “The French Suicide”) — are finding support not just from the lower classes who are most directly threatened by mass immigration, but by the middle classes as well. In the United Kingdom, UKIP plays this political role, but with a stronger tinge of being against the European Union.

In Europe, the concerns are mostly about the displacement of native European culture by foreign cultures, mostly Islamic.

From the perspective of opponents of multiculturalism, it would seem like democracy is doing its job, despite solid opposition from highly educated elites.

Or, rather, democratic correction is appearing to begin to fix the political problems caused by the enactment of mass immigration policies of the 1960s. In Europe, those new laws followed  enormous ethnic cleansing operations in many countries, most notably in Poland of ethnic Germans, which left many countries with nearly unprecedented levels of ethnic homogeneity.

Unlike at any other time in history with the exception of perhaps the Roman period, these countries began importing enormous numbers of people from Africa, Asia, and the wider Muslim world. The economic argument behind this, particularly in West Germany, was to provide social welfare systems with more funding, to correct for projections of shortfalls in government finance.

The mass immigration wave has failed to render these poorly-conceived-of social welfare programs healthy. One of the long-term consequences of enormous social welfare states is a precipitous drop in fertility — especially fertility among the most productive workers who pay the most in to the welfare state.

The problem which is most acute in Europe is that the traditional national cultures have decayed, along with the older religions practiced by the people in Europe. The religion of the modern Western state is progressive internationalism. The leadership classes of these states are fervent believers in their religion. Mere opposition to another religion is not itself a religion or a strong opposition culture.

The notion of multiculturalism is similar to Communist internationalism, derives from the same roots, and was promoted by academics from within the Marxist framework.

Europeans, like Americans, will not be able to get what they want. The Great Society in America and the various welfare states of Europe are not financially sustainable. They have perverse economic effects, not to mention being actively deleterious to the institution of the family. There is an intimate connection between the drive for more immigration and the state’s need to at least plausibly pretend to be keeping their national finances in order.

Popular movements are unable to speak the truth about these connections. Politicians know that the only way that they can be elected is to promise the impossible: on the right (to a limited extent), promises to reform immigration systems, and on the left, to open the floodgates even further. Bureaucrats operating in the background know that the situation is dire, but those who speak to the public about how dire the problem really is (like Jason Richwine) wind up losing their careers for speaking to the public about it at too loud a tone.

Multiculturalism is more than a state policy emanating from an academic cult. The beliefs promoted by that academic cult were also useful to states facing a looming financial crisis in the 1960s which struck  even more catastrophically in the 1970s. These financial crises threatened the fiscal ‘glue’ of these nation-states — the social welfare programs that give citizens ‘skin in the game’ to help the system continue.

In West Germany, the state under Adenauer began importing guest-workers to resolve its perceived labor shortages. The consequences were not entirely foreseen, and steps were taken to attempt to stem the flow rather early on, to little avail. Similar fiscal justifications have been made in other Western states, and similar problems have appeared in enforcing bureaucratic-immigration-regulation.

Part of the core problem is that democratic governments are not unified fronts. In the US, members of the Democratic party gain in power when they shirk immigration enforcement duties. This is even a matter of official municipal policy in places like New York City. Republicans, many of whose supporters oppose mass immigration, do not gain electoral strength from indiscriminate immigration in the same way. The parties often act to subvert one another.

And after the Johnson administration, it’s been core to the Democratic strategy in the US — Johnson dropped southerners and the working class, while picking up racial minorities and immigrants as permanent supporters of his party. That was a conscious political calculation that has reaped enormous returns for his party, as he had plotted to achieve.

When he was seeking the mayoral election in 2001, Michael Bloomberg said in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations that the US risked “national suicide” — if it didn’t lower standards for immigration in the guise of technocratic reform. This rhetoric of self-destruction tends to be used by both sides of the immigration debate.

In the more contemporary crisis, elites are out of sane options, leaving only insane behavior that can only delay popular revolt and national bankruptcies. “Kick the can down the road” is the common way of describing the pragmatic cowardice used by states since the crisis of the late 2000s.

In Europe, the false promise made by politicians riding these popular movements is that their welfare states can be maintained, whether or not they reduce the pace of mass immigration or expel them in large numbers.

The welfare programs bind the citizens to the state. But the citizens are no longer bound nearly so tightly to one another. Instinctively, the people feel this, but without something to replace that bond to the state, the void waits beneath them, and so comes the desperate need to look away from it, to focus on anything but that. They grasp at any replacement that they can find, because inducing people to cooperate is the central problem that politics and law attempts to resolve.

These are essentially separate but related issues. Getting rid of hostile, incompatible cultures will probably make these countries more governable, but they will not cure the gaping holes in Ponzi welfare schemes either in the short or long runs. America is no exception to this process — its situation is arguably more dangerous, owing to its position at the hub of an unsustainable international system of  arbitrary digit-finance and free-floating paper currency.

Because of these links between the issues, it would be an enormous challenge for political leaders to retract multiculturalism without also retracting many of the defining institutions of the modern nation-state, which has become less ‘nation’ and more ‘administrative region of an accounting-empire operated from New York, Washington D.C., Brussels, and London.’

This is especially acute for populist leaders who may bumble their way into leadership positions in various countries. If you were trying to find a fall-guy or fall-gal for the collapse of Ponzi welfare, you would use one of these characters, so that you could knock them aside once the public adulation turned to rage.

In neither Europe nor America are there national statesmen comparable to Charles de Gaulle,  much less that of the caliber of statesmen from before obliteration of the ancient regimes. It is not popular or even really possible to tell citizens the straight truth of the devaluation of their very citizenship. Nonetheless, it is better, in the long run, to inform everyone who will listen that the crisis is more complex and severe than it seems on the surface of it.

Promising that the rollback of global-multiculturalism will, itself, resolve the crisis of the nation-state, is setting up for a future political catastrophe. It is better to argue that it is necessary, but not even close to sufficient.