Many intellectuals and revolutionaries, Right-wing and Left, find this apparent sameness — omniculture, they’d call it — downright repellent. For conservatives, it signals the erasure of particularity by “globalism.” Leftists, meanwhile, see in the omniculture the triumph of a consumerist economy built on exploitation. What neither camp appreciates is that this sameness is the source of the West’s enduring influence at a time when the United States and its allies are in relative decline thanks mainly to the rise of China.

We should be grateful for omniculture because it appeals to a globalized world more than any of its civilizational rivals do.

Intellectuals and revolutionaries always like to imagine idealized versions of culture. During the Cold War, the best minds looked past the grimness of the “really existing socialism” of Communist states to the idealized socialisms that existed only in the imagination. In the same way, the nostalgic Right today laments the decline of an idealized Greco-Roman-Christian West, and the legacy Left celebrates the defeat of an imperialist, racist West. Neither of these constructs bears any resemblance to the actual culture of the Really Existing West today.

Half a century ago, much of Latin America was ruled by military officers in sunglasses, some of whom looked to Italian fascism or Spanish or Portuguese corporatism for economic models. Meanwhile, the eastern half of Europe was governed by Communist satraps of Moscow. Now democracy, in more and less corrupt versions, has replaced military juntas and rule by politburos. In addition to sharing multiparty democracy, Europe and the Americas increasingly share similar politics — not least the polarization between rural and working-class voters (“the Right”), and urban professionals and ethnic minorities (“the Left”).

The convergence of the nations of the West isn’t limited to political forms and political divisions. Partially, it’s demographic: Western nations are becoming uniformly diverse, in the sense that all are now home to ballooning shares of immigrants from non-Western regions, including Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

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In every Western country, fertility rates have collapsed far below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. In the United States, the total fertility rate is 1.6; in the European Union, it’s 1.34; and in Latin America, it’s 1.8 and falling. The shortfall is being filled, everywhere, by immigrants and their descendants. The foreign-born share of the United States population is nearly 15%, the highest rate since the late 19th century. Foreign-born residents make up an even larger share of the population in Britain (around 20%) and Canada (more than 20%).

Growing secularization is another characteristic of the omniculture. Protestantism once defined the United States, while Catholicism shaped life across much of Continental Europe and Latin America. But on both sides of the Atlantic, organized religion and church attendance are in rapid, and perhaps irreversible, decline. More than half of Americans never attend religious services at all. Christian self-identification in the United States has declined to around 60%, not owing to the influence of non-Christian religions, which remain small, but because of the rise of “nones”: those who have left the Christian denominations of their ancestors, mostly for “nothing in particular.”

In Europe between 2010 and 2020, the Christian share of the population dropped to about two-thirds, down from about 3 in 4 — a result caused less by Muslim and other non-Christian migration than by the simple extinction of Christian belief without its replacement by another traditional religion. The same process can be observed in Latin America, where Catholicism is in decline and competing with “nones,” who account for more than 20% of the population in South America and 13% in Mexico and Central America. 

The Catholic Church is also losing ground to Protestants, chiefly evangelicals and Pentecostalists, whose numbers in Latin America swelled to about a quarter, up from only 4% in 1970. Increasingly, in Latin America, evangelical Protestants make up an important constituency of the political Right, as in the United States.

The decline of organized religion has been accompanied by the liberalization of attitudes toward sex and reproduction throughout the Really Existing West. In Europe, abortion is prohibited outright only in Vatican City, Poland, Monaco, Liechtenstein, and Andorra; elsewhere, it is legal and subject to varying restrictions. In the United States, following the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade, only 13 of 50 states imposed total or near-total bans on abortion.

Homosexuality has been decriminalized in every European country, with most recognizing same-sex marriages or civil unions. In the United States, the Supreme Court has decriminalized homosexuality and legalized gay marriage in all 50 states. Every Latin-American country has decriminalized homosexuality as well.  

In the case of the arts, the folk cultures of various peasantries, the elite cultures of royal courts and the haute bourgeoisie, and the official artistic styles of totalitarian regimes have been swept aside everywhere by commercial mass media and social media. Thanks to comic books and superhero movies, today’s Westerners recognize Spider-Man and Darth Vader more easily than they do figures of Greco-Roman mythology like Hercules or biblical heroes like Joshua. Even many Western conservatives, while lamenting the decline of classical literacy, appear to derive much of their worldview from children’s books by two British authors, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. 

Patriotism exists in the Really Existing West, but it is an unintellectual, sentimental, populist patriotism, based on national sports teams and national music and movies. Contemporary Europeans have long forgotten what they learned in school about the early kings and saints of their countries, but they can tell you the names of their leading national football players and Eurovision contestants. The World Cup plays the role of the original Olympic Games in the era of multiple Greek city-states and kingdoms.

The emerging pan-Western omniculture is deeply pluralistic — but the pluralism is based on functions and sectors, not on races or religions. In premodern multiethnic societies, segregated, parallel communities often existed side by side, as in the millet system of the Ottoman Empire, which allowed minorities a restricted freedom to practice their own religion and establish their own culture and law. In today’s Really Existing West, by contrast, horizontal stratification of different areas of life has replaced vertical communal divisions. There is a pan-Western business and economic culture; a pan-Western academic culture; a pan-Western avant-garde artistic culture; and various pan-Western musical styles with fans everywhere (rock, pop, rap). The same individual can participate in all of these subcultures at different times, with no sense of contradiction.

This functional pluralism is difficult for many intellectuals and activists on both Right and Left to understand. Catholics and Calvinists and Marxists and democrats and romantic nationalists alike have dreamed of aligning every aspect of society — from politics and values to art and architecture and literature — with a single overarching doctrine. Democracies must have “democratic” architecture, socialist regimes must have “socialist” art and literature, and so on. The functional pluralism of the new omniculture seems like incoherence to these would-be social engineers.

But such diversity would have been familiar to ancient Greeks and Romans and premodern East Asians. In the Hellenistic era and the Roman period that followed, formerly segregated and separate cultures of the Mediterranean disintegrated and became parts of a kaleidoscopic whole in which at least some individuals could pick and choose among fragments of different traditions.  People could take part in imperial or civic rites, worship their ancestors and household spirits, practice Stoicism or Epicureanism, and belong to this or that mystery cult at the same time. Similarly, in premodern China and Japan, you could be a Confucian in public life, a Taoist in private life, and perhaps a Buddhist on some occasions for particular purposes. This kind of cafeteria approach to culture — with no comprehensive dogma governing every aspect of life, and with some transnational subcultures appropriate for some functions but not others — is the emerging norm in the Really Existing West.

Subcultural pluralism, however, is not liberal individualism. The local geographic community has given way to multiple transnational communities for many people, but these decentralized communities can be just as conformist and intolerant. Marshall McLuhan believed that modern communications technology would create a “global village.” Yet global villages — plural — would be more accurate. The same neoliberal economic orthodoxy is taught in business schools in the United States, France, and Brazil, while the same intolerant woke identity politics structures the arts and humanities on both sides of the Atlantic. You can choose to enjoy country music or rap, but each has its zealously guarded standards of authentic tradition. 

Post-liberal critics of the modern West get this wrong. Tradition and community have not been replaced by radical individualism and anomie. Rather, complex plural communitarianism has replaced homogeneous tribal and village communitarianism.  

The dominant attitude toward sex in this emerging Western omniculture is not one of celebration of alternative lifestyles, but of lack of concern about what other people do in their bedrooms. If this is liberal, it is the liberalism of indifference. Transgenderism is a bridge too far, because it requires everyone to actively acknowledge minority sexual identities — and radical claims about mind-body dualism — instead of just ignoring them.

Thinkers on both the Right and the Left persist in trying to explain these cultural developments as derivations of this or that overarching ideology. Cultural Marxism! Gnosticism! False consciousness spread by the capitalist media! But there is no common worldview, any more than there was in the Hellenistic era, when you could worship Athena and Serapis at the same time.  The intolerant monotheisms that tried to impose uniform belief on societies by state coercion, and the intolerant secular religion of Marxism-Leninism, were historical aberrations. In the absence of government-imposed orthodoxies, large-scale societies will be heterodox by default.  Led by the Really Existing West, global civilization is returning to its natural incoherent condition.

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Attempts by Western conservatives to revive older versions of the West — whether of 1950 or 1350 — are doomed. The West of widespread Christian orthodoxy and overwhelming white majorities and sexual conservatism is gone, never to return. One by one, the countries that the Right sees as refuges from the omniculture of the Really Existing West have succumbed and have been absorbed by the omniculture. Catholic Ireland liberalized abortion law. Anti-gay Hungary jettisoned Orbán and Orbánism. Radical Salafists who want to restore the medieval Caliphate, trad Caths who want to restore medieval Christendom, slavophile Eurasianists who want to de-Westernize Russia — all are fated to fail.

Equally doomed is the progressive Left’s vision of a post-national world society in which every race and gender is represented in every social realm in proportion to its numbers in society as a whole. A shared civilization doesn’t mean a lack of national rivalries and wars. And the incoherent, segmented, functional pluralism of the omniculture, with different subcultures for different private and public purposes, is incompatible with absolute cultural egalitarianism. 

The models for the nostalgic Right are all in the past and the utopias of the progressive Left are in a borderless future that will never come about. Among contemporary societies, there are no alternatives to the new pan-Western omniculture that don’t have to be propped up by autocracy, given their lack of appeal even within their own borders. Communism, at least, once won enthusiastic converts around the world, but radical Islamism appeals to few other than a minority of ethnic Muslims. And the relaxation of religious coercion in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan would almost certainly lead to the assimilation of those societies in short order into the emerging omniculture.  

People in other countries look to China for models of industrial policy and state capitalism, not for neo-Confucian philosophy or authoritarianism. Xi Jinping’s daughter attended Harvard, and China’s Communist princelings have traded Mao suits for Western businesswear and Western fashions.

Jeremiads about Western decline, then, are doubly wrong. While the United States and Europe have allowed too much manufacturing to be lost, the main reason for their declining shares of global GDP and potential military power is external — the industrialization of China, India, and other countries — not internal mismanagement or moral decadence that can be reversed by wise leadership or a revival of correct values.

Paradoxically, the relative decline of the West’s share of global economic and military power is accompanied by the spread of Western values — the values, that is, of today’s new, religiously indifferentist, multiracial Really Existing West. If you don’t like the omniculture of the Really Existing West, you can move to Communist North Korea or anti-gay Uganda or the Taliban’s Islamist Afghanistan — for as long as they hold out against the tide. 

So says Samuel Samson, a 27-year-old deputy assistant secretary in the US State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, or DRL. As used in this sense, the term “natural rights” derives from the early-modern age, when thinkers like Hobbes and Locke radically reprogrammed Western political philosophy. Where ancient and medieval thought had viewed the human subject as naturally social — naturally inclined to cooperate for the good — the moderns framed him as naturally turbulent and self-seeking, and forced into a social contract in order to protect his life and property from his equally violent, turbulent neighbors. Life and property were his natural rights, in this telling, and government’s job was to protect them. This new conception formed what the philosopher Leo Strauss called the “low but solid ground” of modernity — and came to shape the American founding.

Samson says natural rights are a cornerstone of his mission at DRL — a directional change that he describes as “anthropological.” This, even as he wants to link natural rights back to the much older account of natural law, developed first by the ancient Greeks and then absorbed by historic Christianity. Heady stuff, now at work (sort of) at the heart of Trumpian soft power and diplomacy.

His branch of the State Department, the DRL, was established in 1977 under a slightly different name, with the mandate of promoting democracy and American values around the world amid the Cold War. Back then, with Soviet Communism still standing as a universalist rival vying for hegemony, American values mostly meant modern liberalism. But now, under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Samson’s boss, it is charged with implementing the Trump administration’s ideological pivot towards “tradition” in American foreign policy. 

In the abstract, this has meant embracing the principles of Western civilization and the ideals of the nation’s founders — as if the two were perfectly in accord, with each other and with Trumpism — on topics such as nationhood, immigration control, free speech, and democracy. 

In practical terms, Samson’s work has heralded a change in what kind of causes the US government funds abroad, as well as a shift in emphasis from the developing world to the mostly European countries that Rubio designated America’s “civilizational allies” in remarks at the Munich Security Conference in February 2026. 

Not surprisingly, Samson has become something of a lightning rod for the administration’s new philosophy. A Catholic from Houston, the son of a Filipino mother and an American father of European ancestry, he arrived in Washington in 2021 and soon accrued a formidable Right-wing intellectual pedigree: a master’s degree in government from Hillsdale College, the evangelical-ish college that declines government funding in order to preserve its cultural and academic integrity, and a fellowship at the Thomistic Institute at the Dominican House of Studies in DC, with plans for a doctorate to follow. “I thought I was going to be a professor,” he says.

However, “there were exciting things happening in the conservative intellectual space,” and he was drawn to the NGO sector and was eventually offered a role in government. An acquaintanceship with Vice President JD Vance probably didn’t hurt. “Some have tried to spin me as having some particular or personal connection” with Vance, he says. The reality is that Samson has met the vice president a few times, and that he’s a young idealist, enthusiastic to work on causes he considers “critical issues at this critical moment in our country’s history.” 

If Trumpian foreign policy’s “civilizationalist” tilt — viewing the world as divided between large civilizational blocs, with Washington obliged to favor the West — has an architect, Samson has a good claim to being it. A blog post he published on the State Department’s website under the headline “The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe” came a full year before Rubio’s remarks in Munich, in which the secretary of state said that post-Cold War the West had succumbed to the “dangerous delusion … that every nation would now be a liberal democracy … and that we would now live in a world without borders where everyone became a citizen of the world.” Rubio announced an American return to national autonomy and expressed the wish that Europeans, with whom “we are connected spiritually and we are connected culturally,” join us in being “unapologetic in our heritage” and proud of our “common inheritance.”

In a sense, Samson’s rejiggering of DRL has saved it from the administration’s penchant for slashing government agencies that the Trumpians view, not unjustly, as ideological jobs programs for credentialed progressives. DRL, like the former USAID, is an American governmental channel for ideological advocacy abroad, dispensing about $190 million in funding every year, for the promotion of causes that have come to fall under the rubric of human rights but which Samson describes as “progressive social engineering or Leftist conditioning around the world.” DRL, he says, “was using its mandate as a skin suit to promote ideological Leftism that often ran contrary to the defense of democracy and human rights, and beyond that, just at a practical level, would often get involved in foreign-policy issues in ways that would actually undermine the national interest.” 

These efforts included, he says, “conditioning populations to adopt particular Leftist premises about promoting LGBT; normalizing things like transgenderism and gender surgery, including for children; promoting abortion around the world as if it’s some sort of settled moral question; and facilitating mass migration and elevating mass migration as a humanitarian obligation that developed countries have.” He adds: “All of these things are deeply radical.” In his time at DRL, it has shut down 80% of existing grants, and is currently offering money for causes more aligned with the Western tradition or Trumpian politics, depending on whom you ask.  

On that latter point: the observer would be forgiven for viewing most of its initiatives as narrowly political. In Britain and Europe, for example, Samson’s work has raised grumbles for favoring one side in the continent’s partisan battles, and the fact that some recipients of DRL largesse tend to go silent when it comes to criticizing the Trumpians’ own encroachments on free speech and other rights. Accordingly, Samson has been roundly vilified in the media. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism has published a feature on him. The New York Times in April said he’s “the 27-year-old diplomat waging Trump’s cultural war with Europe” and referred pointedly to his Catholic religion in a hit-piece on him. The progressive-leaning investigative site ProPublica criticized his championing of the State Department’s program to protect white Afrikaners under the rubric “the end of aid.” 

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Samson, however, refers to the agenda as one that prioritizes natural rights, and proffers a return to a conservative view of humanity and its purpose. He originally tried to change the bureau’s name to reflect the new orientation but settled for setting up an Office of Natural Rights instead, which he describes as intended to “defend America’s national interest and security by defending the unalienable rights and dignity of American citizens, and championing those same rights around the world.” 

The natural-rights theory of the Enlightenment came as a shock to the upholders of the West’s old order, not least Samson’s Catholic Church. Enlightenment philosophy, and the 18th-century revolutions that sought to bring it to life, shifted the end goal of politics, away from the common good of the whole — as the likes of Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas had had it — and toward individual autonomy. In the classical frame, moreover, the happiness of the individual and the community had an objective content. But under the new dispensation, this was much more contested, with modern political orders leaving it up to each person to determine for herself what it meant to pursue happiness.

“Nature” was the common denominator of both natural law (the old view) and natural right (the new one). Yet the substantive content of human nature shifted dramatically in the transition between the premodern world and the modern, concurrent with the collapse of feudal orders and the rise of early market societies.

Natural law, the older vision, first appeared in ancient Greece. Heraclitus, a forerunner of Plato, held that “man’s nature as well as his ethical goal consists in the subordination or conformity of individual and social life to the general law of the universe,” as explained by the German lawyer and theorist Heinrich A. Rommen in his authoritative survey The Natural Law, first published in 1936. (Rest assured, Rommen opposed the Nazis and eventually immigrated to the United States to escape their clutches.) 

The premise was then developed by Aristotle, and later by the medieval Christian Scholastics, and might broadly be described as the proposition that right and wrong, good and evil exist as unchanging ontological truths in the same manner as what we observe in the natural world. A tree exists to fulfill a certain end or range of ends: to grow and bear fruit. Just so, our purpose as human beings is to strive towards the “good and the true,” as Samson puts it. And our laws and social institutions are good or bad, legitimate or not, in so far as they promote these ends.

If human beings are made to strive toward certain kinds of goods, it follows that they have certain rights, also ontologically determined, that will promote this quest. These rights “belong to all people by our nature as human beings — that is what makes them natural,” Samson says. As he puts it, “perhaps in the Aristotelian sense, [man’s nature is that he is] a rational, social being made in the image of God. Some of the foremost natural rights that come from that nature are the rights to life, sovereignty (and security), speech, religion, and life in the polis.”

He goes on: “Natural rights are a much older, more profound conception of human rights — one espoused by America’s founders, and certainly in our founding documents.” Samson argues that his office’s focus on nationhood, immigration control, free speech, and democracy “tend back to those core tenets of human nature and are necessary for human flourishing.”

What Samson is doing here is subtly blending the older, natural-law or Aristotelian worldview into the early-modern, Enlightenment-derived one enshrined in America’s founding documents, now with a dash of 21st-century populism. For the premoderns, for example, there was no general right to free speech as such, except insofar as speaking freely corresponded with a particular citizen’s duties and stature. Freedom of religion was rare, to put it gently; “error has no rights,” the Catholic Church long taught, and often used the business end of the secular state to make sure things stayed that way. And the classical and medieval world that nurtured this tradition was, by and large, dominated by large, multinational empires. Nationalism and nation-states with borders and immigration laws that the Trumpians wish to harden — all these came much later: in the 18th and 19th centuries, right about when the modern vision took hold.

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Yet if the attempt to discern an Aristotle or Aquinas in the figure of Locke or Jefferson is theoretically tenuous, Samson is far from the first to attempt it. The project has a serious lineage and worthwhile aspirations. Plus, it may just work in practice. While we must be thankful for the more capacious rights theorized by the modern thinkers and secured by the American founders, there are ways in which the older, natural-law account can help us today: by elevating our rights discourse, and reminding us what rights are for. 

It sounds good, but the Trump administration’s attempts to promote Western civilization so far have failed to escape accusations of bad faith, and haven’t been taken seriously outside of the most credulous elements of the MAGA base.

Anyone trying to seize the moral high ground and promote the good and the true will have a difficult time explaining many elements of Trump administration policy, from the brutalities of ICE to the betrayal of the America First base represented by a unilateral war with Iran. And Western civilization-focused executive orders, such as one decreeing that all federal buildings should be constructed in a classical style of architecture, are performative and flimsy. You can order a certain style, but intelligent observers understand that it won’t make the buildings resemble the architecture of the classical period unless they’re also designed and constructed beautifully — which is unlikely, given the aesthetics of the Trump administration. In the same vein, you can withhold federal funding for schools teaching racial “indoctrination” and promote “a patriotic” curriculum, but only if you have a plan for how to replace the old ideas with better ones, organically, within the American academic culture — without bowdlerization or hiding the country’s dark side in a mirror image of the woke who hid the noble side. 

The State Department’s activities also leave it open to accusations of being more politically motivated than virtuous, even when the cause of virtue is being served. Samson declined to comment on new grants actively under consideration, however ProPublica has reported that they include one to the Free Speech Union, a British organization founded in 2020, which references the “spirit of the Enlightenment” in its statement of values, and defends people “who get into trouble for exercising their right to lawful free speech, whether in the workplace, at university or on social media.” Others are a reported $40 million slated for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation; and a reported $7 million for “878” — a new, Washington, DC-based British think tank, whose focus areas include “renewing our Judeo-Christian culture” and “ending mass immigration and deporting illegal immigrants” (as if the two obviously go hand-in-hand). 

These are popular causes on the Right, but how are they being executed? Free speech in Europe has been a marquee initiative. The State Department has declared an erosion of European civil rights, due to limitations on free speech imposed by Britain’s 2023 Online Safety Act; and by the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which, among other powers, can fine companies for violation of its standards for up to 6% of global revenue, and which recently went after Elon Musk’s X on transparently thin grounds. 

Both pieces of legislation contain language that can be — and occasionally is — used to suppress conservative speech. In a recent case in Britain, the comedian Graham Linehan was arrested for X posts critical of transgenderism. Defenders, however, claim the laws are necessary to prevent sexual abuse, threats of violence, and actual sexual harassment — forms of speech that are proscribed even under the US Constitution and its First Amendment. In Britain, supporters of the law contend that political arrests are usually a result of bungling execution and affect only a tiny minority of cases. The Free Speech Union itself cites only 300 people arrested under the UK’s law since 2023, and is vague about how many of those arrests were political. 

“At the end of the day, a lot of this is going to be prudential judgment,” Samson says. “No one actually believes in an anarchistic free-speech utopia, right? There is such a thing as harmful content, but we want to defer to the side of speech as much as we can.” (It’s worth noting, again, that you will find no defense for such an expansive libertarian view in Aristotle or Aquinas — or even in the early American tradition, which tolerated blasphemy laws as compatible with the First Amendment.) 

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Presented with the perception of American hypocrisy, regarding the United States’ own suppression of pro-Palestinian speech on campuses, he says that “we have a substantial legal tradition and also practical tradition that says that incitement to violence is a problem. There’s a categorical difference between grandmas praying outside of an abortion clinic, and violent Leftist groups that are calling for the extermination of our civilization.” Many of those facing such restrictions from the Trumpians did no such thing, however, and the courts are increasingly casting a skeptical eye on the administration’s pinched view of speech rights, especially when it comes to visitors and noncitizen migrants.

The disputes about the scope of speech are telling. They arise under both supposedly censorious Eurocrats and an American administration that tub-thumps loudly for speech. If everyone agrees that some limitations on speech are necessary, perhaps our civilizational allies in Europe are going about it in their own way, and how they do so may or may not be the appropriately ordered top concern of the American government. It does, however, play to an American base. 

The issues are real. However, the noise surrounding them drowns out a genuine and important shift. If the MAGA coalition was anything, it was the decisive majority of more-or-less normal Americans seeking a return to the kind of values they feel normal people, broadly, believe in, and that they feel progressive governance has abandoned. This has been branded by the spokesmen of progressivism as uneducated and dim: what, exactly, are the “normal” values? Who determines what’s “good”? Obviously there’s no ultimate authority, or real answer to these questions.  

Here, the natural-law tradition can be especially instructive. By the natural-law formulation, humans are designed to know the good, and thus the vague feeling that certain things are beyond the pale is telling us something. Our reason may be clouded, our will may be weak, our university education may be confusing us, but each human conscience is endowed with a sense of the true and right, and a longing for it. If there’s a MAGA future that could be pro-something, instead of merely anti-woke, it springs from this inchoate sense of a proper human virtue. 

Liberal secular morality and progressive governance have been characterized by the opposite, holding that truth is whatever the individual says it is; and that “the good” is what the people think is good for them, or perhaps what their betters think. That way led to the open border and the pediatric gender clinic, and a broad coalition of Americans has come out against it. 

It is astonishingly radical, actually, both in its metaphysical claims and its practical ones, that in 2026 the American government is even trying to deliver an authoritative stance on the good. To stand for any fixed truth — such as a defense of Western civilization, even if messily put together from discordant elements — is to oppose the ideology of the postwar order. That ideology elevated diversity as the highest good, and was allergic to suggesting that any populations or societies have any characteristics at all. Defense of a civilization requires certain claims: that we believe Western civilization is a good and meaningful category; that it has certain essential characteristics that are proper to it; that we aim to promote those characteristics and discourage others. 

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This isn’t diverse, but nor is it antithetical to the diverse society we currently have — because of Western Civilization’s very insistence that rights are universal, Samson says. The Catholic popes were among the first to champion the rights of indigenous peoples, on natural-law grounds, moral counsel that European conquerors honored only in the breach. Samson is thus clearly right when he says that “the tolerance and acceptance that this country has shown to immigrants is itself a product of the Western ethos…. There are non-Western people who live in America, but that’s distinct from the particular heritage that this country belongs to.” 

He references his own experience as the son of an immigrant from the Philippines, and his experiences in spending summers in the Philippines growing up, which were formative for his Christian faith. “If the prevailing international narrative was true, they would say, ‘Oh, well, the Spanish came and colonized your ancestors, and they were terrible to them.’ And of course, there are historic atrocities that you can’t ignore. But at the same time, I have the faith that I have, because of them. It was the Spanish who first came and taught [my ancestors] about the good and the true. I’m very grateful for that.” 

The devil, of course, is in the details. If there are actually correct values and goals that will promote human flourishing, the interpretation of what those values and goals are is a crucial art. An art that sits uneasily next to a president, Trump, who too often resembles the kind of petty, impulse-control-challenged figure the Greco-Roman sages of the natural law had in mind when they warned about the absence of virtue in a leader. Still, one cannot blame Samuel Samson for trying. One key question for the conservative movement, as it leaves the Trump era behind, is whether the intellectual depth and seriousness of purpose Samson exemplifies can be extracted from the wreckage.

Today, the education industry is no longer marginal and the university faculty no longer fits the awkward-brainiac stereotype. Professors have become powerful politically — they are the core of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and they predictably hold Leftist views, treating us to spectacles such as the University of Michigan faculty senate accusing Secretary of War Pete Hegseth of “war crimes.” Much of the Leftist elite, in fact, comes from academia — for example, Sen. Elizabeth Warren taught at Harvard Law School for 20 years, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is the son of a famous radical academic, who teaches at Columbia University. 

Meanwhile, Luigi Mangione, the Left’s favorite alleged assassin, has two degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution. The parents of Katie Wilson, Seattle’s new socialist mayor, are both professors. Globally, elite university graduates have been the primary promoters of the most hysterical climate change theses, epitomized by British politician Ed Miliband, an Oxford graduate and Labour MP, who has served as the UK’s Secretary of State for Energy Security since 2024, and who is clearly oblivious to the economic consequences of his “net zero” fanaticism.

However absurd its beliefs, what academia thinks and how it imposes its ideology matters. Leftist professors are shaping generations, sending youth into the world spouting the standard progressive script and displaying proud ignorance of the achievements of Western Civilization. 

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Virtually no major job category is more uniform in ideology. In 1990, 42% of professors identified as “liberal” or “far Left,” according to survey data by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. By 2014, that number had jumped to 60%. Today, roughly three-quarters of faculty are left of center, a trend that feeds on itself in hiring; even moderates are rare. Since 2002, at least 70% of political contributions from academics have gone to Democrats; the University of California faculty and staff sent $10 million to Democrats in 2004, but less than $300,000 to Republicans. Even at DePaul University, America’s largest Catholic university, almost 90% of contributions went to the Left.

This political skewing has the effect of turning universities into ideological re-education camps. For example, prominent schools of journalism, including those at Columbia and the University of Southern California, have moved away from teaching the fundamentals of reporting and now openly advance a social justice agenda. This enforced conformity isn’t good for students, or the quality of the pedagogy. Even some progressives, like the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, recognize that “students are less likely to get a good education, and faculty members are likely to learn less from one another, if there is a prevailing political orthodoxy.” 

At the university level, students coming to class, particularly in the liberal arts, are deficient in knowledge of such things as the failure of socialism in the USSR or the repressive nature of contemporary China. After all, socialism’s lethal failures are inconvenient facts for Marxist professors, who have, notes author Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, “surrendered to revolutionary kitsch.” Progressives would rather accuse Israelis, Americans, and Britons of genocide, while ignoring the fact that the greatest mass murderers in history did so under the Red banner. 

In this sense, today’s academics resemble Medieval clergy — or Marxist propagandists in the old USSR — more than open-minded and flexible intellectuals. Church authorities in the Middle Ages trained clergy in the defense of orthodox doctrine in order to combat heresies, a trend that also infected the universities of the time. The University of Paris became a staunch guardian of religious orthodoxy, and in the 1300s, it held a conclave to affirm the supposed reality that demons were afflicting society. 

Just as medieval universities resisted many of the ideas of the Enlightenment, today’s academics increasingly seek to banish the great liberal traditions that underpinned their own institutions’ ascendancy. And just as the medieval clergy preached against materialism, leading figures in today’s academia look askance at the idea of a dynamic economy, a spirit of innovation, and a commitment to improving everyday life. Some even suggest that progress is a myth. 

These approaches have consequences. Many college students who embrace socialism do so uninformed. Graduation speakers chosen with student preferences in mind are overwhelmingly from the Left, and those few non-Leftists who haven’t been canceled, such as Jonathan Haidt, are heckled. Yet when I taught a class on socialism at Chapman University, where I teach, only one student in 30 could identify a picture of Lenin. The exception was an Armenian who grew up in Moscow.

The academy’s unwillingness to teach the failings of Marxism helps explain why a recent Yale Buckley Institute poll found that a majority of all American college students express sympathy with socialism. In a global survey covering 28 countries and almost 21,000 respondents, half of respondents at least “somewhat agree” with the statement “at present, socialist ideals are of great value for societal progress,” including 39% of American respondents.   

Increasingly, university professors see their mission “to promote” a particular set of beliefs rather than “to teach,” notes British author, architect, and urban-planning expert Austin Rhys Williams. Not surprisingly, according to recent studies of cognitive behavior, today’s university graduates are inclined to maintain rigid positions on various issues. Confident of their own superior intelligence and perspicuity, students tend to be intolerant of other views. One recent study found that only 47% of people ages 18 to 34 said speech that might offend minorities should be allowed, compared with 70% of those over 55. 

Yet even as academia sticks to its radical agenda, the relevance of higher education becomes increasingly dubious, particularly due to artificial intelligence, which has turned schools into factories for slop, and displaced the remaining vestiges of intellectual formation. Professors, in their turn, have been slow to recognize the threat. They often seem in their own world, more like a guild or religious cult, with arcane rituals and folkways. Half a century ago, the Russian sociologist Pitirim Sorokin called this tendency “a frantic eagerness to know ‘more and more about less and less.’”  The vast majority of academic articles — so crucial for getting tenure — are almost never cited, especially in the social sciences and humanities. 

After decades of surging enrollment at American colleges, the numbers are beginning to drop, a trend hastened by the shrinking population of college-age potential students. Since 2010, undergraduate enrollment has dropped from 18.1 million to 15.4 million, and the percentage of BAs headed to graduate school has fallen precipitously over the past two decades. Over the past decade, 500-plus US private colleges have closed, three times the rate of the previous decade. 

In addition to the demographic reasons for the decline, students also appear to be concluding that academia is less valuable to them. At Harvard, 60% of grades are As, compared to 25% two decades ago. But this is no measure of student accomplishment: a recent NIH paper asserts that college students’ cognitive abilities are increasingly diminished by time spent online. And employers report that recent graduates are short on critical thinking skills. Overall, Gallup reports, the percentage of Americans who express “a great deal of confidence” in education has fallen in the past decade from around 60% to around 40%.

In particular, liberal arts majors are deciding their degree isn’t worth it. Producing such degrees has been a fertile source of employment for academics, but has also seemed oddly removed from basic reality. There are very few choice jobs in academia for such graduates, particularly at the tenure level. Roughly half of all faculty members today are part-timers, compared to one-third in 1987. Tenured positions have dropped from about 40% of all university teaching jobs in 1987 to around half that number in 2021. And capture by the ideological Left seems not to be helping: high-capture fields like history, English, and philosophy tend to be those that are losing the most students.

In contrast, less radicalized fields such as business, engineering, and hard sciences, although also under pressure to conform to such things as racial quotas, generally offer more promise both for students and society. And, for many, an increasingly likely option is to go to a trade school or simply get into the workforce. Both the federal government and companies such as Google, IBM, Apple, Ernst & Young, Starbucks, and Hilton, among others, are de-emphasizing credentials in favor of skills. It is in the skilled trades, as well as engineering, that the great opportunities of the future will be found. America is running low on skilled workers, doctors, and aerospace engineers; it faces no such problem with postmodernist English teachers.

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Why the ‘heterodox’ university failed

By Edmund King and Thomas Prosser

These shifts may ultimately weaken the current academic elite, but they also generate a potentially dangerous class of underemployed and overeducated people. Educated professionals, particularly younger ones, have replaced blue-collar workers as the radical constituency. We are seeing what one Marxist scholar described as a “swelling population of college graduates caught in a vise of low-paying jobs.” Historically, since the popularization of higher education, such people have played a role in revolutionary upheavals in Europe, Russia, and Latin America — and, potentially, they could do so in the United States as well. 

What happens at universities matters, and correcting the current situation requires a revised approach. To succeed, colleges need to focus less on activism and more on the basic task of imparting skills and educating young people as critical thinkers. Fortunately, there are some signs of a shift back to basics. This is occurring in schools such as Chapman, as well as numerous universities in the South, such as the University of Texas, the University of Florida, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Vanderbilt University. 

Simply put, we must rescue academia from the academics. This is particularly true in the humanities, where the number of doctorates has fallen by 15% in the past two decades. Rather than radical agitprop, students need a curriculum rich in classic literature and history, which naturally stresses eternal values and inspires debate. 

Today, university policies on curriculum largely ignore writers such as Homer, Confucius, Shakespeare, Milton, de Tocqueville, and the Founding Fathers. Some books are scorned for having been written by dead white males, who as a group are linked to such horrors as slavery, the subjugation of women, and mass poverty. 

Any return to basics will be fought bitterly. The academic establishment, as well as the serfs struggling to get any university-level teaching job at all, will fight like dogs over a bone, and will mount a rearguard action to preserve the regime, including DEI, until the end of President Trump’s term. In some places, notably the Northeast and California, they might even prevail, although perhaps at the cost of their own region’s economic prospects.

Ultimately, the fate of higher education will determine the future of the West. If students come out of college despising their own culture’s past successes and the value of merit, there is little hope of competition against societies where education is controlled by a state that values skills, even if such regimes aren’t strong in intellectual curiosity. Independence of thought may be the greatest strength of Western societies but, unless the academy changes, it will continue to recede, to the detriment of us all.

The three rival conceptions can be identified as creedalism, multiculturalism, and pan-white tribalism. For creedalists of the center Left and center Right, the West is a supra-national community of individuals who, regardless of race or religion, share a personal devotion to a universal creed of human rights and liberal democracy.

For Left-wing multiculturalists, meanwhile, the West is made up of European and North American countries with shared legacies of white supremacy and colonialism, countries that ought to be internally remodeled into multicultural societies in which “culture” is used as a synonym for biological race: to fulfill this model’s promise, whites must be deposed; “black and brown folks” lifted up.

Finally, for many, though not all, conservatives and Right-wing populists, the West is an ethno-religious community defined by pan-ethnic white racial identity and pan-Christian or Judeo-Christian religion. Some edgier varieties exclude either Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, or more than one of the three. Still more exotic ones hark back to paganism, viewing Christianity as a Jewish imposition on Viking vitality.

Partisans of all three visions have struggled to reconcile their preferred model with the actually existing political communities of the West, and they view this failure as a “crisis” of the West. It isn’t. Rather, demographic reality simply defies their neat, ideologized picture. Culture and nationhood still matter, but what anchors them are shared language and customs — not Enlightenment philosophy (as the creedalists would have it), not anti-European resentment (as the multiculturalists would), and not blood-and-soil devotion (as the ethno-sectarian Right would).

Start with the creedalists. In April 2016, then-President Barack Obama warned that if UK citizens in the Brexit referendum voted in favor of leaving the European Union, Washington would collectively punish them, sending Britain to “the back of the queue” for any future trade deals.

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By Michael Lind

In the language of trans-Atlantic centrist creedalism, Obama praised the European Union as one of “the international institutions” that enabled those in its sphere “to institutionalize and internationalize the basic values of rule of law, and freedom, and democracy, that … benefit our citizens as well as people around the world.”

These warnings notwithstanding, a decisive majority of Britons voted to leave. Today, returning to the European Union is the quixotic fantasy of a minority, often belonging to the upper professional classes. Creedalism has suffered many other defeats, including the backlash on both sides of the Atlantic against the disastrous global crusade for democracy of Tony Blair and George W. Bush, who in his messianic second inaugural address declared: “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one…. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation … now it is the urgent requirement of our nation’s security, and the calling of our time.”

Then there is Left multiculturalism, which mounted its strongest showing during the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. Although policing and race relations in Britain and the rest of Europe are very different from American conditions, BLM spread beyond US shores, underscoring the movement’s (anti-) civilizational ambition.

Inspired by the American Left, activists in European countries vandalized or pulled down civic monuments, rewrote university curricula and museum exhibits, and demanded racial preferences.  The BLMUK manifesto parroted the rhetoric of Left-wing American activists: “We’re guided by a commitment to dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white-supremacy, patriarchy, and the state structures that disproportionately harm black people in Britain and around the world.”

Yet this version of Western “civilization” likewise failed to take hold and exhausted itself. Today, Americans look back on that period — so-called peak woke — almost as a bad (if also oddly humorous) dream. And while such trends take longer to dissipate in the imperial periphery than in the core, it’s unlikely that European-style woke-ism will last much longer. Indeed, in Europe the crises of immigration and assimilation are, in some ways, far more acute, and are likely to discredit the multicultural model for a generation or more.

The Right’s answer to the creedalism of the liberal center and the race-based multiculturalism of the Left is a kind of trans-Atlantic nativism, in which the West is defined as a civilization by racial and religious “heritage.” In 2025, for example, the Trump administration implicitly argued for an ethno-religious definition of the West in its National Security Strategy.

The document contains lines about the importance of Europe as a military ally and a trading partner that could have appeared in any American state paper. But it weaves these into a lurid narrative of Europe and the United States as parts of a single embattled trans-Atlantic ethno-religious community, with shared ancestry and culture as a basis for US-European relations — a concept that would have startled generations of Americans who drew a sharp distinction between the Old World and the New.

Using apocalyptic rhetoric common on the far Right but hitherto unknown in American state papers, the NSS warns that Europe faces “civilizational erasure.” According to the NSS:  “Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.” The NSS gets as close to outright racism and anti-immigrant white nativism as an American state paper can go: “We want Europe to remain European.”

 The subtext: Europe doesn’t look European any more, with all those dark-skinned invaders like former British Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, and former Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar.

According to the Trump administration, the good news is that the “growing influence of patriotic European parties” — that is, Right-wing nationalist parties opposed to mass immigration and the European Union “indeed gives cause for great optimism.” Implicitly identifying “America” with white Americans of European descent, the document states: “America is, understandably, sentimentally attached to the European continent — and, of course, to Britain and Ireland.”

This would be news to many Americans, including many British- and Irish-Americans, whose ancestors fled poverty or persecution and have no interest in this or that old country. And the idea that sentimental Europhilia is an important part of American culture is hard to square with the intense resistance on the part of many Americans to US involvement in the two world wars. 

The language of Trump’s NSS reflects the worldview of pan-Western American paleoconservatives who idolize the likes of Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. Orban has described his ideal as “illiberal democracy” and, in July 2022, declared: “We [Hungarians] are not mixed-race: we are simply a mixture of peoples living in our own European homeland.… We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race.”

Religion-mixing, rather than race-mixing, is the target of other defenders of an ethnic conception of the West. In 2025 Andrew Beck, a fellow of the Claremont Institute, which has sent dozens of fellows and staffers into the two Trump administrations, denounced the construction of a Hindu “idol” in Texas and asked in The American Mind: “Are we permitted to determine whether the foundation we build upon remains a distinctly Western, Christian civilization that assimilates outsiders into its mold?” 

Another Claremont fellow, Jeremy Carl, may have doomed his chances to be confirmed as Trump’s nominee to be assistant secretary of state for international organizations with his past statements about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as an “anti-white weapon.”

During a hearing on his nomination, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) asked Carl to define “white culture”: “You have made several statements about your worry regarding the erasure of white culture in America,” Murphy said. “You know, I understand Irish-American culture. I understand Italian-American culture. I maybe don’t understand white culture, as well. Tell me the values, the white values, that you believed are being erased by the current American government or the prior American governments.” 

Carl, Trump’s nominee, mumbled and struggled to respond, before finally thinking of an example unrelated to immigration and based on race: “I would say that the white church is very different than the black church in terms of its tone and style on average.”

OK, good luck to the populist Right in the quest to frame the black church as the big civilizational threat. Indeed, it’s pandering to the likes of Carl and those further to his Right that will likely break apart Trump’s diverse coalition in the 2026 midterms and beyond.

As Carl’s statement suggests, moreover, while uniting fellow adherents in the United States and Europe, each of the three conceptions of the West is used to divide people within countries between “Westerners” and “non-Westerners.” For the ethno-religious nationalists, American society is divided between “authentic” Americans, who are white and Christian, and Hindus and blacks and many others, who will always be outsiders, even if technically they are US citizens. 

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We are all Eurasians now

By Anatol Lieven

For their part, American multiculturalists agree that “Western” means “white” by the US Census definition, so that “decolonizing the curriculum” can mean the inclusion of black American authors who by definition are “non-Western,” even though their native language is American English, their religion is Protestant Christianity, and their ancestors have lived in the United States for centuries. 

For creedalists, meanwhile, racists and religious nativists are “un-American” because they don’t share a universalist, ideological conception of Americanism. Belonging to the liberal center, creedalists also typically reject Left multiculturalism, albeit usually with much less vehemence than they reserve for the racial Right.

What’s notable about these three versions of “Western civ” is that none has a deep historical pedigree. Rather, all three coalesced in the aftermath of World War II, during the civil-rights revolution of the 1950s and ’60s. Before then, America’s elite tended to define the American nation as an Anglo-Saxon Protestant community, an offshoot of the Germanic Protestant family of nations.  

Of the three versions, the only one that resembles what most Americans for most of American history thought is today’s white nationalism. But here’s the irony — by including white “ethnics” like Irish-, Polish- and Italian-Americans in the category of authentic Americans, contemporary American white nationalism is by historic standards liberal, inclusive, and diverse. 

In contrast to what might be called the new nativism, adherents of the old American nativism assumed that the white race was composed of distinct sub-races with hereditary cultural and personality traits. Anglo-Americans (the majority of US citizens until around 1900) were thought of by leading scholars and politicians as members of a Germanic tribe that was superior to barbaric Celts like the Irish, hot-blooded Latins like the French and Italians, and primitive Slavs like the Russians and Poles.

For two centuries after the Founding this was the elite view, not an eccentric one. For example, in 1776, Thomas Jefferson proposed that the Great Seal of the United States depict “Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.” Like the radical Whigs of 18th-century England, Jefferson believed that Anglo-American ideals of freedom and self-government originated with Dark Age Germanic tribes. Later in 1825, Jefferson, the co-founder of the University of Virginia, established the first course in Anglo-Saxon in the United States, which he considered the language of liberty. Up until World War I, historians like Columbia’s John W. Burgess continued to promote the “Teutonic germ [seed] theory” of American liberty.

US immigration policy from the beginning was based on a racial conception of membership in the American nation. The Naturalization Act of 1790, passed by a Congress that included many of the drafters of the Constitution, outlawed the naturalization of immigrants who were not “free white persons,” a prohibition on citizenship for nonwhite immigrants which lasted until the mid-20th century.

In 1923, the Supreme Court, in the case United States v. Bhagat Thind Singh, ruled that a Punjabi immigrant from India was not a “white person” and therefore was ineligible to become a naturalized US citizen. Writing on behalf of a unanimous court, Justice Sutherland rejected the claim that Singh was a “Caucasian” or “Aryan” by anthropological standards: “The words of familiar speech, which were used by the original framers of the law, were intended to include only the type of man whom they knew as white. The immigration of that day was almost exclusively from the British Isles and Northwestern Europe, whence they and their forebears had come. When they extended the privilege of American citizenship to ‘any alien being a free white person’ it was these immigrants — bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh — and their kind whom they must have had affirmatively in mind.” The test was the viewpoint of America’s Founders, and every member of the Supreme Court agreed that the Founders would not have considered Mr. Singh “white.”

America’s white-only immigration policy was tightened up by a series of Asian exclusion acts in 1882, 1892, and 1917. The Immigration Act of 1924 made all Asians ineligible for US citizenship (Arabs were “white” and eligible, but Iranians came from the “Asiatic Barred Zone”)  and created the national quotas to favor Northwestern Europeans among white immigrants. The 1924 Act was signed by President Calvin Coolidge, who, as governor of Massachusetts in 1921, had explained to the readers of Good Housekeeping magazine: “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully.  With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.” Coolidge and many other old nativists would have taken a look at some contemporary American nativists like part-Mexican Nick Fuentes and shaken their heads.

After World War II, needless to say, equating Americans with Anglo-Americans and describing them as a Teutonic nation sounded Hitlerian. By then, under pressure from the civil-rights movement at home and competition with the Soviet Union for the favor of former European colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, the American establishment, still dominated by WASPs, hastily promulgated a new definition of American national identity, the “American Creed,” based on natural rights (the Declaration of Independence) and a term rarely used before the Cold War, “liberal democracy.” Anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish quotas in the WASP-dominated Ivy League universities were gradually eliminated (though legacy admissions remained to favor the right sort of WASPs). The 88th and 89th Congresses enacted the 1965 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished nearly two centuries of official white nationalism.  

During the Cold War and the civil-rights revolution, the liberal center rewrote American history to claim that the American Revolution had been fought not only for the universal ideals of human rights and popular sovereignty, but also for the ideals of colorblind immigration and civil and political rights for people of all races. Liberal creedalists airbrushed out embarrassing details like Jefferson’s Anglo-Saxonism and the support for colonizing freed black ex-slaves abroad shared by Jefferson with James Madison, Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln. 

For example, in 2017, Daniel Fried, an arch-creedalist, declared that “we are not an ethno-state, with identity rooted in shared blood. The option of a White Man’s Republic ended at Appomattox.”

Fried quoted an 1858 speech in Chicago, in which Abraham Lincoln noted that “perhaps half our people” were (white) immigrants who shared no blood with what was then the Anglo-American majority. Nevertheless, he said, they have the right to claim the ideals of the Declaration of Independence “as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the men who wrote that declaration, and so they are.” 

According to Fried, this proves that “Lincoln defined Americans as a nation formed by belief, by faith, a credo nation and a new nation, truly ‘novo ordo seclorum.’” Lincoln was indeed sincere in arguing that the Declaration of Independence was relevant to “the happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, everywhere.” But “everywhere” was not necessarily the United States. In a debate with Stephen A. Douglas on Oct. 15, 1858, Lincoln called for America’s western territories to be “an outlet for free white people everywhere the world over” and named as examples “Hans and Baptiste and Patrick.”

In 1864, as president, Lincoln signed an act to encourage immigration that was limited to recruiting immigrants from Europe who, unlike nonwhite immigrants, could become naturalized citizens under existing federal law — “voluntary white labor” in the words of the bill’s author, Sen. John Sherman of Ohio.

In August 1862, during the Civil War, Lincoln, a long-time advocate of colonizing freed blacks abroad, met with a group of black leaders and urged them to lead free black Americans out of the United States to Liberia in Africa, or else to Central America, telling them: “You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss; but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think.”  

Lincoln exhorted them to sacrifice their personal comfort to the heroic mission of leading their fellow black Americans out of the country: “General Washington himself endured greater physical hardships than if he had remained a British subject, yet he was a happy man because he was engaged in benefiting his race….” (Whether Lincoln completely abandoned support for colonization by his death is disputed by historians.)

There were black and white reformers at the time like Frederick Douglass who argued in public for a multiracial and mixed-race American nation and a non-racist immigration policy. Abraham Lincoln was not one.

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The illusions of diversity

By D. Graham Burnett

The mid-20th century creedalist conception of American identity invites an obvious question: if the ideals of the Declaration of Independence really require a colorblind society and race-neutral immigration policy, why did almost nobody realize this until the 1960s? Like it or not, until the mid-20th century, many educated and well-intentioned white Americans without contradiction could believe that slavery and tyranny were evil and also that all human beings have the same basic human rights — but nonwhite people should seek to realize their human rights in other countries, not in the United States, a “white man’s country.” 

Notwithstanding the falsity of its historical narrative, from the 1960s until the 2010s, public schools and political oratory spread the new interpretation of American identity as a creedal nation whose membership is defined solely by subjective personal belief in 18th-century Enlightenment liberalism. But postwar liberal creedalism was contested from its origins after World War II by racialist identitarians on both the Left and the Right.

Naturally, creedalism was rejected by Marxists, for whom the United States was just the biggest capitalist country. But their influence was negligible. More important was the split among black leaders between liberal integrationists like Bayard Rustin and proponents of Black Power like Malcolm X and Floyd McKissick (Martin Luther King, Jr. was strategically ambiguous). In the 1970s and ’80s, Jesse Jackson, the most influential black American leader, promoted race-based quotas in jobs and hiring, and the redefinition of America as a “rainbow coalition” whose colors implicitly did not mix. He led a demonstration against a Western civilization course at Stanford University, chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.” 

Black Power served up the template for future identity-politics movements in America, including radical feminism, the Left wing of the gay-rights movement, and the trans movement. “Multiculturalism” means “multiracialism.” Instead of having a common identity, the United States is envisioned as a multinational state, whose several permanent, unmixing “cultures” are the official races defined by the US Census beginning in the 1970s: black Americans, so-called non-Hispanic whites, Hispanics/Latinos, Asian and Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans. Instead of getting a separate-but-equal realm of their own, under the post-1970s racial preference, in defiance of the intent of Congress when it passed the color-blind Civil Rights Act, non-Hispanic white Americans have been penalized by design in college admissions, job applications, and government grants.

Like multiculturalists, American conservatives after World War II rejected the idea of the United States as a creedal nation (that is, with the exception of some neoconservatives who were former midcentury liberals or socialists). Many on the Right defended Jim Crow in the South until the mid-1960s but usually avoided crude racism. Barry Goldwater invoked federalism (it was about the states’ right to discriminate against blacks, you see). And William F. Buckley, Jr. invoked “civilization,” notably in 1957 in the pages of National Review, in his essay “Why the South Must Prevail,” in which he defined black Americans and Kenyans as part of the same uncivilized group. “The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage,” he wrote. (To be fair, Buckley also proposed that the suffrage should be denied to the uneducated of all races).

The passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 put an end to such talk on the mainstream Right.  Such was the dominance in public discourse of post-1964 liberal creedalism that for half a century, many multiculturalist Leftists and pan-white Christian conservatives alike strategically engaged in double talk. Both the identitarian Left and the crypto-racist right invoked the universalist ideals of the American Creed in statements intended for broad public audiences, while appealing to their constituencies and audiences on the basis of racial tribalism. Creedalism in the streets, racialism in the sheets.

On the Left, multiculturalists claimed that race-based preferences — camouflaged by bureaucratic euphemisms like affirmative action, goals and timetables, and diversity, equity, and inclusion — were nothing more than temporary remedial measures that were perfectly compatible with the American Creed. Meanwhile, following the demise of Jim Crow, racial preferences were attacked by the mainstream conservatives, like those around Buckley’s National Review, as betrayals of the ideals of Martin Luther King, Jr. — as though the Right hadn’t vilified those very ideals just a few years earlier.

From the 1960s onward, Buckley and other gatekeepers of mainstream conservatism purged blatant white supremacists and overt anti-Semites like Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran, who became known as “paleoconservatives.” But the exiled paleocons said aloud what many respectable “movement conservatives” thought. After all, the single most influential public-policy thinker on the American Right in the last quarter of the 20th century was Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute, whose books Losing Ground (1984) and The Bell Curve (1994), co-authored with Richard Herrnstein, provided pseudo-scientific support for what many conservatives, mainstream and paleo alike, already believed — that the welfare state encouraged the government-dependent and disproportionately black poor to outbreed taxpayers, and that blacks are intellectually and genetically inferior to whites. 

By the second decade of the 21st century, the post-1945 creedalist orthodoxy has weakened to the point that the racialist Left and the racialist Right have felt empowered to drop their masks.  In How To Be An Antiracist (2019), Ibram Kendi declared: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination” — that is, permanent and society-wide discrimination against white Americans, including those born long after the end of Jim Crow.

Around the same time, in the 2010s and 2020s, the racist and anti-Semitic right learned to use Twitter and podcasts to circumvent the gatekeepers of establishment conservatism and infiltrate the Republican Party at the highest levels. For example, in February 2025, Marko Eliz, a 25-year-old staffer who shared pro-eugenics, anti-racist and anti-Indian material online, was forced to resign from DOGE — and was then reinstated. In January 2025, the Department of Labor posted a video with the text evocative of Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuehrer: “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American.”

Another Labor Department social-media campaign depicted American workers as heroic, idealized white men — and only white men. An ICE recruitment post on X (formerly Twitter), meanwhile, portrayed a lone cowboy on the frontier beneath a stealth bomber with the phrase “We’ll have our home again,” the title of a white-supremacist song, “By God, we’ll have a home again.”

Despite their differences, both the multicultural Left and the racialist Right tend to equate race and culture. Both have racialized Latin Americans and Muslims as “brown.” For the nativist Right, Latin Americans and Muslims belong to the brown and black hordes besieging the pan-white Judeo-Christian West. For the multicultural Left, they are part of the nonwhite global majority oppressed by Europeans and Euro-Americans beginning with Columbus in 1492.                    

Fortunately, both the racialist Left and the racialist Right are doomed by demographic trends on both sides of the Atlantic. Increasing rates of interracial marriage are blurring the stripes of the rainbow coalition. As mixed-race Americans increase as a share of the population, the elaborate post-1970s system of official races and race-based preferences is likely to collapse as a result of its own incoherence, if it isn’t swept away by the courts and Congress first.

Thanks to demographic change, the racialist Right’s definition of “real” Americans as part of a trans-Atlantic white Judeo-Christian West is already anachronistic. Among Americans under the age of 18, only 47% are non-Hispanic whites. Only around 40% percent of Americans are non-Hispanic white Christians. And only 48% of Americans between 18 and 24 in 2023-4 identify as Christians. Post-white, post-Christian America is here.

Elsewhere in the West, Christianity is already a minority religion in Britain (46%), Germany (42%), and France, where 51% are areligious “Nones.” In the world as a whole, the largest group of Christians are Africans, followed by Latin Americans, with Europeans in third place. Will European and American conservatives advocate re-Christianizing Western civilization by importing fellow believers from Nigeria, Congo, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia to the United States and Europe?

Don’t count on it. Shortly after bombing ISIS in Nigeria in the name of protecting Nigerian Christians on Christmas Day 2025, the Trump administration froze visa processing for immigrants from 75 countries outside of North America and Europe, including Nigeria. Earlier, in October 2025, Trump slashed refugee quotas and prioritized them for white South Africans, so the majority of new refugees to be admitted by the United States will be white.

In theory a racial and religious national identity in the United States and Europe might be fabricated, in the same way that the Judeo-Christian identity was invented in the middle of the 20th century to accommodate Catholics and Jews alongside the former WASP regency. Perhaps self-described white Hispanics and “white-adjacent” Asian Americans might informally be included in a neo-white racial identity.  Islam and Hinduism could also be included, to make a new category of “theism” (mono- and poly-). But defining American or Western identity as “neo-white” and “theist,” leaving out only black people and atheists among others, is so remote from the self-perceptions of ordinary Americans and Europeans that it would be unlikely to be effective as a Right-wing rallying cry.

Can creedalism be revived as a unifying force in twenty-first century America? Probably not. Creedalists are right to object to claims, like those of The New York Times’s 1619 Project, that anti-black racism has been the central factor in all of American history. But the creedalist fairy tale, in which American history is a series of tragic lapses from the supposed colorblind idealism of 1776, is just as bogus. 

Creedalism offers illogical political theory as well as bad history. It answers the question of how Americans should govern themselves, but not the question of who Americans are. American identity can’t be defined merely by belief in the Enlightenment ideals of the American founding. The ability to passionately recite the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address does not entitle foreign nationals to US passports. Conversely, law-abiding Americans cannot be stripped of US citizenship and deported if they reject the American Creed for illiberal ideologies like communism, fascism, or Islamism; an American monarchist is still an American.

A nation is a bounded, particular community, not a multicultural hotel for permanent foreign diasporas or the creedal base camp for a global democratic ideological revolution. And contrary to the nativist agenda, the cultural boundaries that distinguish one nation from another need not be racial or religious — and, indeed, can’t be in a diverse and religiously pluralist nation.

Fortunately, little is necessary to distinguish a modern cultural nation from others beyond a common language and a few national customs and mores shared by otherwise different subcultures. Most countries wisely prefer to forget their awful political histories and controversial dead politicians and to base national identity instead on a national language and widely-shared customs. 

The idea that people will not fight and die for such a “thin” linguistic-cultural nationalism is based on the mistaken idea that citizen-soldiers fight to promote this or that abstract ideology, including the American Creed, rather than to avoid dishonor in the eyes of family and neighbors or government punishment. In the US conflicts widely regarded as the “good wars” — the American Revolution, the Civil War, the world wars — state or federal military levies and drafts were required, because there were not enough volunteers to risk life and limb crusading for American ideals, however defined.

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The best replacement for creedalism, multiculturalism, and pan-white tribalism might be called “melting-pot multi-faith nationalism.” Government policy would be strictly neutral with regard to religion and race. The Census would stop labeling Americans on the basis of arbitrary, pan-ethnic official races. Race-based affirmative action would be abolished.  

In foreign policy, crusading liberal creedalism would be rejected, but so would the manifestly false idea that the 21st-century world is divided among homogeneous “Western,” “Oriental,” “Muslim,” and other “civilizations.” Relations between Washington and countries in Europe and elsewhere would be based on mutual national economic and security interests, not ties of blood or faith or belief.

As for religion, politically motivated attempts to pulverize different denominations and religions and blend them into a single synthetic identity — pan-Protestantism, pan-Christianism, pan-Judeo-Christianism, pan-Abrahamism — would have no place in a melting-pot multi-faith America. All creeds in the United States — including variants of Islam, Hinduism, New Age sects, neo-pagan heathenism, and organized atheism — would be guaranteed autonomy, within basic legal limits: kosher and halal meat yes, human sacrifice no.

Views of religion in post-Christian America might resemble those that were held in pre-Christian Rome, according to Edward Gibbon: “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.”

Unlike creedalism, multiculturalism, and pan-white Judeo-Christian tribalism, this vision of American identity is aligned with what most Americans actually believe. According to a Pew Research poll in 2017, 70% of Americans believe that to be considered a true member of the American nation one must speak English; and around half of both Republicans and Democrats say that sharing national customs and traditions is important. But only 32% believe that being born in the United States is part of being American, while a mere 29% of all respondents — and only 43% of Republicans — think that being Christian is part of being American.         

A more recent (2025) Pew survey found that only 26% of Americans, including 62% of white evangelicals, believe that only one religion is true, while 48% think that many religions may be true, and 25% believe there is little or no truth in any religion (1% did not answer). Sixty-one percent of all Americans, and 62% of white Americans, say that the declining share of the white population is neither good nor bad. 

Maybe American policymakers and public opinion leaders should adopt the conception of American national identity that most Americans already share. 

This shift is the result of deep, and perhaps inexorable, changes that contemporary Western leaders celebrated in the name of “diversity.”  Western societies have indeed become more diverse, but the process hasn’t been the product purely of Western openness, but also of structural forces. To wit, modern communications and mass immigration have shrunken distances, making Western countries less like their past as exclusionary metropolises of racially based sea empires, and more like the multiethnic Eurasian land empires like Rome, Russia, Iran, and China. 

Thus, the history of those empires has important lessons — and warnings — for us. Above all, the Eurasian empires were civilizational states, dependent for their success upon the strength of their inherited civilizations, and on respect for these civilizations by their multiethnic populations. By these standards, Western countries today are in increasingly poor shape. 

Civilizational decline is not so dangerous in ethnically homogenous societies. Like many formerly great peoples before them, the ethnic English of the future could squat contentedly on the steps of the half-ruined monuments of their ancestors, scratching for fleas while telling themselves stories of their great past victories, great past works of literature that they no longer read, and great buildings that they no longer have the craftsmanship to build. This is, however, unlikely to impress new residents of their island. 

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In a world in which new residents are a given, the historical distinction between oceanic empires and land empires becomes crucial. Western-European colonists traveled thousands of miles across the sea and encountered completely different cultures with whom they had had no previous contact, and which were generally at a markedly lower level of technological development. In the Americas, on top of this came the immense new commercial opportunities of plantation crops and industrialized slavery based on race. The result was institutionalized racist systems for social management. There were of course beliefs in imperial “missions civilisatrices”, but accompanied by an implicit or explicit assumption that the process of civilizing the natives would take a very long time and probably always remain incomplete.

The great land empires — Roman, Chinese, Muslim, and Russian, among others — couldn’t be like this. They had lived next to the peoples they conquered for hundreds or thousands of years. They had similar levels of technological development. Sometimes, the subjects were tacitly recognized by the conquerors to have in certain respects a higher level of “civilization” than themselves: Greeks over Romans, Iranians over Arabs, Baltic Germans over Russians. For long periods, moreover, the subject peoples had been the former rulers: several of the great Chinese dynasties were from “barbarian” peoples; several of the great Iranian dynasties were Turkic; the Russian principalities lived for almost 300 years under the “Tatar yoke.” 

In these circumstances, hierarchies based on racial origin and proportion were hard to sustain — certainly if the empires wished to expand and survive. Dynastic intermarriage was a regular thing. To secure imperial rule over conquered territories required the successful co-opting of large parts of their elites. These elites then merged into the existing imperial elites. Hence the Tatar surnames of some of the greatest Russian noble families, like the Sheremetievs and Kochubeys.  

The test was not race, but readiness to adopt the civilization, language, and, in the case of the Muslim and Russian empires, religion of the empire. The originally “alien” ethnic origins of writers like Ivan Turgenev (with his Tatar roots) in Russia have never affected their status as great national cultural icons. Given time — and the Iranians and Chinese had millennia — whole populations could merge into the imperial people. Thus a large majority of “Han Chinese” south of the Yangtse River are, in fact, of non-Chinese “tribal” origin. 

Or as a Russian friend exclaimed when I first explained America’s racial “one-drop” rule to her, “That’s ridiculous! By that standard, every Russian is actually a Mongolian!” Indeed, the quasi-racist charge that Russians are racially and culturally mixed with Asiatics and therefore “not really European” has always helped to fuel Western prejudice against Russia. British visitors to Russian-ruled Central Asia in the later 19th century were appalled by the levels of corruption — and also by the ease of intercourse between Russians and “natives”.

What are the lessons — positive and negative — of these imperial traditions for our increasingly multiracial societies today? The first is that equality of racial origin in the elites has never said anything at all about the social and economic position of the mass of the population, whatever their race or ethnicity. The second is that social stability depends upon the integration of new populations by providing them with tolerable lives and equal rights before the law; and this process depends, in turn, on there being rights and a rule of law to start with. 

Caracalla, who reigned AD 211-217. was one of the nastier Roman emperors. Even so, he was responsible for extending Roman citizenship to all free-born men in the empire. A great sign of progress in a brief moment of liberalism? Not exactly. His chief motive, according to the historical consensus, was to increase the tax base. It may have been the right direction, but it did nothing to slow growing tax evasion by the elites, and the intensifying slide of the mass of the empire’s population into immiseration and exploitation. 

By the fifth century, this had reached a point at which many preferred to be ruled by the “barbarians.” Equally importantly, the “Antonine Constitution” granting universal citizenship was part of the process whereby the last vestiges of the Roman republican tradition and its legal rights were extinguished and replaced by the absolutist, quasi-sacred monarchy of the later empire: “equality in misery” as the old Russian saying has it. A multiracial elite is very nice, but it is even nicer when it is not ruling over a population of impoverished multiracial serfs. 

Above all, the history of the great Eurasian land empires raises the question of whether our societies can maintain the combination of material success, elite ethics, and civilizational attraction that made the “barbarians” respect the empires and enabled those empires to assimilate not only their subjects, but even in some cases their conquerors. This is in large part a question of maintaining — or rather, restoring — widely spread economic opportunities and prosperity for citizens of all races; but it is much more than that besides. 

The success of ancient Rome also depended upon the ethics and values known as Romanita, emphasizing such virtues as loyalty, discipline and fortitude. Chinese states repeatedly failed and were repeatedly put back together by ruling elites united and strengthened by the values imparted by the different strands of Chinese cultural tradition. Core to both was a deep sense of loyalty to the inherited idea of the state, leading to duty to the actually existing state. When contemporary critics say — rightly — that present Western cultures think too much about rights at the expense of duties, they should remember what happened to ancient Rome when the elites lost their sense of duty. How can immigrants develop a sense of loyalty to Britain or America, if those countries’ elites themselves have lost it? 

When it comes to assimilating immigrants, Western civilization is being undermined from several directions at once. Capitalist demand for wage arbitrage and a “reserve army of labor,” legitimized politically by a fanatically utopian and historically illiterate Left, is producing a nativist reaction in much of the older ethnic population. Some of President Trump’s restrictions on immigration are thus a necessary corrective. 

But by abandoning the universalist values of American “credal nationalism” in favor of a chauvinist version of US identity, Trump threatens to wreck America’s version of Romanita, and destroy the cultural and ideological elements that made the successful assimilation of immigrants possible. In Europe, the populist Right’s growing insistence on the Christian basis of national identity worked well for the great universalist religious empires of the past but is unlikely to do so in an irreligious contemporary Europe, where the strongest religious allegiances are found among Muslim immigrant communities.

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Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, there is the need for a “great tradition,” a cultural core capable of assimilating other cultures. It has been said that “a language is a dialect with an army,” but it would be more accurate to say that a language is a dialect with a literature. Languages with a strong literary core have played a key role in preserving national identities and the idea of the state, for centuries or even millennia during which the state itself has vanished. This role has been most powerful when the literature is integral to a codified religion, as in the Jewish diaspora, or bound up with philosophies of state, as in China.

In the Middle Ages, the legends of King Arthur and his knights were called “The Matter of Britain,” as the legends of Charlemagne were called “The Matter of France.” In Persian-speaking lands, the Shah-Nameh (and the miniature art it generated) helped to preserve an idea of Iranian identity during long periods in which Iran was fragmented. The same was true of the “Knight in the Panther’s Skin” in the Georgian lands. 

The frantic attempts of late 19th century nationalist writers to “rediscover” and write down “national” myths — like Lacplesis in Latvia, transformed from a mythical half-bear into a “historical” national hero fighting the German medieval crusaders — has attracted a good deal of justified mockery. But these revisionists were onto something: national pride can bring us together. 

These are, however, specifically national and ethnic (or pseudo-ethnic) myths, rather than a literary corpus that can attract other peoples. Modern Russia has possessed, rather than one national myth, the corpus of great 19th-century Russian novelists and poets, whose work has been central to Russian civilizational identity. Being secular in form (if religiously-influenced), this core body of work has attracted many people of non-Russian ethnic origin to the Russian tradition.

Britain and France — and the United States, in a more complex and diffuse way — also possess such immensely prestigious inherited modern literatures, that exercised a powerful effect on colonial subjects who were educated in English and French.

For Britain and France to maintain the influence of their literary traditions within their domestic societies, however, requires a sufficiently large literate class interested in preserving them and reworking them for present and future generations. Quite apart from the apparent desire of much of Western academia to destroy this tradition, can such classes survive the era of AI and an atomized mass media? And when they do try to rework the classics, can institutions like the Royal Shakespeare Company in its present debased form carry a great tradition forward? All too often, the RSC’s “adaptation” looks more like woke Procrustean torture, and by the time they have finished stretching Shakespeare and cutting bits off there is not enough left to see him at all, let alone sense his part in a great tradition. Or can the Smithsonian in America, with its present insistence on curatorial self-flagellation over the misdeeds of the past, now transmit an American tradition?

I hope that the picture I have drawn is too gloomy, and that our sea-faring societies will find the cultural and political strength to adjust successfully to new populations in the way that the Eurasian land empires did. Should we fail, we can derive some thin comfort from the fact that all states come to an end, and that in the end, perhaps the best they can hope for is to leave a good-looking cultural corpse to help fertilize the civilizations of the future.