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[This article is adapted from a longer version that appears in the Fall 2011 issue of The Occidental Quarterly magazine.]

There was a time not long ago when the idea of Western uniqueness was received wisdom in the academic world. The West was characterized as uniquely rooted in individual freedom, representative government, science, and exploration. The intense dynamism of the West was responsible for dragging the rest of the world from its backward slumbers rooted in collectivism, superstition, and unchanging tradition. It was a view that coincided with a period when the West had a strong sense of cultural confidence.

But all that has changed with the rise of multiculturalism and an academic Establishment that is decidedly on the left. In the new dispensation, the West is seen as a historical backwater whose success is entirely due to luck—combined in some accounts with rapacious exploitation of non-Europeans—rather than anything unique, much less positive, about its people or its culture.

It’s no accident that the decline of the West as anything approaching an ethnic entity has coincided with the predominance of this academic Left and its scathing, politically- and ethnically-motivated critiques of the West. With the rise of multiculturalism in all Western countries, it is not only the people of the West who are in dire danger of losing their dominance over areas they have dominated for hundreds of years—in the case of Europe itself, for many thousands of years. The culture of the West is threatened as well.

Duchesne, a professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick, is out to change all that. The Uniqueness of Western Civilizationis an extraordinary work written by an exceptionally wide-ranging scholar and thinker.

Duchesne begins by showing that the decline of self-confident assertions of Western uniqueness and cultural confidence began with the rise of the academic left in the 1960s. Any comparison of West and non-West became fraught with concerns about Western ethnocentrism. Standard college courses in “Western Civilization” were removed in favor of world history courses emphasizing multiculturalism and a downgraded role for the West. This was the beginning of what Duchesne terms “a crusade against the West”.)

In attempting to explain the rise of the West one fashionable strategy is to invoke luck. These historians “treat history as an unending series of ‘lucky shots’ and abrupt turns”   For example, Duchesne quotes Rosaire  Langlois, who maintains that Europeans “weren’t just lucky; they were lucky many times over” [The Closing of the Sociological Mind?, Canadian Journal of Sociology, 2008]

Then there’s Peter Perdue’s review of Ken Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence —undoubtedly the most famous and highly praised book on European economic ascendancy, titled “Lucky Europe, normal China.”

This is what one might term an anti-theory of Western uniqueness. In no other area of scientific

Talk show host and columnist Michael Medved is a neoconservative in the literal sense of being a former liberal. (An ad for his biography says “Michael Medved has taken an extraordinary journey from liberal activist to outspoken conservative.” Well, maybe it’s not that extraordinary.)

Which means that while he may now support the American side in foreign wars, and be on the side of law in the fight against crime, he maintains some of the liberal beliefs of his upbringing—above all with regard to immigration.

That being the case, it’s easy for him to get a gig at the liberal Daily Beast  sniping at ordinary conservatives, saying things like “The GOP Self-Destructs.” [October 19, 2011]

His latest effusion for the Daily Beast is indicative of this. Packaged by the Beast’s editors as GOP DISCORD, it insists that Republicans have to stop talking about immigration, because it’s not important.

This is what Medved’s Marxist former friends (or is that former Marxist friends?) call writing into the “optative mood”—i.e. if you say something loudly enough, it might come true...or at least you might bully people into thinking it’s true. Other, more objective, MSM observers have expressed surprise at just how important the immigration issue has actually turned out to be: see Immigration debate intensifies in GOP race, by Steve Peoples, SFGate, October 20, 2011; Why immigration won’t go away in 2012, by Ed Kilgore, Salon, October 24, 2011.

But in Stop Harping on Immigration! [October 24, 2011] Medved claims:

“With Rick Perry suddenly pushing a flat tax and Herman Cain substantively revising his popular 9-9-9 revenue plan, GOP candidates may finally relinquish their feverish immigration obsession—one that’s destructive, distracting, demented, and downright dumb.”

[Links in original]

Medved’s argument: people aren’t interested, as shown by polls where they’re asked to name what’s important to them—they don’t say “immigration”:

“Actually, no major poll of the last year—no, not one of them—showed robust public interest in immigration. This month, CBS News asked respondents to name “the most important problem facing this country today.” Less than 2 percent came up with “illegal immigration,” while a dozen other concerns, led by “the economy and jobs,” of course, finished higher on the list. Over the summer, surveys from Bloomberg and Fox News found 3 percent and 2 percent, respectively, who identified immigration as a priority, with gas prices, the war in Afghanistan, health care, the deficit, education, and even nebulous concerns like “partisan politics” and “moral values” more frequently mentioned by the public.”

Two points here:

• Actually, very few stand-alone issues break double digits in this type of polls. A Gallup poll in September showed “immigration” at just 4%— compared to just 7% for healthcare, 4% with education, and 3% for "War/ Wars", all of which get many times the MSM attention. "Taxes" came in at a mere 2%. Only four issues got above 10%.
• And these tend to be economic issues—but immigration is the economy.

As I’ve said before, you see people saying, in effect “Let's not talk about immigration, let's talk about THE ECONOMY”. But they forget that immigration is the economy in the sense that millions of foreigners are being invited in to share in it. And even more than that it's the jobs issue, since that's really what the immigrants are being invited to share in.

It works like this:

• People are concerned about jobs? Immigrants take jobs.
• People are concerned about spending? Immigrants receive spending.
• People are concerned about “health care, the deficit, education…”? All of them made worse by immigrants.

I think that leaves only the War in Afghanistan (started by immigrants on 9/11) and

With the Obama administration crowing about all the illegal aliens it has deported (no more than Bush but don’t expect the Main Stream Media to look past the press release), the average American unschooled on immigration must think those uniformed sentinels on the Southwestern frontier work day and night t

This daily cartoon contributed to VDare by Baloo. His site is HERE

Attorney General Eric Holder is finally getting some well-deserved scrutiny over his outright lies about Operation Fast and Furious. The Obama Department of Justice [DOJ] was involved in selling weapons to Mexican drug cartels that ended up killing at least one US Border Patrol Agent. The ostensible purpose: to track weapons flows. But it’s obvious that the real motive was to blame Mexican drug and border violence on our Second Amendment, rather than on Mexico’s corruption and Obama’s failure to secure the border.

But, atrocious as Fast and Furious was, it is just the tip of the iceberg. In his excellent new book Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department, J. Christian Adams goes beneath the surface to expose the whole massive mess.

Adams was a career attorney in the Justice Department. He resigned in protest over the New Black Panther cover-up.  During the 2008 elections, members of the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia dressed in paramilitary gear, brandished batons, and warned white poll watchers “you are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker.” This was about as open and shut a case of voter intimidation as you can get. But, as Adams details, the Obama DOJ intentionally quashed the prosecution because it simply did not want to protect whites from violations by blacks.

Adams is a conservative Republican, but his book is far from a partisan screed. He quotes many honest liberals who were also outraged over the cover-up. One of the poll watchers who reported the intimidation was Bartle Bull, who litigated for black voting Rights under Robert Kennedy. Bull called the Black Panther case, “the most blatant form of voter intimidation I have encountered in my life…even going back to the work I did in Mississippi in the 1960s.”

And the other main whistleblower in the Obama DOJ is Chris Coates—a Clinton appointee who p

In Federalist 2, John Jay looks out at a nation of a common blood, faith, language, history, customs and culture.

"Providence," he writes, "has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion ... very similar in their manners and customs ..."

Are we still that "one united people" today? Or has America become what Klemens von Metternich called Italy: "a mere geographical expression"?

In "Suicide of a Superpower," out this week, I argue that the America we grew up in is disintegrating, breaking apart along the fault lines of politics, race, ethnicity, culture and faith; that the centrifugal forces in society have now become the dominant forces.

Our politics are as poisonous as they have been in our lifetimes.

Sarah Palin was maligned as morally complicit in the murder attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Terms like "terrorists" and "hostage-takers" are routinely used on Tea Party members who one congressman said want to see blacks "hanging on a tree."

Half a century after the civil rights revolution triumphed, the terms "racist" and "racism" are in daily use. We remain, said Eric Holder in calling us a "nation of cowards," as socially segregated as ever.

"Outside the workplace, the situation is even more bleak in that there is almost no significant interaction between us. On Saturdays and Sundays, America ... does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some 50 years ago."

He is not altogether wrong in that. In California's prisons and