Quo Vadis, Europe?

Europe today resembles a civilization that has forgotten not only what it once was, but why it ever existed. There is something tragic, Shakespearean, about watching the slow eradication of nations that produced Aristotle and Aquinas, Dante and Da Vinci, Newton and Einstein, the Renaissance and the industrial age. Andre Rieu playing the violin while the continent burns.

Spoiled by prosperity generated by their entrepreneurs. Lulled into a deceptive sense of safety created by the rise of America’s military power after WWII. Deceived by their elites into seeing their shared cultural values as embarrassing relics of pre-globalist times. Opening the gates to migrants from dysfunctional societies, with no opportunities or demands for assimilation.

That’s not compassion. It’s civilizational malpractice. Trump has sounded a rude but life-saving wake-up call. It will, of course, give Europe’s intellectuals one more reason to hate “orange man.” It’s a klaxon their ruling class prefers to muffle. Europe risks “civilizational erasure!” The warning is not hyperbolic. It’s a factual account of a tragedy of biblical proportions.

It’s not that European elites embrace the uninvited illegal aliens’ values. They just despise their own. A civilization ashamed of itself cannot ask others to assimilate into anything meaningful. And so they don’t. Europe’s decline cannot be reversed by adjusting migration quotas or rewriting climate regulations, by another summit, a different directive, or new bureaucracy. Europeans must choose public servants who believe that their civilization is worth defending. The greatest weakness of Europe’s conservative movement is, however, not a lack of ideas, but a lack of unity.