The Nature and Cause of Western Self-Loathing. Part Two

Victor Davis Hanson

So why do we see these endless ICE, campus, race, and Middle East demonstrations, not aimed at reasonable dissent, but often descending into open hatred of the U.S. and its values and traditions?

Why does Europe allow millions of immigrants, many entering illegally, who have no intention of assimilating, acculturating, or integrating with their host population—but who do boast of absorbing Europe into a new Islamic state? Or why does it adopt “green” initiatives that ensure sporadic power while pricing their own industries out of the world market?

In other words, why do Western publics, and elites especially, seem to hate the very system that the non-Western world is either trying to flood into or copy at home?

The Greeks and Romans would answer from their own experience with two causes of collective self-hatred: leisure and affluence. That is, the combination of free-market capitalism with consensual government ensuring freedom allows residents to have the legal right and the material ability to do almost anything they please.

Complacency follows. As society makes enormous strides in material improvement, citizens begin to forget about the existential challenge of living one more day. Starvation, plagues, enemies who sack and plunder, etc., become rarer experiences.

Expectations of forever greater and greater affluence become normalized. Heaven on earth is seen as attainable. Ennui sets in, along with hypersensitivity that any possible disruption in their trajectory toward guaranteed good health, safety, happiness, and material splendor is somehow due to some culpable person or thing.

Guilt follows. Why are Westerners better off than Nigerians? Why is north of the Mexican border prosperous, and the south not so much? Why are the lights out at night in North Korea but not in South Korea? Why didn’t people try to escape from West Germany to East Germany rather than vice versa? Why aren’t Europeans flooding into Libya or Egypt? Why do the Gulf States import Western managers, doctors, architects, etc., but not from Bolivia or Chad?

Westerners know the answers to all these questions, but feel the power of envy, jealousy, anger, and hatred from the non-Westerners strongly. And those in the West whose lives are not on the edge but comfortable with sizable reserves, feel guilty over their bounty—but not to the extent they would gift any of it away.

So hating the West—past, present, and future—politically, rhetorically, and demonstrably—squares the circle of exonerating the blessed Westerner from feeling awful that he has so much and others have so few, without having to do much about the asymmetry (Jane Fonda can turn up on spec to denounce the U.S., and then retreat to her multimillion-dollar, gated, 24-hour guarded, Century Woods enclave.).

Globalization was a force multiplier of Western guilt. For the first time in history, the planet’s populations were known instantly and intimately to one another. An isolated crime in South Dakota was reported to all in India. And a minor flood in Kenya was news in Bakersfield. The bounty of the West was exposed to all, as was the poverty of the non-West, without any honest and informed opinion on why it was all so.

Immigration was a further accelerant of oikophobia. It is a Greek word combining “house/home” (oikos) with hatred (phobos) to form the word “hating one’s own home.” Immigration policy, ever since the Democratic-engineered change in immigration laws in the 1960s (they wanted no more conservative 1956 Hungarian anti-communist refugees or 1959–60 anti-Castroite Cubans), has ignored illegal immigration enforcement (allowing millions to enter illegally from Latin America). Simultaneously, the new immigration ethos privileged legal immigration from the non-European world. In other words, the Democrats feared that their socialist agendas were losing clout with Americans, and they needed “new” American voters, but those who were most likely to welcome Democratic benefaction were the world’s nonwhite, poor, and in need of vast government entitlements, statism, and higher taxes on others.

The immigrant from the non-West knew this all too well and was expected to play his part as an “oppressed” newcomer, beholden to his protectors, the Democrats. That skit required him to acknowledge that the West had exploited the non-West, hence his flight from home. And the corrective for a guilty past was found only in left-wing neo-socialism. Presto, we began seeing the Tlaibs, Omars, and Mamdanis in perfect Western fashion, becoming rich and powerful—and expressing contempt for the country that had empowered them.