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| -Signs, Portents, and the Weather- | |
| Our Post-Western Future: How digital technology and mass migration are accelerating the West’s transformation. | |
| 2026-10-27 | |
| [The American Mind] This is an edited version of a speech that was delivered at the 2026 National Conservatism Conference in Jerusalem on October 6, during the “Immigration and Cultural Replacement” panel. Generals always fight the last war. The media theorist Marshall McLuhan made a similar point when he argued that we understand the effects of new technologies in terms of past ones. He called this rear-view mirror thinking. Right now, Western countries are suffering from a collective exercise in rear-view thinking about the effects of digital technology on mass migration. Rather than seeing the unique functions of digital technology, we have assumed it has the same homogenizing effects as prior information technologies. That exercise of rear-view thinking is accelerating cultural replacement. Let’s take stock of where we are. Since the 2010s, it has become clear that we are living in the end of the end of history. Having studied the West for decades, China and Russia decided not to imitate it but to pursue their own civilizational paths. Islamic civilization had long been pursuing its own. As the geostrategic ambitions of those three civilizations became clear, the concept of "the West" gained fresh life. The civilizational paradigm seemed perfectly poised to address these new clashes. You might call it Samuel Huntington’s posthumous revenge over Francis Fukuyama.
Huntington’s best critic, the political scientist James Kurth, made this point. In his 1994 essay "The Real Clash," Kurth argued that Huntington played down the growing conflicts emerging within the West. Sometime late in the previous century, it repudiated the institutional arrangements of mid-20th-century liberal democracy and went in a new direction. Kurth argued that the real clash of civilizations...is already underway within the West itself, particularly within its central power, the United States. This is a clash between Western civilization and a different grand alliance, one composed of the multicultural and the feminist movements. It is, in short, a clash between Western and post-Western civilizations. Multiculturalism and feminism are more than a set of ideas—they are social technologies for administering society. Moreover, they claim the need to have absolute efficacy in every human activity. Anti-discrimination law cannot stop at the door of a privately funded school, business, or social club; it must pry its way in, enlisting state police power when necessary. | |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #3 |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2026-10-27 16:00 |
| #2 |
| Posted by: NoMoreBS 2026-10-27 15:32 |
| #1 |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2026-10-27 01:56 |