Don’t go there

American’s don’t tend to follow news of other nations nearly as much as citizens of other nations follow ours, and international news in general. We would do well to pay attention to cultures further down the path we’re on now and learn how best to avoid mistakes that have cost their national identity dearly.

Europe provides some examples. Here’s the British breakdown, from Melanie Phillips.

Like Obama, [former Prime Minister Tony] Blair was charismatic, eloquent, hip, and relaxed, in cruel contrast to the bunch of sleazy, incompetent throwbacks to the paleolithic era in the departing Conservative administration. Like Obama, Blair was seen as a messiah figure, who would lay his hands upon a broken nation and bring healing where there was discord. And like Obama, Blair had an agenda of change.

Blair, she recalls, first established himself as a centrist.

What few realized at the time was that in fact he was a radical of a different stripe. He wanted to remake Britain and even change human nature itself, wiping out prejudice and ushering in a new world order of progressivism.

Sounds familiar.

Then there’s this part about government changing the identity of the country.

Promoting the doctrine of multiculturalism, it opened Britain’s doors to mass immigration. In the state-controlled schools, teachers no longer saw their role as the transmission of Britain’s historic culture, which was “racist”; accordingly, children were not taught the history of their country, but instead a concept of ‘citizenship’ which was all about changing the values of the country. It undermined marriage, promoting instead “lifestyle choice” by incentivising lone parenthood (official forms no longer refer to husband and wives, merely “partners”). It discouraged prison sentences because criminals were said to be victims of life and jail would make them worse.

These same cultural forces are hard at work here, and have been for decades. Their activism is directed at ‘rights’ legislation, as defined by them, reflecting relative instead of traditional values.

As a result, freedom has shrunk to what ideology permits. Equality legislation has cemented a “victim culture” under which the interests of all groups deemed to be powerless (black people, women, gays ) trump those deemed to be powerful (white people, men, Christians). Since this doctrine holds that the “powerless” can do no wrong while the “powerful” can do no right, injustice is thus institutionalized, and anyone who queries the preferential treatment afforded such groups is vilified as a racist or bigot.

But that couldn’t happen here, right?

The challenge for conservatives on both sides of the pond is to find a way of conserving the essential values of Western Civilization and defend them against the onslaught being mounted against them both from within and from without — but to do so in a way that is generous and big-hearted rather than narrow and sectarian, and embraces rather than repels.

There are markers here, for a nation mapping a new course, of how to navigate the challenges. And where not to go.