The War on the West

How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason

Douglas Murray

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780008492816
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

CHAPTER 1

RACE

There is an obvious, observable truth about people in the West. Historically the citizens of Europe and their offspring societies in the Americas and Australasia have been white. Not absolutely everybody has been. But the majority have. The definition is tautological—white means mostly having ancestors from Europe. Just as the majority of people in Africa have been black and the majority of people in the Indian subcontinent have been brown. If for some reason you wished to level an assault on everything to do with Africa, you might well at some point decide to target people for being black. If you wanted to delegitimize everything about Indians, you might at some stage decide to attack its people for the color of their skin. Both would be inhumane and would today be easily identified as such. But in the war on the West, white people are one of the first subjects of attack. A fact that has been steadily normalized and made into the only acceptable form of racism in the societies in which it happens.

To delegitimize the West, it appears to be necessary first to demonize the people who still make up the racial majority in the West. It is necessary to demonize white people.

Sometimes the results of this play out in front of everybody’s eyes. In August 2021, the results of the US census that had been carried out the previous year were released. One of the headline facts was that the number of white people in America had declined. On his Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon mentioned this in his lead monologue. “The results of the 2020 census just came out,” he told his studio audience and viewers at home. “And for the first time in American history, the number of white people went down.”¹ In response to this, the studio audience whooped and cheered uproariously. For them, it was not just funny news, but good news. Not that the percentage of whites went down but that the actual number of white people alive went down. And though this might come as a surprise to some people, for many of us, this ugly movement had been growing for years.

In February 2016, I was in a large hall in London speaking as a “second” alongside John Allen, the American four-star General and former Commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan. We were taking part in a debate over what to do with the Islamist group ISIS. In addition to rampaging across the Middle East, the group had already carried out attacks in Europe. Foremost on all of our minds that night were the multiple suicide bombings and Kalashnikov attacks that had taken place across Paris a short while earlier, taking the lives of 130 people. Although ISIS bombers had not yet hit the United Kingdom, I used my speech to warn the audience that if ISIS weren’t stopped, then some evening soon, perhaps in a hall like the one we were in, perhaps aimed at a younger audience, perhaps targeting a pop concert, ISIS would strike. And when they did, we would wonder what the hell we had been doing, ignoring them as they built up their forces in Syria and Iraq.

General Allen used his remarks to give a deeply measured summary of how to defeat ISIS. His speech was technical, impressive, slightly dull but careful to stress his respect for Arab allies on the ground and across the region. Our opponents that night appeared to have listened, but it was something that one of them said at the opening of her speech that stuck with us. After we had both spoken, one of our opponents—a Palestinian activist and writer called Rula Jebreal—opened by explaining why the audience should not bother listening to what either General Allen or I had to say. “We’re again lectured—with all due respect,” she said (which in this context always means “none”), “by two white men.” I had heard it before, but I noticed the General wince slightly.

The comment was clearly still playing on his mind afterward at dinner because he picked up on it again. “Have you had that before?” he asked me. I said that regrettably I had and was only shocked that he had not. “I never had that,” he said. He had spent his life serving in the US military, risking his life, living among the people of Afghanistan, on deployment for years on end. And he seemed genuinely surprised that this and all the rest of his life and experience should be summed up and dismissed through the fact that he happened to be a white man. And lumped in with me, to boot. “Well, I’d get used to it,” I told him breezily, little realizing how fast we all would.

That was only a few years ago, but still then, outside of academic circles and racist organizations, it was deemed discourteous to lump people together and dismiss them simply because of the color of their skin. An earlier generation had come to the sensible conclusion that dismissing people, vilifying them, or generalizing about them simply because of the color of their skin was the definition of racism. And racism had become viewed as among the ugliest of human evils. Fail to take people into account as individuals, and we knew where it could lead: to the horrors of the mid-twentieth century, to the nightmares of Rwanda and Bosnia at the end of that century. Closer to home, it led to the racial segregation and occasional racial violence that had scarred America’s past, as it had the past of so many other countries.

The lesson had seemed clear: treat people as individuals, and reject those who would try to reduce them to membership of a group they belonged to solely by accident of birth. The message of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. seemed to have triumphed. The future was meant to be one in which racial categories mattered less and less. Society and the people in it would aspire to be color-blind, just as they also aspired to be sex-blind and blind to differences in an individual’s sexual orientation. The aim of society seemed clear and, with some skirmishes still remaining round the edges, was agreed upon across the political spectrum. People should be able to fulfill their potential unhampered by the chance of group characteristics. Anyone who wanted to play with racist rhetoric or find people willing to excuse racism had to mingle with the residue of white supremacists in their increasingly small enclaves or find a home among equally fringe groups, such as Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, with their black supremacy. Such groups were far from the political or social center or mainstream, and the center seemed to want to keep it that way.

Then, in the early years of the present century, this began to change. A vogue began for referring to race more than anyone had in years. Specifically, it led to an upsurge of descriptions of white people in terms that would be used about no other group in society. Commonly it was people who were white themselves who did most of the running, or rather pleading. But it broke out in an extraordinarily wide range of venues. As usual with bad ideas, they originated in the universities.

CRITICAL RACE THEORY

Despite the waning number of overtly racist laws and the power of overt racists in the United States, the disparate results between whites and blacks eroded very slowly. Academics began looking for hidden mechanisms of racism to account for this.

Critical race theory (CRT) emerged over decades in academic seminars, papers, and publications. From the 1970s onward, academics such as bell hooks (the pretentious lower cases are intended), Derrick Bell (at Harvard and Stanford), and Kimberlé Crenshaw (UCLA and Columbia) worked to create a movement of activists within academia who would interpret almost everything in the world through the lens of race. In some ways, their obsession was understandable. Bell, for instance, had grown up during the very last years of segregation. During his time at Harvard, there were only a handful of black faculty members. Instead of taking the incrementalist approach favored by others, those who formed the bases for CRT first asserted that race was the most significant factor in hiring decisions at Ivy League universities, and then that it was the single most important lens through which to understand wider society. Meaning that at the very moment that things were improving, and more black faculty members were coming through, everything in the academy and everything in the academy’s understanding of wider society was racialized, or rather racialized anew.

Of course, there were obvious and clear counters to this. The Civil Rights Act had been passed and working for years. Antidiscrimination laws were already on the statute books and growing in number. Yet followers of CRT saw nearly all progress in American race relations as an illusion. That is how Bell himself referred to it in 1987, when he wrote that “progress in American race relations is largely a mirage obscuring the fact that whites continue, consciously or unconsciously, to do all in their power to ensure their dominion and maintain their control.”² When Harvard failed to give tenure to two followers of CRT in 1986, Bell and others staged a sit-in at the university. Like any revolutionary sect, the followers of CRT knew how to make themselves felt and heard and knew how to change the intellectual weather in a corner of society not known for its heroism.

The more places scholars could see invisible racism, the more popular they became.

Naturally, it was the case that very few people who this ideology was coming for knew what was coming for them. Even if they had known, they would have found it hard to oppose. Because one of the distinguishing marks of CRT was that its assertions were based not on evidence, as it might previously have been understood, but essentially on interpretations and attitudes. This marked a significant shift in the manner in which people were expected to prove assertions. While rarely announcing the fact, the rules of CRT had no need for normal standards of evidence. If a person’s “lived experience” could be attested to, then the question of “evidence” or “data” had to find a place further back in the queue, if at all. The intersectionalists who grew up at the same time comfortably overlapped with CRT. These people, who built a theory from the assertion that all oppressions “intersect” and must be simultaneously “solved,” made this leap possible. Suddenly academic papers were able to be produced (most famously by Peggy McIntosh at Wellesley) that consisted of nothing more than lists of assertions. All made from a standpoint which was neither provable nor disprovable. It was simply asserted.

Whether leveling claims against colleagues or against wider society, it became sufficient to fall back simply on the evidence of one’s own perceptions. If one person pointed to evidence that proved America had become less racist, another person could say that he knew this not to be the case. Why? His own “lived experience” (as though there is any other kind). In many ways, it was a clever move to make. For it is true that no individual’s personal experience can ever be fully comprehended. But neither can it be always and wholly believed. Certainly, assertions about entire societies and groups of people should come with some evidence attached? Well, not now. At its best, the shift from evidence to “me” allowed a stalemate: You have your views and reality. I have mine. At its worst, it left any exchange of ideas vulnerable to being taken over by bad-faith actors who simply insisted that things are as they say they are. And that is precisely what happened.

One of the distinguishing marks of CRT is that from the outset, its advocates and adherents have been remarkably clear about what they want and how they intend to get it. CRT’s progenitors, followers, and admirers laid out their stall early and often. For instance, the claim that CRT is not a school of thought or set of propositions but a “movement” is something that is admitted to by its own apostles. In their 2001 work Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, the authors Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic admiringly described CRT as a “movement” consisting of “a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism and power. The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up, but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, context, group and self-interest, and even feelings and the unconscious. Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

That is quite the list of things to question. The principles of the Enlightenment, the law, neutralism, rationalism, and the very foundations of the liberal order. Had this been written about CRT by an enemy, that would be one thing. But this was written by its adherents about themselves.

What is more, as Delgado and Stefancic boasted, although CRT started in the realm of the law, “it has rapidly spread beyond that discipline” throughout all fields of education.

“Today, many in the field of education consider themselves critical race theorists who use CRT’s ideas to understand issues of school discipline and hierarchy, tracking, controversies over curriculum and history, and IQ achievement testing . . . Unlike some academic disciplines, critical race theory contains an activist dimension. It not only tries to understand our social situation, but to change it; it sets out not only to ascertain how society organizes itself along racial lines and hierarchies, but to transform it for the better.”³

This is an unusual language for academics to write in: to boast that a particular collection of academics and teachers are, in fact, academics “with an activist dimension.” And as for the admission that CRT seeks not just to understand society but to “transform it”? This is the language of revolutionary politics, not a language traditionally used in academia. But revolutionary activists were exactly what those involved in CRT turned out to be.

The hallmarks were there from the beginning. An absolute obsession with race as the primary means to understand the world and all injustice. The claim is that white people are in their totality guilty of prejudice, specifically racism, from birth. That racism is interwoven so deeply into white-majority societies that the white people in those societies do not even realize that they live in racist societies. Asking for proof was proof of racism. And, finally, there is also the insistence that none of the answers Western societies have come up with to address racism are remotely adequate or capable of dealing with the task at hand. The work of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and others insisted that even the concept of aspiring to be “color-blind” when it comes to issues of race is itself deeply racist.⁴

But what was racism by this new and assertive definition? It was, it was repeatedly asserted, “prejudice plus power.” Partly thanks to the influence of Michel Foucault, these academics had become obsessed with the issue of power.⁵ They saw it both as the central issue of a free society and as being wielded negatively by all state institutions. As a result, the priority was to wrestle power out of these hands and wield it elsewhere. Attributing power, or taking power, on the basis of skin color was enormously advantageous to these academics, even if their thinking on the matter remained wildly confused. For instance, they maintained that someone could not be guilty of racism if they had no power—even if they were prejudiced. And in the power structure that devotees of CRT remorselessly laid out, it was axiomatic that only white people had power. Therefore, only white people could be racist. Black people either could not be racist or, if they were racist, were racist only because they had “internalized whiteness.”

Of course, while all of this was taking place in universities across America, most Americans were able to remain blissfully ignorant of it. And while it is certainly possible to underestimate what a group of activist scholars might be able to accomplish, it is also possible to overestimate their impact. For most Americans, the work of Crenshaw, Bell, and others need not have touche...