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It is exactly what makes Britain and the United States such desirable destinations that our liberal elites are now threatening to destroy

JANET DALEY 28 January 2023 •

Janet Daley was born in America, and taught philosophy before beginning her political life on the Left (before moving to Britain, and the Right, in 1965) – all factors that inform her incisive writing on policy and politicians.

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Hundreds of people cross the Channel in dangerously insecure small boats every day, determined to make it to Britain where they hope to stay. They seek asylum whether or not they are actually in danger of death or persecution. Many of them will destroy their documents and identity papers in order to do this, disguising the fact that they are not genuine refugees who are fleeing from mortal threat. Similarly large numbers of migrants will head for European countries like Sweden and Germany. The question that generally dominates discussion of this phenomenon is, how can we put a stop to it? Or at least, how can we dismantle the criminal networks that facilitate this movement, and thereby reduce the numbers who arrive?

On the other side of the Atlantic, thousands of people from Central America besiege the Mexican border in order to enter the United States, putting themselves and their families through tremendous hardship and danger in the process. Again, the question that much of America asks – and demands of its political leadership – is, how can we put a stop to this?

The answers offered range from building a 2,000-mile impregnable wall (Donald Trump) to offering to help relieve poverty in the countries from which the migrants are fleeing (various Democrats).

What almost nobody asks is why these vast hordes of people are so eager to get to these specific places? What is it about those nations that makes them appear to be heaven on earth to the poor and desperate peoples of the world? On the face of it, the answer is obvious. The populations of these blessed countries are seen to be rich and free.

Indeed, their wealth and liberty are now so universally acknowledged that they seem like facts of nature, or the gift of some benevolent deity. In fact, they are the direct products of the most stupendously successful political and economic system in human history. There is no point in arguing about this. The movement of people puts this truth beyond any doubt: the combined effects of liberal democracy and free-market economics have created a social order in which almost everyone would choose to live.

Bizarrely, this miracle of social organisation, which has liberty and the possibility of unprecedented opportunity embedded in its political institutions, is now in the throes of abject self-loathing. So overwhelmed by the belief that it does not deserve its own remarkable success, Western democracy is now torturing itself into a denial of its own virtues. The freedoms on which it is built and which made its extraordinary progress possible, must be portrayed as forms of “privilege” which deliberately disadvantaged other less-favoured groups. Every achievement and advance that was enabled by economic and social innovation must be discredited because it was the product of unfair practices. Everything that was once seen as right about the liberation of the individual – and the enterprising spirit that arose from it – is now wrong. So wrong that it must be atoned for with a kind of neurotic self-harm: an endless confession of guilt and regret that discredits every aspect of national history.

The greatest irony is that most of the people who are taking such enormous risks to enter these successful Western countries are – according to the logic of fashionable historic guilt – precisely those who should hate them most. Paradoxically, at the same time that the white populations of Europe and America are depicting themselves as loathsome and unworthy of their inherited privileges, the ethnic groups, who should feel nothing but resentment, are determined to join them. You might argue that there is nothing inconsistent in this: that the migrants from former colonies or populations that were once exploited by the slave trade are just seeking their fair share of the wealth that they helped to create for the West. But this does not look much like vengeance or resentment. It seems like a simple choice: the desire to live under a decent, basically fair rule of law and democratic accountability which rewards individual effort. This is what most economic migrants describe as seeking “a better life”.

So how is it that almost everybody in the world can see so clearly what is uniquely valuable in our political and economic way of life at the very time that our own intellectual elites are denigrating it? The main plank of this cultural self-hatred is the idea of inherited guilt. Taking on the moral opprobrium for evils committed generations ago should sound patently absurd and unjust. We do not hold the children of murderers responsible for their parents’ crimes, unless they were wilfully engaged in them. How can it be conceivable that anyone alive today should share the guilt of 18th-century slave owners? Because they have shared in the inherited benefits of that ownership, goes the argument. Well that includes pretty much everybody. It would be impossible now to disentangle the origins of contemporary sources of mass prosperity from those earlier roots. Arguably, the entire modern industrialised economy can be traced back to the wealth acquired through empire and, at least in the United States, to the slave trade.

Presumably then we must renounce the modern era itself as a kind of penance. The environmental extremists seem to have something like this in mind. In some future orgy of self-punishment, will everyone who benefited from the trade in fossil fuels have to be denounced too? Is that where we are heading? Perhaps this really is the end: the perverse suicide of a great civilisation, which will someday be studied in the way that the collapse of Rome is now. But if it’s over and unrecoverable, what will become of all those migrants who sincerely want to be part of this miracle that the West has achieved? Where will they go? Perhaps they are the ones who are destined to save this enterprise because they at least understand the value of it.