The West is back: A new willingness to fight the rot that has been corroding our civilization

With any luck, the recent grand reopening of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, which was destroyed by a devastating fire in 2019, will be looked back upon as the dawn of the Western revival.

In early December, leaders from around the world attended the first Mass in the famous gothic church in five years, where they heard performances of pieces by late anti-communist Catholic Polish composer Henryk Górecki and baroque composer Handel, the creator of Messiah. The famed church, which began construction in the 12th century but wasn’t opened until the mid-13th, had been nearly completely rebuilt in only five years. Its classic flying buttresses and apses were revived by 2,000 workers at the cost of nearly a billion dollars, which was procured from 340,000 donors hailing from over 150 countries. The effort fused efficient modern techniques with medieval design, a rare example of old and new existing in harmony. All of it is a celebration of Western culture.

Though the Notre Dame Cathedral is an enduring symbol of Christian Europe, it stands in bleak contrast to the continent’s growing apathetic secularism, mass Islamic immigration, and abandonment of enlightenment values. Notre Dame is alive, but Catholic churches across the continent have been converted into gyms, grocery stores, skate parks, nightclubs, and mosques.

The decline of Christianity is only one of the many factors corroding the moral heart of Western civilization. And yet, an optimist might point out there seems to be an eleventh-hour popular and political realization that surrendering your hard-earned legacy and capitulating to the Left’s ideological scams, nihilistic cultural fads, attacks on the family, and social science quackery have had disastrous consequences.

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Over the past five decades, the Left has marched through our institutions largely unopposed, popularizing strains of increasingly unhinged ideological movements meant to discredit the history and foundational ideas of Western civilization. For years, there seemed to be a resignation that the pillars of faith and classical ideas would give way to more enlightened progressive ones. One can only “evolve” toward the left, after all. Thankfully, that’s not how it works. History heaves and pulls, zigging and zagging its way into the unknown. And a bunch of disparate events may point to change for the better.

This is perhaps the first moment since the late 1970s that a political counterrevolutionary effort has materialized with a chance to beat back the illiberal trend. Whatever you make of President-elect Donald Trump, his improbable return to the White House, despite being subjected to unprecedented lawfare and virtually every major institution in the country opposing him, has reinvigorated the movement to restore Western values. For normies, his victory feels like a repressive cloud has been lifted. And it is difficult to deny, even for those of us often critical of the president-elect, that his brashness has imbued conservatives with a bravery they were missing in the recent past.

Indeed, it’s heartening to see people defend unfettered free speech and the nuclear family without qualification. It is heartening to see Trump promise to dismantle behemoth federal agencies that not only lord over citizens but prop up all kinds of illiberal movements.

One of them is diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, a bundle of racialist programs that is predicated on the idea that people should be judged by their immutable characteristics such as skin color rather than their beliefs and achievements.

Only a few years ago, in fact, the United States was awash in mass demonstrations, and riots, propped up by media and cultural institutions — not to mention corporate dollars. The U.S., they argued, was an irredeemable and “systemically” racist society in which black men are hunted on the streets by white officers, among other atrocities.

Many white liberals, most of whom had likely never engaged in any acts of bigotry, offered public contrition to black people — in some cringe-worthy cases, they would wash the feet of the allegedly oppressed. While protesters toppled and vandalized statues of American founders, powerful politicians dressed up in the garb of a fictional nation called Wakanda and took a knee in Washington. It was perhaps the most embarrassing display of pandering in our political history. The rest of us were told to shut up, listen, and learn as if melanin levels determined one’s wisdom. If a person had the temerity to contend that all lives mattered equally, they would be drummed out of polite society.

Like most caustic ideas in American life, this one was brought to life in universities, where traditional scholarship has increasingly given way to crackpottery and pseudointellectualism. But it doesn’t start there. In public high schools, children are often taught race-obsessed revisionist histories, which contend that the American founding was undertaken to preserve slavery. Indeed, millions of children, already heading into the world without any useful belief system, are persuaded their cultural inheritance is one of colonialism, mass murder, systemic bigotry, and little else. All the most successful ideas that liberated mankind from actual tyranny — capitalism, religion, and natural rights — are denigrated.

While media outlets still capitalize the descriptor “black” as they would “Japanese” or “British” to create the impression that skin color is an ethnic or national identity, the fever seems to be breaking. Numerous states have passed anti-DEI legislation, which undermines funding for these programs. And several major state colleges and corporations, including Walmart, Ford, John Deere, and Lowe’s, among others, have scaled back or completely dropped their DEI programs.

Another clue that the fever might be breaking is the 2024 presidential election, in which, for the first time in decades, virtually every minority group moved toward the right. Which isn’t to say the GOP is correct on all issues. It is to say it’s increasingly clear that normies of all races and creeds are increasingly unconcerned about the identity politics of the Left.

Indeed, fewer people seem nervous about being shamed for failing to see the world through the prism of race. When Daniel Penny, a former Marine, was acquitted by a diverse Manhattan jury for the killing of a homeless man who had been menacing a subway car full of people, the usual suspects tried to make it a racial matter. Not many New Yorkers took the bait, which was also heartening. The story of Jordan Neely, the homeless man, is a tragic one, no doubt, but in a healthy Western society, men defend their fellow citizens from those who might hurt them. It has nothing to do with color.

Indeed, we protect children from harm as well. Perhaps the most paganistic practice normalized by society has been our sacrifice of young people to “gender-affirming care.” For years, one can assume Americans failed to speak out against the appropriation of medical science by quacks because they would be accused of harboring a “phobia” against their fellow citizens, as has been the custom. Muckraking authors who detailed the mental and physical harms of gender transitioning were banned by Amazon, and those who spoke out in public were treated as if they were no better than the average Klansman.

Disney pulled a transgender storyline from Pixar’s Win or Lose series because “when it comes to animated content for a younger audience, we recognize that many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline.” This is quite a change in attitude.

Not only are Americans increasingly speaking out against the normalization of gender dysphoria, but the Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in the case of a Tennessee ban on hormone treatments for children. There is, of course, no protection for state-sanctioned child abuse in the Constitution. Even Britain and other European nations have permanently banned the use of puberty-blocking hormones for people under 18. Allowing adults to mutilate misguided children points to an unconscionable moral rot of a society. The faster we stop, the better.

Every state should pass laws preventing government employees in schools from talking to prepubescent children about sexuality. And every state should institute “book bans” that allow parents, rather than school boards and progressive administrators, to curate libraries for their children. Leftists have no right to infringe on the ability of parents. This is one reason school choice is likely more popular than ever. Sure, to some extent, it’s undoubtedly a reaction to decades of subpar education, but it’s also about saving children from leftist proselytization.

It’s not just the U.S. that is seeing a counterrevolution. There are other signs around the world that Western ideals are making a comeback.

In South America, which is perpetually backsliding into Third World collectivism (alas, Marxism is also a Western ideology), there is Argentina’s Javier Milei, perhaps the only libertarian head of country since the invention of the nation-state. Milei experienced stunning early success by exuberantly stripping the government of power and implementing free-market reforms that elites have spent decades warning us wouldn’t work. More than merely a test to prove classical economics can work, Milei is an unabashed Happy Warrior for individual rights, religious freedom, and the West’s primacy of the world.

Then, there is Israel, by any useful definition a Western nation, which broke free of the suicidal hold of the anti-West D.C. swamp, found a spine, and decimated the proxy armies of the Islamic State. In the era of the West coddling the immoral theocrats of Iran and elsewhere, the Jewish state exerted its power.

Here at home, many of the people who want to tear down American society, not incidentally, side with the rapists and murderers of Hamas. A recent statement from Students for Justice in Palestine at Columbia University notes that the group is “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.” Believe them.

Still, most Americans find themselves on the right side in the fight against barbarism. In recent raw polling of attitudes toward “culture war” issues, progressives found themselves underwater on “affirmative action” (-36%), trans puberty blockers (-37%), “boys in girls’ locker rooms” (-43%), “immigration is a serious problem” (-46%), and on the issue of Israel versus Hamas, the Left was losing by a huge margin (-62%). One can always quibble with the framing of the polling questions, but these numbers are overwhelming. And the insistence of progressives to side with Hamas finally moved a not-insignificant number of American Jews to rethink their support for Democrats.

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For the opening of the Notre Dame Cathedral to really matter, Europe must be saved. While not every popular resistance to the European Union’s soul-crushing bureaucratism has been ideal, you can comprehend the appeal of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban or Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni or Brexit not as “fascism” but as a backlash to governing and moral failures of technocrats who treat borders as arbitrary man-made lines that impede a multicultural utopia. Western morality and liberalism did not spring out of the ether.

Certainly, it is premature to celebrate. Most of our institutions are still captured by the activist class — including those that teach our children. It is increasingly clear, however, that there’s a willingness by all sorts of people and groups to fight against the cultural and ideological rot that has been corroding our civilization for decades. It’s about time.

David Harsanyi is a senior writer for the Washington Examiner.