Interview With Dr. Ricardo Duchesne
On his past, his intellectual journey, his cancellation from academia, the evolution of his ideas on race, his latest book, and his predictions and prescriptions for the future of the West
Q: Hello, Dr. Duchesne. Thank you for granting this interview. If it's all right by you, I would like to start with a few personal questions, to help the reader get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a little about your personal background? Anything about your life or career before coming to Canada? I know that you are originally from Puerto Rico. How/why did you end up coming to Canada?
A: I was born in Puerto Rico to parents of diverse heritage. Wikipedia’s biographical information is inaccurate. My father, a medical doctor, was of Afro-Puerto Rican, French, Spanish, and Portuguese descent. My mother, purely British by ancestry, was born in India, not of “Anglo-Indian” descent. They met at the Sorbonne in Paris, where they studied before relocating to Madrid for my father’s medical training.
At 14, following my parents’ divorce, I moved to Canada with my mother and two sisters. I have pleasant memories of my childhood in Puerto Rico. My father often took us (wife and family of six children) on Sunday outings around the island, or to animated gatherings at my grandparents’ home. My father, one of fifteen siblings, came from a musical lineage; his father is recognized as one of the two great classical-jazz composers of Puerto Rico. His mother would spend most of the day cooking great meals. My mother, quintessentially British, lived in a world of eccentricity and imagination. Though not studious, I was drawn to my mother’s large book collection, captivated by their looks, sometimes wondering about their contents, though I rarely read as a child.
Q: I think it would be interesting to learn a little about your intellectual journey. Was there anything noteworthy in your high school and/or undergraduate days? What made you decide to go into academia, and into sociology in particular?
My early years in Canada, interspersed with nearly a year in Spain, were marked by liberality. From ages 14 to 18, I immersed myself in nightlife, indulging in drinking and drugs, barely scraping by academically. By 19, exhausted by this lifestyle, I was captivated by Plato’s Republic and its vision of a perfected mind. In college, two years before McGill University, I embraced Marxism, committing to a minimum of three hours of daily reading to compensate for my lack of academic background. This discipline led to strong college performance, but at McGill, I reverted to old habits, earning a B- average in my first two years while remaining a keen reader of Marx and contemporary Marxist thinkers, including Latin American politics. I revered Lenin as history’s greatest revolutionary.
At 22 or 23, after dropping out of university, I contemplated an academic career. While working part-time, I devised a rigorous self-study plan, devouring great novels, philosophy, and works on historical materialism, Nietzsche, Natural Law, economic history, and the history of the sciences. Nietzsche’s ideas, though clashing with my Marxism, kept me thinking beyond my leftist inclinations. For three years, I lived a near-solitary life, cycling, reading in parks, and meeting my girlfriend, whom I would later marry.
Q: What were some of your early intellectual interests and influences? When and how did you begin to develop views that diverge from the academic mainstream? Did you always stand out in any ways from your colleagues and the general intellectual climate, or did you only become "out of place" in academia after expressing your views?
A: My intellectual approach diverged from the mainstream as I pursued broad, historical studies over any disciplinary specialization. I enjoyed the study of the histories of a wide range of subjects, whether mathematics, philosophy, or economics. I was building up a library through purchases in second hand books stores. In retrospect, I can see now—I still have many of these books—how the study of the history of these subjects likely implanted in me the sense that most accomplishments had come from Europe, since in those days most books were naturally Eurocentric. I also read overviews about human evolution, agriculture’s origins, civilizations, modern science, and the Industrial Revolution. Returning to complete my BA, I majored in History, focusing on Europe, while taking diverse courses. My Marxist convictions persisted, culminating in an MA thesis defending a Marxist interpretation of the 1789 French Revolution.
I was lucky to find an interdisciplinary program at York University, Toronto, for my PhD studies. I still did not want to become an "expert" in any particular field. This program was called "Social & Political Thought." I studied a bit of everything: philosophy, economics, history, political science, and sociology, resisting the fascination of the other students with postmodernism, feminism, and postcolonialism. Drawn to Hegel’s historical approach, I saw thought (and debates about the ultimate questions) as comprehensible only through their historical development. My dissertation, a phenomenological analysis of the Marxist “transition from feudalism to capitalism” debate, traced how “classical” Marxist claims evolved toward “post-Marxism” in the degree to which the major contenders in this debate were conceptually compelled (in light of the evidence) to incorporate ideas from Adam Smith, Max Weber, and other non-Marxist thinkers.
When I was hired as a sociologist at the University of New Brunswick in 1995, I identified as a liberal cultural Marxist. Sociology gave me ample room to sustain my interdisciplinary interests, allowing me to teach diverse courses—sociology of law, economic development, historical and political sociology—without specializing. This generalist approach, while fulfilling, relegated my publications to second- and third-tier journals. By 1999, I found a huge but definitive subject I could focus on in the “rise of the West” debate, engaging revisionist scholars online who challenged Eurocentric narratives with multicultural perspectives. My defense of Western achievements, infused with Nietzschean, Weberian, and Hegelian influences, sparked much debate among academics advocating inclusivity and multiculturalism.
Even as a Marxist PhD student, I had been uneasy about increasing third-world immigration to Toronto and Montreal in the early 1990s. My further readings on Western history from a comparative perspective, coupled with the multiculturalist push to downplay Western contributions, eventually pushed me towards conservatism, in a quasi-libertarian way. I came to believe that humanity’s highest achievements were at odds with inclusivity and leftist ideologies.
Q: Can you speak to some of the pressures you faced in your career for your views, and the reception of your work among your colleagues and students?
A: I kept my ideas about race, white identity, and immigration private up until about 2018. Mind you, I did show open support for Trump, walking with a MAGA hat around campus, which infuriated a few professors. I also gave a lecture at my university to a packed audience about Trump in early 2017, where I brought up immigration issues.
All in all, however, they still saw me as a conservative who authored a book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (2011), cherishing this civilization for its cultural and intellectual achievements. It was in late 2012 that I began exploring the links between the devaluation of Western achievements, the rise of multicultural world history, and the politics of diversity and immigration. By early 2013, I frequently visited online platforms such as American Renaissance, Occidental Observer, and Counter Currents. Although Uniqueness addressed the political dimensions behind the push for a multicultural historical approach, I now saw with clarity that this push was not solely about “new findings” or “new methodologies” by leftist revisionist historians; it also aimed to reshape curricula, to produce a new world history at the service of the growing racial diversity in the West.
A striking double standard was apparent in this whole debate around race: revisionist historians readily linked Western global expansion to "white supremacy" but reacted with hostility when I associated Western accomplishments with "white Europeans." I first observed this in online exchanges on H-World, H-Net’s world history forum, as well as in academic conversations, conference discussions, and email correspondence.
As I explored controversial websites and delved into race realism and white nationalism, I withdrew from discussing politics with colleagues at the university, limiting myself to the non-racial themes of Uniqueness. This was no great loss; I recall only one professor there with whom I had meaningful intellectual exchanges. As I had already been promoted to full professor in 2008, I felt no pressure to publicize my research. Thus, I maintained a low profile regarding my involvement in dissident circles, including numerous activities and invitations, barely saying a word, if any, about my subsequent books, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age and Canada in Decay, when they were published in 2017.
Opposition to my pro-Western views initially came externally through grant rejections and severed ties with former leftist colleagues as I developed the ideas leading to Uniqueness. Later, conservative circles distanced themselves when I began addressing race and immigration. After Uniqueness appeared, I was invited to speak at Princeton University in 2012, and several American conservatives praised its scholarship. However, they disengaged once my critiques of immigrant diversity became clear. Steven Balch, who wrote a long, glowing review of Uniqueness, contacted me about joining Texas Tech University’s Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, which he had just been hired to create. Yet, upon learning of my evolving views, he cut off communication.
Q: Before things came to a head in 2019, did you already have a sense that many of your colleagues and students were against you?
A: Things began to deteriorate with my colleagues during 2018, as they learned about my book Canada in Decay, which was then a best seller, and I told them about it. Opposition to my ideas came earlier from the bigger campus at Fredericton when they learned about a video interview I did on 2014 criticizing academics for their lack of critical thinking about immigration issues. I was on the Saint John campus of the University of New Brunswick. In 2015, members of the sociology department at Fredericton wrote a letter to a major newspaper objecting to my views. They also wrote a formal complaint against me (with many signatures coming from academics from other universities) to the president of the university. University administrations, however, tend to take student complaints far more seriously. There had been no complaints against me from any students.
It was really my effort to push through the Dissertation of a student, Clare Ellis, that revived the opposition against me in the Fredericton campus. It is a long, complicated affair. Suffice it to say that they hated the thought that a student had managed to produce a Dissertation about immigration replacement in Europe, with very high evaluations from external supervisors, while the Fredericton examiners engaged in petty nitpicking, which I ridiculed in replies. In the end, they were compelled, if reluctantly, to pass the Dissertation. They could not deny it was based on extensive research and citations. (Arktos has now published this Dissertation, under the title, The Blackening of Europe, in three volumes).
It was a guy named Bernie Farmer, well known in radical leftist activism, and founder of The Canadian Anti-Hate Network, who orchestrated, in 2019, a united opposition against me, first in Fredericton, and then in Saint John. This included an open letter signed by over 100 academics published in the media, a few articles, and some radio discussions.
Q: From my understanding, the university basically pressured you into taking early retirement following complaints from students and staff, and an open letter by your colleagues demanding your dismissal. Were many of the people making these demands people you knew personally? Were there any that surprised you?
A: There were no complaints from students. I was not pressured into early retirement by the administration. I just knew it would not have been possible for me to work in a department where every one of my "colleagues" had signed the open letter, and filed other complaints, including numerous professors in departments below and above the floor where my office was located. This toxic environment compelled me into early retirement. In a way, there were no surprises. I understood the risks I was taking, and expected something to happen at some point. It confirmed my realization around 2013 that the West is absolutely committed to immigration and diversity, and will ostracize anyone who talks about replacement of whites.
Q: You have written extensively about the plight of white Canadians, and been very outspoken about the downsides of our policies of mass immigration. As an immigrant to Canada yourself, what makes you so passionate about the cause of demographic replacement in this country? Or is it more the case that you are concerned about the demographic collapse of whites in the West in general, and simply extend that concern to the country you live in now?
A: I am equally concerned about demographic replacement across the West, not just Canada. Native Canadians tend to be concerned about Canada, which is understandable since they have a stronger Canadian identity than I do. While I “feel” for Canada more due to the many years I have spent here since high school, I tend to have a cosmopolitan Western outlook, caring more or less equally for Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Sweden, Spain, or England. Sometimes I wonder why I care so much about immigration replacement considering that I am an immigrant born on a small island in the Caribbean, with some non-white blood. Perhaps it is my “genetic memory,” my majority European ancestry, combined with my admiration and identification with the intellectual and cultural heritage of Western civilization. Civilizations have declined in the past, like China, Japan, and India, but they have managed to rise again. The West will never again be the West in a few decades if trends are not reversed. The argument for endless immigration, black and brown pride, and white compliance, goes against my sense of fairness, pride, and dignity.
Q: As you mentioned previously, Uniqueness was less controversial upon its publication than your subsequent works, and even received a mixed but overall balanced reception, with positive reviews in relatively mainstream journals. Do you think this was solely due to the emphasis on culture rather than race, or was the intellectual climate in academia generally less restrictive towards such material back then? How did the intellectual climate change and develop between that time and your retirement?
A: Uniqueness would not have been reviewed, certainly not as favorably, if it had equated Western civilization with the “white race.” Its focus on cultural, economic, demographic, and geographical factors—without drawing on race realism—allowed it to be positively received by reputable journals such as The European Legacy, Journal of World History, Cliodynamics, Academic Questions, Canadian Journal of Sociology, The Independent Review, Policy, and The Dorchester Review. Six of these reviews, of which five were very positive, were extended essays. (It received long reviews in alternative right journals as well). For a long time now, the liberal academic establishment has excluded publications that explicitly link Western achievements to racial categories. Certainly, the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020, heightened the hysteria of academics against “systemic racism.” Psychology remains the only social science discipline where journals may tolerate race-realist perspectives on IQ, provided they are presented in a strictly scientific, nonpolitical manner within expert circles. However, even in psychology, the intellectual climate has grown increasingly restrictive. Scholars may still explore race realism, but only by adopting a libertarian stance or confining their work to a purely technical lexicon, avoiding political language or affiliations.
Q: Uniqueness was not an explicitly racialist book, and certainly not antisemitic, but you did set up several thinkers as intellectual antagonists, including Frank, Boas, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Wallerstein, all of whom happen to be Jewish—and many would argue that they do not simply “happen to be,” but that in fact their Jewishness is a major influence on their reasoning and a motivation for their intellectual pursuits. Of course, you address many other thinkers, but Jews feature prominently in the intellectual antagonists you address in Uniqueness. Did this occur to you at the time? You mentioned (and it is clear from your books) that your ideas on race largely crystallised after publishing Uniqueness. Is this also the case with your familiarity with the so-called Jewish question?
A: Before writing Uniqueness, I had read two excellent articles by Kevin MacDonald, and was familiar with IQ race realism. While I did not object to these perspectives, though I felt uncomfortable with their political implications, I deemed it unnecessary to incorporate them into my arguments. I also recognized that some Jewish scholars, such as David Landes, whom I discuss favorably in Uniqueness, were supportive of Western civilization. Mind you, in reply to Brill, the publisher of Uniqueness, I actually listed Kevin MacDonald's journal, The Occidental Quarterly, as a potential reviewer. They did send a review copy to him, and he wrote a long review. We have kept in communication to this day, after he sent me a copy of the review late in 2011. I met him a few times, and consider him a most esteemed academic colleague.
It was only after publishing Uniqueness, as I elaborated in Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age (2017), that I gained a clearer understanding of the relationship between race and the rise of the West. I realized that Eurocentric scholars in the debate over the West’s rise framed it as a "universal civilization" grounded in liberal values, open to assimilation by any immigrant. Initially, I shared this view of the West as a universal liberal civilization. However, shortly after Uniqueness was published, I began to see that this philosophical stance aligned with policies promoting immigration-driven demographic replacement, a position I could no longer endorse. I was convinced that a Western world with a marginalized white population would cease to be Western.
This induced me to think further about the relationship between liberalism and immigration. The view I took in Faustian Man, and elaborated at length in Canada in Decay, written later but also published in 2017, was the standard one within dissident circles: that the West had come under the domination of a cultural Marxist ideology. Liberalism had long existed with strong immigration restrictions, and white identity affiliations. Only in recent years did I reach the view that liberal capitalism has a universalist progressive logic, and that this logic eventually pushed it towards open borders and racial diversity, after past traditional norms and identities were seriously weakened.
Q: As someone who has been familiar with your work for some time, I could kind of observe that shift in thinking between your earlier work and G&R. Uniqueness reminded me in some ways of another book that was very much in the same vein, namely Civilisation: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson, though of course Uniqueness was much more academic in tone compared to the sleek pop-historiography of Civilisation, nor did it really share Ferguson’s counter-Jihad (i.e., Zionist) focus on a supposed clash of civilisations between the West and the Islamic world. Nonetheless, there are similarities. Ferguson posits several “Killer Apps”—namely competition, science, private property, medicine, consumerism, and the protestant work ethic—as the defining features of Western culture that led to the rise of the West. This is also somewhat in same vein as Joseph Henrich’s idea of the West as WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic). In G&R you are critical of Henrich’s almost monocausal attribution of these traits to what he refers to as the medieval catholic church’s “Marriage and Family Program” (especially its repression of polygamy and cousin marriage). I do tend to agree with your critiques of this overemphasis on the church’s role, but at least Henrich offers a plausible explanation, whereas Ferguson offers no explanation of why or how (or even from exactly whom, racially speaking) these “killer apps” might have arisen. Can you speak to the similarities and differences between their hypotheses and your own?
A: Uniqueness has certain affinities with Ferguson's Civilisation: The West and the Rest in its endorsement of the “Eurocentric” argument that individual rights, free markets, enlightenment values. However, in a review I wrote of Ferguson's book in early 2012, I am quite critical of his book for two reasons: first, I now realized that many pro-Western historians, including Ferguson, were often right-wing liberals or neoconservatives who framed the West’s values as universally replicable; second, as articulated in Uniqueness, the West’s distinctiveness predates modernity, stretching back to ancient times.
Ferguson’s book implies that Europe was an undeveloped backwater until its economic rise in the 1500s, ignoring a rich legacy of intellectual and artistic achievements. These include the Greek invention of dialectics, philosophy, historical writing, and tragic poetry; the Hellenistic advances in natural sciences, such as Aristarchus’s heliocentric hypothesis and Euclid’s Elements; and Roman innovations like republican governance and legal concepts of personhood. By ignoring this heritage, and that of the Middle Ages, Ferguson reduces the West to a set of modern “apps”—liberal values detachable from their cultural roots.
In my review, I rejected the notion that Western liberal values are universal tools that any culture, regardless of history or ethnicity, can adopt. These values, along with the West’s broader achievements, are uniquely Western, inseparable from its historical and cultural trajectory. I also challenged Ferguson’s view of the United States as a “propositional nation” defined solely by universal ideas rather than ancestry, customs, or ethnicity.
The novelty and interpretative power of Joseph Henrich's The Weirdest People in the World (2020) lies in his demonstration that Westerners created very different liberal institutions, or civic associations, freed from kinship networks and norms, because they were psychologically different. Liberal institutions did not create liberal individuals; rather, liberal individuals created liberal institutions. By “liberal individuals,” Henrich means individuals with a greater “neurological and psychological” set of capacities, marked by reduced nepotism, greater trust, fairness, and cooperation with strangers. He maintains that these traits emerged in the Middle Ages after the Catholic Church dismantled polygamous kinship networks, imposed monogamy, and encouraged marriages based on voluntary decisions. This shift fostered civic institutions like guilds, universities, and chartered towns, grounded in impartial rules and merit rather than tribal loyalties.
However, Henrich’s claim that this psychological transformation arose incidentally from the Church’s prudish concerns about polygamy or its self-interested land grabs via excommunication is unconvincing. As I argue in Greatness and Ruin, the Greeks, Romans, and early Christians had long recognized monogamy’s civic benefits, such as reducing blood feuds over inheritance. These earlier arguments suggest a deeper, more intentional cultural evolution toward monogamy, challenging Henrich’s view of it as an “unintentional” byproduct of ecclesiastical policy.
Q: It is clear that, whether we’re talking about “killer apps” or WEIRDness, the consensus seems to be that certain Western cultural traits seem almost destined to bring about liberalism. There is a logical progression from burgeoning individualism to liberalism, just like there is from liberalism to the West’s predicament today, as you mentioned. Still, you once believed that liberalism, perhaps in a more conservative form, was basically compatible with nativist policies and white identity. With G&R, you have come to view it more skeptically, seeing ethnic nationalism as fundamentally incompatible in the long-term with the progressive logic of liberalism. What precipitated this shift in your thinking?
A: Liberalism is inherently a progressive ideology that seeks the full emancipation of individuals from pregiven collective identities, whether traditional or biological. In other words, liberalism did not actualize its ideals the moment the first liberals came to power with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, or the French Revolution of 1789. Liberalism initially coexisted with customs, rituals, religious beliefs, and nativist sentiments, which kept its progressive logic in check, and gave early liberal societies a very traditional character by the standards of today. Over time, however, the emancipatory project of liberalism eroded these “backward prejudices,” fostering a purer liberal order that views racial equality and immigrant diversity as essential to achieving equal liberty for all, regardless of sex, religion, or race.
To understand the West, one must adopt a historicist perspective. Particularly since the early modern era, or the Renaissance, the West has been a dynamic civilization defined by continuous change and innovation. Concepts like feudalism, capitalism, individualism, democracy, representative government, and liberalism lack transhistorical meanings; their nature and significance evolve with their temporal context. Judging these phenomena by a single historical instantiation ignores their variability. This lack of historical awareness may explain why scholars like Paul Gottfried argue that the contemporary West is dominated by “cultural Marxism,” a distinct ideology. Gottfried remains attached to the classical liberal version witnessed in the Anglo world of the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, though he occasionally equates liberalism with the pre-1960s or pre-1980s West.
This does not imply that all self-identified liberals in our times embrace liberalism’s latest formulation. Today, liberals broadly divide into left- and right-wing camps. Right-wing liberals favor earlier versions of liberalism and view leftist excesses as deviations from the path of liberty. Yet, conservatives have historically accommodated progressive achievements, only recently resisting “wokeness” via a populist rebellion. Most conservatives, nevertheless, still regard ethno-nationalism, immigration restrictionism, and white identitarianism as illiberal ideologies to be excluded from the public sphere.
Consider Eric Kaufmann, a self-described right-wing liberal who critiques woke politics while defending Western civilization for the sake of “truth and freedom above ideology.” Upon closer examination, however, it is clear that Kaufmann opposes only the excesses of wokeness (aggressive censorship, rigid diversity mandates, and open borders) because they provoke populist backlashes that threaten stable, multiracial liberal democracies. He is not alone. Prominent liberal intellectuals like Konstantin Kisin, Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, Jonathan Haidt, Yascha Mounk, and Niall Ferguson share this perspective.
Q: In G&R, you mentioned that Traditionalists “have been the only ones—think of De Benoist, Kerry Bolton, Alexander Dugin—to carry a frontal attack on liberalism as such, holding its inherent individualism responsible for undermining every cultural, racial and sexual identity in the West.” You also make several critiques of this school of thought, especially of their failure to address the stagnation of non-Western cultures, stating that they “have not been able to grapple consistently with the ways in which the traditionalism of the West has always coexisted with some degree of individualism, monogamous families freed from polygamous kinship networks, equal civic status, and participation in politics for free adult males—what is now known as a “civic-republican” form of liberalism, in complete contrast to the non-western world.” Nonetheless, it seems to me that the total rejection of liberalism in this way of thinking had its influence on your thought, or at least was something you had to grapple with. I remember listening to previous interviews of yours in which you brought up Dugin specifically, and your main critique of his Fourth Political Theory was that he professed to synthesise a new political theory by borrowing only the best elements from the previous theories, but in fact, you asserted, he had borrowed very heavily from communism and fascism, while taking nothing from Western liberalism. I think your critique was basically accurate, (and I think part of the reason Dugin does this is simply due to Russia’s historical circumstance, including its age-old inferiority complex towards Europe), but nonetheless he is a very interesting thinker, even if one finds much to disagree with. Did your views on Dugin change between that interview and when you wrote G&R? What is your overall assessment of his political thought as it relates to liberalism?
A: In a 2014 review of The Fourth Political Theory, written under a pseudonym, I critiqued his blanket condemnation of liberalism, and his heavy reliance on Marxist and post-modern critiques. In a 2020 interview, I noted that his “fourth political theory” absorbed some “positive” contributions by communism (critique of individualism and capitalism) and fascism (concept of ethnos), but rejected everything associated with liberalism (preferring the concept of “social freedom,” or freedom of the group, over individual freedom). By 2022, however, I recognized Dugin’s insight that liberalism is the West’s dominant ideology. This led me to conclude that wokeness is not a new leftist or “cultural Marxist” phenomenon, but the culmination of liberalism’s progressive logic. Many Western dissidents (race realists and white nationalists) criticize Dugin for dismissing race as a construct, rejecting fascism and white nationalism, and advocating a multipolar geopolitics that some view as “third worldist” opposition to Western hegemony. These critics, I believe, overlook the historical and cultural context from which Dugin’s ideas emerged.
As a Russian cultural nationalist, Dugin views the post-Soviet American push to spread liberal hegemony into Eastern Europe and Eurasia as an existential threat, aimed at fragmenting Russia and imposing liberalism. I view Russia as predominantly European, with 80–85% Slavic peoples and significant Western cultural elements. This is why I support his cultural nationalism against American neoconservative values. Russian Slavs retain a natural ethnocentrism, and both Putin and Dugin embrace Slavic identity within the Russian federation, though not white nationalism, which is incoherent to Russia’s historically-based multiculturalism and its experience fighting the Germans during WWII. Unlike Western multiculturalism, which is driven by a progressive ideology, Russia’s diversity is an organic historical reality.
By the same token, while I appreciate Dugin’s Russian perspective, I also recognize that race realism and white identity are valid approaches in the Western context, where whites are set to become a minority if the West does not make a decisive break with liberal capitalism.
Q: Great insights. I could not have summed up my own views on Dugin better myself.
You make frequent reference to Hegel in your work, and both Uniqueness and G&R draw heavily from Hegel’s ideas on the genealogy of reason and the development of man’s intellectual faculties throughout history. You argue convincingly in G&R that Hegel’s philosophy of the development of the human mind is specific to the cognitive experience of Europeans. Do you agree that, especially in light of his attempts to reconcile the contradictions of some of the most important developments in European thought—namely classical philosophy, Christianity, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism—Hegel could be considered primarily (if perhaps not self-consciously) a philosopher of the European mind? Would you consider yourself a Hegelian?
A: Uniqueness has a long chapter titled “The Restlessness of the Western Spirit from a Hegelian Perspective” arguing that Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1806) should be read as an account of the developmental experience of the Western spirit rather than of the human spirit as such. This should be obvious enough. The historical allusions of this book are almost entirely to philosophers, literary works, poems, scientific treatises, political and military figures from Europe. In our age of equality of rational capacities and rights, Hegelian scholars cannot but pretend that the Phenomenology is an exposition of “human experience and cognition.”
Granted, Hegel, like every other European philosopher, wrote in terms of the rational essence of “mankind-in-itself” and of the rational nature of humans to become self-aware of themselves as the agents of their conceptual creations and activities. Europeans have always expressed themselves in universal terms, projecting their intellectual experiences onto humanity, and, indeed, presupposing that Europeans, in their higher state of cognition, should be the standard by which to make judgements about humanity in general.
Once we connect this text with what Hegel says in more explicit terms in his “Lectures on the Philosophy of History,” which presents a comprehensive view of world history through the lens of his philosophical ideas, it is hard to deny that the basic truth contained in the Phenomenology is that the West is the only civilization in which “freedom” and “reason” have progressed over the course of history.
The Phenomenology of the Spirit is a work that seeks to capture, in a comprehensive manner, the developmental experience of the idea of freedom in its intrinsic association with the developmental experience of reason. What I learned from this text, which allowed me to go beyond the narrow reduction of Western uniqueness to economic growth and modern science, is that the intellectual history of the Western spirit cannot be comprehended as a substance, a state of being, but as an “activity.” Non-Western civilizations can be reasonably identified in terms of one or two major philosophical experiences, “the Confucian worldview,” the “Hindu Mind,” the “Talmudic” world of Jews, or the “Islamic experience” of Muslims, in their essence, with subsequent intellectual variations occurring primarily within these currents, or in combination with a few other relatively static currents, such as Buddhism, or Sunnism versus Salafism in Islam.
In contrast, the mental experience of the West can be known only by knowing it as an experience that engendered, in-through a dialectic of theses, anti-theses, and syntheses, multiple philosophical schools, in the course of time. At the base of this dynamism, as I came to understand with greater clarity while writing Greatness and Ruin, is the discovery of the mind by the ancient Greeks: the realization that humans have a faculty that is singular to the human species, which consists in the ability of reason to create methods for proper reasoning, concepts and values, over which it can adjudicate as to their validity and morality.
It was really from the first flowerings of reason in ancient Greece that Hegel detected an inner necessity (a “dialectical” logic) in the philosophical development of humans, which he traced to the nature of reason per se to become actually what it was potentially from the beginning. Prior to the Greeks, humans had barely become conscious of their rational consciousness. Human consciousness started to display a restless disposition—its true potentiality and nature—when it came to “discover” itself as a faculty in its own right in ancient times. For it was then that reason apprehended its capacity for self-reflection, to think for-itself, in terms of its own volitional abilities, ceasing to accept passively the existence of norms, gods, and natural things as if they were “things-in-themselves” beyond its own reflective judgments.
This rational spirit would remain in a state of dissatisfaction and alienation, restlessness and unhappiness, continually seeking a new solution, in its effort to overcome and sublimate every contradiction within its thinking, and every non-conceptualized unknown it encountered. The Western self could not feel “at home” in the world until it got rid “of the semblance of being burdened with something alien.” The Phenomenology views every major Western outlook—Roman stoicism, skepticism, Catholic scholasticism, Cartesian rationalism, British empiricism, German idealism, and romanticism—not as isolated or timeless viewpoints, but as evolving “moments” in the effort of human selfhood to become what it is intrinsically: the free author of its own concepts, values, and practices.
The Phenomenology thus exhibits the ways in which diverse but interrelated outlooks held sway and conviction for some time, only to be seen as limited in their inability to provide answers consistent with the demands of beings that are becoming increasingly aware of themselves as the free creators of their own beliefs, laws, and institutions. Europeans, in Hegel's grand scheme, only became what they are potentially—rationally self-conscious agents—when they came to recognize themselves, in modern times, as free in their institutions and laws, and as the ultimate decision makers as to what is true, rather than relying on “natural laws” mandated from above.
For Hegel, this stage had been reached in his own time, in the post-French Revolution era of Europe. It is not that there would be no more history after him (no further debates about, for example, how widely free speech should be extended). Liberal institutions would continue to develop, improvements and adaptations to different national experiences and events would occur. His point was that Europeans would no longer accept a political order that denied the equal liberty of individuals to express themselves as free rational agents.
Hegel, however, was not a libertarian or a relativist who believed in value pluralism. As I will explain in response to the next question, he was a communitarian liberal who believed that the state should play a key role in creating a sense of cohesion and belonging among citizens, rather than allowing the business world, and freewheeling individuals, to be in charge of the foremost ideals of a society.
I agree with Hegel that only Europeans became conscious of their consciousness. This is the foundational stone from which I try to make sense of the unique historical trajectory of Europeans. In this respect, I am a Hegelian. Of course, as I show in Greatness and Ruin, there are currently many other thinkers, treatises, debates, historical and psychological findings, with keen insights about the "second-order thinking" of Europeans and other unique psychological traits. However, I don't believe there is a grand purpose in history. We can see meaningful patterns, identifiable stages in Western history, but history is unpredictable. Most humans are barely able to think for themselves; Africans and Indians, non-Western peoples generally, are now a huge majority in the world, and their ways of thinking are very different, even if they have or are modernizing. Apart from Western technology and affluence, the historical experience of the West means very little to other civilizations. Samuel Huntingon was correct that modernization should not be confused with Westernization. AI, globalization, mass immigration, and race mixing inside the West, are creating a world that is unpredictable and very different from the world Hegel experienced.
Q: It is, of course, far beyond the scope of this interview to come up with exactly what it would look like, but do you think Hegelian dialectical methods might be fruitful in reconciling European ethnic self-preservation and cultural coherence with the “liberalising” tendencies of individualism, universalism, et cetera, that seem to be intrinsic to Western culture?
A: In my judgement, Hegel belongs to a group of German thinkers, idealists and historicists, who understood the value of modernity, freedom, the use of reason, and the value of open inquiry, while believing that societies could not be founded solely on the free choices of individuals abstracted from their ethnos and ancestral community ties. They emphasized the “social rights” of the community or ethnos. In chapter 10 of Greatness and Ruin I examine the ideas of German historicists, their critique of liberalism, though not Hegel's own critique.
Hegel, we can say, is a liberal communitarian who advocated for “social rights” within a political order that would reconcile the individualist aspirations of citizens with the need of humans for community ties, a sense of belonging, ancestral ties and historical rootedness. Today, in the West, liberal communitarians are multiculturalists who identify “social rights” with economic equality, welfare provisions, and the removal of “socially constructed” differences between the sexes and races.
Charles Taylor, one of the major Canadian theorists of multiculturalism, and an admirer of Hegel, has readapted Hegel's ideas to serve progressive ends, while discarding or suppressing his traditionalism and nationalism. Hegelian scholars generally have put forth a Hegel that views “social rights” as rights for greater equality in a multicultural setting, a Hegel that synthesizes the atomism of free markets and private rights with a state that ensures social rights for diverse peoples and promotes the “collective economic good” of society.
It is true that Hegel argued that being recognized as a citizen while living in abject poverty limited individual self-expression, insomuch as this was a result of the actions of powerful citizens having complete freedom of contract without any social rights protecting workers in the form of state regulations. But there is more to Hegel’s concept of social freedom. When Hegel writes about a shared conception of the good, he does not mean economic goods only; he means as well cultural collective goods, a sense of peoplehood (Volk) that can be guaranteed only by a national state. Hegel appeals to the idea of national identity as the glue that can tie otherwise rational private citizens by virtue of their belonging, through birth and ethnicity, to a single culture.
Current interpreters of Hegel, notwithstanding the merits of their works in organizing and clarifying Hegel’s extremely difficult ideas, rarely mention or willfully misread Hegel’s emphasis on national identity. For example, Frederick Neuhouser, in his book, Actualizing Freedom: The Foundations of Hegel's Social Theory (2000), argues that Hegel could not have appealed to a sense of national belonging “akin to bonds of brotherhood” since such bonds would be rooted in a “prereflective attachment,” which is supposedly inconsistent with a post-Enlightenment culture in which individuals accept only communitarian identities that are “consciously endorsed through a process of public reflection on the common good.”
I disagree. Neuhouser should know that the “bonds of love” that unite Western families are not purely “free” and “rational,” even as the union of husband and wife are freely decided rather than coerced by unreflective customs. There is a strong natural bond between parents and children and between men and women as sexual beings who can reproduce children, not to mention the multiple customs that regulate the marriage ceremony and child-rearing. There is also a strong natural (but no longer prereflective) bond uniting people with the same historical ancestry, territorial roots, and language within one nation. This bond is consistent with a rationally free subject. The subjection of “pre-reflective bonds” to rational examination does not necessarily entail the creation of a nation based on “propositional values.” Thinking critically about “prereflective bonds” means that these bonds can no longer be seen as unknowable, mysterious forces that control the affairs of men; it means that we now know their nature, that we can explain why we individuals tend to be more attached to people of their own ethnicity and historical lineage. It means that we have rationally explained studies about in-group attachments, biological dispositions, and genetic determinants.
Q: With the proliferation of technology, rising literacy and rates of education, and the global homogenisation of culture due to American media power, to what extent do you think non-Western peoples might be moving towards Western modes of thought, including individualism and higher-order thinking?
If, as you argue in G&R, the development of the Western mind underwent a process of Piagetian development to arrive at higher-order self-conscious thought, do you think it is likely that certain other peoples might undergo a similar development, perhaps even at an accelerated rate, since Western culture has already "paved the way" towards this level of self-consciousness?
You quote Hegel: “In development, nothing emerges but what was there originally in germ or in-itself.” You assert that the telos of consciousness is “to make consciousness explicit to itself, to reach self-consciousness,” and that “the seed of man's apprehension of himself as the only being that can become aware of his capacity to self-determine [is] already there inside man as such” (p. 147), but that this “implicit capacity only started to become explicit and actual with the ancient Greeks, and never manifested itself anywhere else.”
Would you say, then, that this germ, this potential for self-consciousness, exists in man as such—that is to say, in all peoples? You give a plausible genealogy of the development of European self-consciousness reaching all the way back to the Indo-Europeans. Is the development of higher-order thinking in Europeans, then, purely a result of this cultural Piagetian developmental process—culture and consciousness building upon itself—and unique to Europeans purely because of the cultural processes that we have undergone? Or is the germ, the potential, different across different people groups, such that, for example, African Pygmies never could have undergone a similar development of consciousness, no matter what cultural experiences and processes they underwent? Do you think it is potentially a case of culture influencing genetics, and vice versa?
And, at the risk of asking an impossible question here: what do you think is the relationship between innate cognitive potential (of a people) and cultural development of consciousness?
A: One would think that, if I agree with Hegel that the potential for self-consciousness exists in man as such, I would agree that Western culture has 'paved the way' for second order thinking, self-consciousness, and a high level of creativity among non-western peoples with the spread of modernity. Yet, in G&R, I seem to suggest that the introspective consciousness of Europeans—the disposition to examine one's own thoughts and feelings, and what Joseph Henrich calls the “weird” Western traits for intentionality, trust of strangers, and lack of ingroup identity—are too deeply wired into the psychology of Europeans to be replicated among non-western peoples simply through proper socialization. Henrich is also ambivalent about this. On the whole, his thesis is that, with modernization, creation of liberal institutions open to merit and based on universal rules and equality of rights, humans will exhibit “weird” dispositions. But he also brings up research showing that second and third generation immigrants in Europe from Muslim nations (and other cultures with strong kinship networks) have not assimilated. For Henrich, it comes down to the persistence of kinship networks. If they are “demolished,” then we get “weird” humans.
But it looks like things are more complicated. In China, despite the promotion of nuclear families and monogamy through policies like the Marriage Law of 1950, and the one-child policy (1979-2015), which aimed to reduce extended family networks, kinship systems still remain strong and deeply rooted in Confucian principles, emphasizing filial piety, patrilineal descent, and extended family obligations like ancestor worship and bloodline. Kinship norms remain strong across many other non-western nations.
I still don't see the same level of individuality among Asians, Africans, Mestizos, and Muslims, despite adoption of monogamy, some liberal institutions, and modernization. I don't see the same degree of what Charles Taylor called the “inner depths” of the Romantic movement in Europe, in his book Sources of the Self (1989). This refers to a very uniquely European modern understanding of the self as having a profound, inward or “authentic” dimension, feelings and moral sensibilities. The self in Chinese and Japanese cultures remains more tied to social roles and pre-modern philosophies, external rules and expectations.
Genetics matter, of course. Populations with low average IQs can't attain a profound inwardness, beyond superficial consumerism and narcissistic forms of self-expression. It can't be denied, however, that nations like China and Japan today exhibit high scientific reasoning and formal operational thinking, with significant achievements particularly in applied science. Japan has won 28 Nobel Prizes in science, making major contributions like the bullet train (Shinkansen, 1964), lithium-ion batteries (1980s), and robotics (ASIMO). China is currently a leader in fields like quantum computing, CRISPR gene editing, and 5G technology.
It can be argued, nevertheless, that China and Japan excel in applied and technical fields like engineering and materials science), but not in more “creative” fields like theoretical physics or biology, where Western scientists still dominate. A 2018 Journal of Creativity Research study found that Japanese students score lower on measures of “creative ideation” compared to American students, which has been attributed to a focus on consensus and rule-following. Japan and China mainly excel in continuous improvement or “iterative refinement” rather than “disruptive innovation,” as witnessed in American tech-driven breakthroughs in the Silicon Valley). Similarly, a 2021 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that Chinese students show “high convergent thinking” (problem-solving within rules) but “lower divergent thinking” (generating novel ideas), as compared to Westerners.
The West remains the citadel of political liberalism and pluralism. China is an illiberal culture with a surveillance state. China’s social credit system and extensive digital monitoring create a highly controlled environment, which suppresses individual self-expression. While Japan's post-World War II constitution guarantees freedoms of expression, association, and thought, making it de jure a liberal democracy, its culture remains deeply collectivist, emphasizing group harmony, deference to authority, and social roles over personal expression.
While I can see a high tech, AI/genetic engineering world taking us in directions never anticipated, with the full participation of East Asians, I don't anticipate seeing again in history the high level of creativity Europeans exhibited in the invention of all the fields of knowledge, multiple philosophical outlooks, exploration, and mapping of the world. This will remain the singular legacy of Europeans.
Q: Earlier, you mentioned the “uniquely European modern understanding of the self as having a profound, inward or ‘authentic’ dimension.” This reminded me of something I've been mulling over for some time, and I'd like to get your thoughts on it:
Do you think there is a sort of trade-off between self-consciousness and authenticity? I sense that white people often understand (intuitively, though often not intellectually) that other people-groups have more kinship-based ways of thinking, and to some extent even admire or envy them for the "authenticity" of their cultures, traditions, and kinship bonds. Is the white liberal yearning for “authenticity” a mere romanticisation of a lower level of consciousness, a sort of “noble savage” ideation? Is it, in effect, a yearning for a return to the smothering womb of undifferentiated selfhood, a shirking of the responsibility that comes with higher consciousness?
Anecdotally, as a child growing up in an already very multicultural and racially diverse environment, I often looked at the natural, unexamined (and thus totally self-confident) ethnic identity of my non-white peers with a degree of envy. It seemed like a source not only of pride, but also of strength, reassurance, certainty, something they could always fall back on, so to speak. They were just so sure of who they were and what people they belonged to, and I didn't see the same thing among any assimilated white Canadians.
I agree with your assessment in G&R that this sort of unexamined, purely instinctual, kinship-based tribal identity is probably not possible for whites to ever truly return to; the collective European mind has undergone a developmental process that makes this type of thinking alien to us, which is both to our advantage and our disadvantage, as you have laid out. However, I feel that the awakening of ethnic nationalism in the Romantic era was, to an extent, a subconscious response to this problem: a yearning for the authenticity of unexamined ethnic tradition and belonging. Ironically enough, the rise of ideological Nationalism was largely driven by intellectuals romanticising (and often embellishing) the supposed unexamined traditions of peasants to construct ethnic national identities. (I do not say 'construct' in a dismissive way; the identities of modern ethnic nations had organic roots in history, culture, kinship, etc.; they were 'constructed' in the sense of being self-consciously 'synthesised' to some degree from diverse regional customs for the political expediency of binding together ethnic nation-states.) I do see the irony here in the self-conscious attempt to construct unconscious ethnic/national identity, but I do not think it is necessarily a contradiction. Modern ideological Nationalism, while it is based in organic cultural and kinship groups, is also a liberal idea to some extent, or at least could not have come into being without liberalism.
If self-consciousness and a degree of individualism are inherent to the Western mind, then perhaps ideological Nationalism can strike a balance between these elements on the one hand, and the power (and human need) of belonging and identity on the other hand. Just because the identity is to some degree self-conscious and intentional, does not mean it lacks all authenticity. Total universalist individualism is ruinous for us; total, unthinking, kinship-based tribalism is impossible for us; it seems to me that some sort of self-conscious Nationalism is the best way forward, whatever form it might take. What are your thoughts on this?
A: Since about the 1960s, you are correct, a lot of progressive whites have come to identify “authenticity” with non-Western cultures, holding an idealized image of Native American “environmentalism” or African tribal vibrancy, echoing Rousseau's noble savage and the Romantics' nostalgic imaginings of the Middle Ages as an Eden of organic unity. They have identified the West, by contrast, as “artificial” and “soulless” in its corporate-driven consumerism and careerism.
However, when I write about the “uniquely European modern understanding of the self as having a profound, inward or ‘authentic’ dimension,” I have in mind another aspect in the Romantic longing for authenticity as the expression of one’s unique, inner self. Behind Rousseau’s imagining of the “noble savage” and the Romantic longing for the organic unity of the Middle Ages, I find a modern rebellion of the individual against the Enlightenment’s cold rationalism and the stultifying effects of industrial mechanization. The Romantics framed their rebellion as a return to an imagined natural authenticity in pre-modern man, unaware that they were a product of Western modernity, expressing a novel variation of the Western longing to be oneself, to create one's aesthetics and values, rather than to conform to societal expectations and prescribed social roles.
The idea of living an authentic life is essential to the philosophy of existentialists like Sartre and Camus. With the collapse of monarchy and religion, followed by increasing scepticism about the ability of reason to create universal values to ground human societies and give meaning to one's life, existentialists, including Nietzsche, radicalized the meaning of authenticity as the complete transvaluation of all prior beliefs and the creation of one's lifestyle in a world that was otherwise absurd and meaningless. We are condemned to be free. We have a choice to be either free in an authentic way, original and true to one's chosen purposes, or to follow the average man's predilection to accept external dogmas and remain unoriginal (“bad faith”).
Liberal pluralism, in its own political way, accepts the meaninglessness of the world, the inability of Western peoples to reach consensus about the “good life” or the “highest” values. The state should simply create a public sphere in which everyone can do their own thing without infringing on the rights of others. The only commitment can be to the plurality of values in a state of tolerance.
The current Western projection of an authentic organic life to non-white cultures is a reflection of the alienation Westerners feel in their hyper individualized societies. Humans, including Westerners with their individualist psychologies, have a longing to be rooted somewhere, to belong in a community. As liberalism eviscerated every tradition which hitherto sustained our liberal societies for many centuries, until recent decades, leaving Western individuals alone in the “absurd” world Camus wrote about, they were drawn to seek communitarian ties in the pre-modern world and in more traditional non-western lands.
Liberal multiculturalism, which is based on a school of thought identified as “liberal communitarianism,” is a product of this mindset. Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka effectively told white Canadians that bringing vibrant and authentic cultures from the non-white world would give Canada a communitarian identity that Anglo-capitalist liberalism could not provide. By not demanding assimilation from foreign immigrants and from the nationalistic Quebecois, and allowing them to enjoy certain collective rights to their cultural traditions and folkways, Canada would become a more culturally vibrant nation. Immigrants and Quebecois would in turn be encouraged to join this multicultural liberal order, agreeing to respect the rights of individuals to free expression rooted in Anglo liberalism—that is, to be open to the right of members of their ethnic communities to make their own cultural choices. For a time, most whites bought into the idea that attending multicultural festivals and the like would give them some collective meaning and authenticity. But with the outright swamping of the nation with endless streams of new immigrants, many are feeling more alienated than ever, as their neighbourhoods and cities have turned into ethnic enclaves and rootless melting pots without substantial ties. This is happening across the West.
Just a few years ago, as one can read in my extended review of Joseph Henrich's The Weirdest People, published in June 2022, I believed that nationalism, the creation of ethnic-cultural states by Europeans, could strike a balance between their individualism and the inescapable longing humans have to belong to a community of people with strong ethnic and cultural bonds. The nation states of the West, after all, were quite liberal a few decades ago despite their white-only immigration policies. As you point out, nationalism emerged within evolving liberal states; and in its inception after 1789, nationalists did not call for civic liberalism alone, but insisted that the creation of nationalist states should be grounded on the actual historical reality that territorial states in Europe were rooted in common ancestral ties and historical experiences. They were not mere constructs of the imagination. Liberalism was compatible with ethno-nationalism. I defended this view in my book Canada in Decay.
I now think it will be very hard to recreate national ethno-cultural states within the framework of our liberal institutions. It is not accidental that across the West, not in only one or two Western states, liberal governments eventually agreed, after WWII, to delink their states from any ethnic group and even any cultural tradition. We are now in a “post-national” stage, in which calling Canada a “liberal Western nation” is deemed to be exclusionary. In Canada in Decay I attributed this to the “march through the institutions” of cultural Marxist ideologues. But now I see it as the progressive unfolding of liberalism. A state that prioritizes an ethnic group is simply incompatible with the principle of individual rights.
I can't see how, in our times, the state of France, for example, would abolish Article 1 of the Constitution, which emphasizes equality before the law for all French citizens “without distinction of origin, race, or religion.” This would entail a restoration of the Vichy fascist regime, which would entail a declaration of war against the existing order. I can't see either how the US would reject integration (Brown v. Board, 1954). Integration is rooted in the 14th Amendment (1868), which provides a constitutional basis for laws ensuring equal protection for everyone regardless of race. Rejecting the 14th Amendment and Brown v. Board would entail a huge upheaval.
It would also entail accepting a prolonged breakdown in the capitalist economy, which would require a very strong political movement to stand up to global capitalism, which would require, moreover, a sizable proportion of white men with high levels of “V” and “C”. Australian millionaire Jim Penman writes (in his 2014 book Biohistory) about two temperamental traits, labeled “V” (vitality, high testosterone, aggression, risk-taking) and “C” (sexual restraint, control of children, family orientation, work ethic), which are both essential for the creation and maintenance of civilizations. These two traits have declined considerably in the West. I have a hard time envisioning a rejection of liberalism under low levels of V and C.
However, liberalism is decomposing, tensions are rising, and a climate may be emerging in which V levels will rise among white men, and that may open unanticipated possibilities.
Q: Do you think it will be possible for the West to walk back from the precipice it is on and achieve a better balance between its universalism and individualism, and reverence for its heritage? What do you think this might look like?
A: My hope comes from the expanding failures of liberalism. We were promised—rooted in the moral ideals of liberalism—that Western nations could overcome the divisions and conflicts associated with WWII, racial segregation in the US, and millennia-old ethnic tensions across Europe, with the implementation of immigrant multiculturalism, the promotion of equal cultural rights to “disadvantaged minorities,” the elimination of white-only immigration policies, and the creation of societies in which everyone, regardless of racial and religious identities, would eventually enjoy equality of liberty and opportunities as individuals. Diversity was inherently a good: the more diversity, the more progressive and liberating Western nations would become.
Well, for some years now many Western leaders have been compelled to admit, if implicitly, that increasing diversity does not necessarily entail increasing harmony. Racial and cultural tensions have grown across the West. Blaming “systemic racism” and “white supremacists” no longer carries the same powers of persuasion among large segments of the population as it has for the last two or three decades. In G&R, I outline many other failures of liberal capitalism. This ideological order, after bringing great dynamism and prosperity for many centuries, has reached a moral dead end, notwithstanding continuing innovations and GDP expansion.
But now that liberal progressivism has eaten up, deconstructed, and trashed the traditions, customs, and rituals that sustained this society for centuries—attachments to family, country and God—things are falling apart. When William Butler Yeats wrote “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” in his poem The Second Coming, published in 1920, he could not have imagined a breakdown of liberal societies permeated with foreign immigrants educated to identify native whites as targets for permanent reparations. We are rapidly reaching civil war-like conflicts. I agree with David Betz, a mainstream academic at King’s College London, that Britain could see civil war within five years.
This is the source of my optimism, which is rooted in my pessimism about the ability of whites to break away peacefully, through elections and reforms, from this liberal reality. As far as Western elites see it, the die is cast; the West has been racially diversified; liberalism guarantees equality of rights for everyone. Racism is basically illegal. The West is a multicultural civilization based on the separation of culture (not just religion) and the state. Culture is a choice. The state has no right to impose any values other than the value that everyone has a right to choose their values as long as they accept the equal rights of others. In other words, the state has a right to ensure that everyone accepts multicultural liberalism in the public sphere. Those who reject this order can be marginalized.
Even conservatives don't see it as a problem that the white populations of many Western nations are already set to become a minority within a few decades. They think it is quite insulting to insinuate that non-whites are “less Canadian” or “less American” or “less British.” As long as non-whites embrace “German values” or “Swedish values,” it will be the same. That is, as long as immigrants embrace the values of multiculturalism and equality of choice, the West will remain the West.
It is true that white citizens in Western nations never voted to become a minority. Many want immigration to be reduced. Our liberal order allows voters to ask for less immigration. Remigration, however, is not allowable. I think the Trump administration, as it is, understands that deporting 20 million or so illegals is extremely difficult within this order. Expedited mass deportations will require illiberal measures incompatible with legally established American values. Stephen Miller's “narrow interpretation of liberalism,” which prioritizes rule of law and national sovereignty for deporting criminals, seems to work only for non-working illegal immigrants, but not for working illegals.
So far, as of June 2025, Trump’s deportation numbers are less than 200,000. Most of these deportees had criminal records. These deportations were justified in terms of Miller's arguments, as a proportionate response to lawbreaking. But deporting 20 million would require authoritarian measures, such as sweeping raids, detention camps, and “legal shortcuts,” which counter liberal principles like due process, pluralism, and individual rights. “Targeting” communities of “Latinos” would “undermine equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.” Deporting working “undocumented” immigrants (those integrated into the economy and paying taxes) would clash with free market values. Identifying and detaining millions in workplace raids would be seen as invasive authoritarian surveillance measures. Liberal capitalism cherishes free markets, diversity, and mobility. Deporting 20 million would require invoking something like the Insurrection Act or declaring a national state of emergency to deploy military forces.
We see a similar situation in the actions of the Italian leader Giorgia Meloni. The liberal media identifies her as “far right,” and, accordingly, it set into motion a way of reabsorbing her into the liberal order away from radical measures; indeed, it has managed to use her populist beliefs to strengthen and streamline Italy's role within this regime. Since taking office in October 2022, only 50,000 illegal migrants were deported. Yet, at the same time, a 2023 decree regularized 450,000 undocumented migrants already in Italy in order to meet “labor shortages.” Legal immigration quotas have been expanded. Some estimate that 280,000 “irregular” migrants, mainly Africans, have landed over the last 32 months. The “Mattei Plan” has bribed African rulers (for example, in Tunisia, Ethiopia, Nigeria) with a payment of 5.5 billion euros to encourage voluntary returns and “address migration’s root causes.” Today, Meloni is being celebrated for her “economic pragmatism,” EU alignment, labor policies, tax cuts and “digitalization.” She is “optimizing” Italy’s needs within the global liberal order. In appreciation, she obtained 194.4 billion euros from the EU’s Recovery Fund.
To the question “What do you think this (taking on liberal multiculturalism) might look like?” – let me respond by way of what Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, has accomplished. Keep in mind, though, that Bukele has been dealing with criminals, not legal citizens, and that in El Salvador liberalism has not penetrated deep into the psychology of the population, and that many illiberal customs remain strong. What his actions show me is that a Western leader will have to act in even more authoritarian ways if he is to clean up the mess liberals have caused with mass immigration and wokeness. Bukele successfully accomplished his goals (while gaining the support of over 90% of the population) by suspending some constitutional rights and limiting due process. He had no choice, indeed, but to declare a state of emergency multiple times, curtailing the right to legal counsel, freedom of association, and privacy in communications. His administration conducted mass detentions of over 85,000 on the basis of “uncorroborated allegations,” going against the “presumption of innocence and due process.” (I am quoting the words liberals in the West have used condemning his actions.)
He had to restrict judges’ ability to offer alternatives like bail or house arrest; to impose virtual hearings often involving hundreds of defendants at once, with little opportunity for effective defense. Detainees have bee frequently unaware of charges, with lack of access to legal representation. Bukele had to limit judicial autonomy, replacing corrupt Supreme Court individuals with loyalists, a policy he extended to lower courts. These actions are “contrary to liberal ideals of an independent judiciary protecting individual rights.” There have been many “human rights violations,” with families often denied information about detainees’ whereabouts, “undermining equal protection under the law.”
Moreover, Bukele’s government had to curtail freedom of expression by criminalizing reporting on gang activities, with journalists facing surveillance. He had to employ the military to “intimidate” political opponents, once threatening the legislature with armed forces to pressure lawmakers. He had to use propaganda to encourage citizens to report suspected criminals, which “fostered a climate of fear and informant culture, undermining liberal values of privacy and community.” His “unconstitutional pursuit of reelection in 2024” further eroded “democratic norms.”
This is what allowed him to be successful: authoritarian control over all branches of government and civil society, controlling key institutions like the Supreme Court and Attorney General’s office, and thus the weakening of the system of “checks and balances.” This is what allowed El Salvador to escape decades of corruption, violence, and fear.
My optimism, then, is based on the failure of liberal multiculturalism, though I don't see a way out within the order of liberalism, and believe the West must experience the most revolutionary changes witnessed in history to transcend its current reality. History, however, is full of surprises, and we can't anticipate what AI and genetic engineering will do.
Q: It sounds like what you see as a possible way for the West to correct course, pragmatically speaking, is more authoritarian policies within the framework of liberal democracy to curtail immigration and deport illegal immigrants and criminals on a large scale. This is certainly plausible and desirable to those concerned with the demographic future of the West.
What about in the realm of ideas? What do you think is the likelihood of illiberal ideas gaining mass acceptance? Anecdotally, in both online discourse and casual conversation with everyday people, I see racial awareness and even the beginnings of familiarity with the Jewish issue spreading rapidly, the latter especially among young people. I don't have any numbers on this, nor do I believe some sort of “great awakening” is right around the corner, but I do believe that every year, more people are becoming open-minded to these ideas; the sacred cows of liberalism are losing relevance; the holocaust begins to be seen not as a unique evil that grants the Jewish people special victim status for eternity, but as a historical anecdote, a tragedy of war like any other, and its narrative and claims are even coming under more scrutiny, closer to the mainstream than ever before. Instead of kumbaya cultural harmony, we see, as a result of mass immigration, ethnic conflicts being imported from the motherland to play out on Canadian soil (see for example the conflict between Sikh and Hindu nationalists over the issue of Khalistani separatism). This also disproves the left-liberal notion that all non-whites share common interests opposed to those of the “white oppressor.” As whites become a plurality in their own countries, instead of the mainstream or the “oppressor,” we become just another racial group among many. The youth of both the hard left and right see “liberal” almost as a slur, and put little stock in the promises of democracy or the “rules-based international order.” Do you think that, eventually, illiberal ideas and more group-oriented ways of thinking could begin to supplant liberal individualism among whites, or is it too deeply rooted in the Western mind for anyone but fringe tendencies to move beyond it?
A: That's true, an increasing number of prominent X “influencers” and conservatives, like Matt Walsh and Charlie Kirk, are now, in the last month or so, calling for an end to legal immigration, admitting that anti-whiteness is widespread, and suggesting that the US must remain majority white. A very noticeable momentum against immigration replacement is palpable on X and among everyday whites. Saying that I don't see a way out of this mess “within the framework of liberal democracy” may seem out of step. To be clear, I believe it is possible to “curtail immigration and deport illegal immigrants and criminals,” though not “on a large scale” without a strong re-evaluation of our liberal values and adoption of authoritarian measures.
This effort, to deport 15 or 20 million illegals, will produce a groundswell of opposition in the US, creating a civil war-like situation. Now, add to this, a plan to remigrate millions of legal Muslim, Asian, and African immigrants, with families, in all the largest territorial areas of the West. These possibilities are nowhere in the horizon of nations like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Never mind efforts to deal with the failure of integration in the US. We can't avoid widespread societal conflicts. Liberalism is deeply entrenched in all the institutions, the schools, universities, publishing houses, newspapers, law courts, political parties, Google, AI, police departments, and the military. Mere feelings, online posts, and the revitalization of dormant ingroup instincts among whites are not enough. We need organized movements, political parties, with clearly articulated illiberal ideas, principles, and policies. Liberal populism is not enough. As I indicated in the case of Meloni's Italy, populism lacks a cohesive ideological alternative; it cannot but operate within the framework of liberalism, easily softened and employed by those in power to meet the larger ends of liberal diversity. Things will unravel and skid out of control. Opposition to deeply held liberal institutions and beliefs will grow. Alternative ideological outlooks may emerge.
Q: Great answers, and a lot to think about. Dr. Duchesne, thank you for your time. And to the reader, in addition to Greatness and Ruin, please check out Duchesne’s earlier books, and his website https://www.eurocanadians.ca/.