D. J. Webb

Libertarianism is the product of a discrete civilization. If libertarianism means anything at all, it is that English culture can and will exist and thrive in the world. The assumptions that underlie libertarianism are all derived from England’s common law. Libertarians want no more than a restoration of England’s ancient constitution. We want no more than a return of that relationship between state and society that dozens of generations of Englishmen would have recognized and seen as the Law of the Land.

Libertarianism is therefore not culturally abstract. It is true that during the days of the British Empire, many features of English culture were adopted by the colonies. The city of Hong Kong internalized many features of English common law and freedom from excessive taxation and regulation, simply because the city was built from the beginning on a free economic basis.

Even so, it remains the case that libertarianism is an Anglo-Saxon concept. Even within the former Empire, places like Hong Kong remain the exception and not the rule; Zimbabwe and Brunei were in the Empire too, and neither is a beacon of democracy. Hong Kong itself piggybacked on Western economic and technological achievements. Without British invention of electricity, railways, television, the Internet and the automobile, it is hard to visualize Hong Kong’s current prosperity. England and America have played an irreplaceable role in human history, one entirely unacknowledged by the governments of other civilizations.

Yet the prejudice of some libertarians is that the positive aspects of English culture are entirely replicable elsewhere. Is there any reason why Iraq cannot become a libertarian society? Of course, there is! Iraqis are not Englishmen. The cultural assumptions that govern their society are entirely different, including tribal conflict, sectarian religious violence, loyalty to lineage, cemented by cousin marriages, and an absence of social trust.

Given time, good leadership and luck, it is probably the case that all or most societies can move in a progressive direction. But the assumption that all societies are equally amenable to liberal values is in itself an expression of Anglo-Saxon hubris. We seek to export our “values” to the world. Is the world seeking to import them?

There can be no “end of history”

Let’s reorient this discussion. The “end of history” thesis that holds that Western liberal democracy is the final pinnacle of human achievement that will eventually spread over the world was a reflection of a sense of Western victory at the end of the Cold War. That moment of victory was fleeting, and it has now passed.

We are now on the verge of a shift in global power—away from the West. China is the second-largest economy in the world, and has yet to adopt Western values. Attempts to recreate the Muslim world in our image appear to be failing badly. At some point in the future, America faces a “Suez moment”, when attempts to bomb a weak developing nation that is under the control of a dictator are scuppered by Chinese objections. Just as America restrained Britain in 1956, the Chinese will one day have the financial ability to restrain the Americans. Russia champs at the bit, and would surely welcome American decline.

The demographic weakness of the European and European-descended nations is a product of feminism and egalitarianism, which has given us abortion, small families, family breakdown, divorce—and, as a result, reproductive rates that are below replacement levels. Our universalist propaganda, which claims that Western liberal values (which have some overlap with libertarianism, particularly in their historical origins) are not rooted in any culture or people and can be adopted worldwide, has led us to seek to replace the entire demographic foundation of the European nations with imported citizens from other civilizations.

Immigration will overwhelm and transform us

So far, therefore, from being on the brink of a libertarian triumph, we are on the brink, rather, of the death of the society, demographically and by immigration, as well as political change and the hypertrophy of the state, that originally gave birth to the concept of freedom. English society will, within our lifetimes, fail in America, as the European majority recedes from the 2030s. English society will fail in England from the 2060s onwards. Canada, Australia and New Zealand are on the same trajectory.

The sterile policy debate in the UK revolves round issues such as membership of the European Union (EU). A more important factor in Europe’s future is the fact that the EU is expected to account for less than 5% of the global economy by the end of the century, with numerous countries (France, Belgium, Sweden, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and others) seeing the emergence of very large minorities of unassimilable immigrant communities from other civilizations. As Mark Steyn has pointed out, in a society that is 10% Muslim, where the Muslim minority has average birth rates of 3 or 4 children per family and the European majority has birth rates below replacement levels, members of the Muslim minority will have almost as many grandchildren as the dominant majority. True, it will take decades for the demographic change to work through, and all the while it will be stated that fear of change is just prejudice. Nevertheless, this demographic change is largely already baked into our future.

As the Anglo-Saxon societies are central to the culture of liberty, and England and America played the central role in forging the global economy, the loss of England and America will be stunning, negative developments in the history of the globe. If Putin believes that the fall of the Soviet Union is the greatest geopolitical catastrophe in recent history, maybe we should wait a few decades to see the future of England and America before making further comment.

All civilizations come to an end

The prejudice of each age is that society will last in its current configuration, or that the future will resemble the present in key essentials. Yet no previous civilization has lasted forever. The Ancient World was overwhelmed. Our civilization essentially dates from European emergence from the Dark Ages around the sixth or seventh century AD. Why think that in a thousand years’ time, the UK will still exist, or even that the EU will exist, or anything else that we recognize as part of our political or economic furniture?

Winston Churchill spoke of Britain’s “Finest Hour” in the Second World War as something that would be remembered if the British Empire and her Commonwealth of Nations lasted for a thousand years! How quickly did those words date!

I think we can confidently state that England will be unrecognizable in a hundred years’ time, with a new majority population, let alone in a thousand years’ time! Will English always be spoken in the Anglo-Saxon world? Could America become Spanish-speaking? Could Australia become Chinese-speaking? Could parts of England fall to Hindi and Urdu, or maybe Bengali? Could Bradford be an Urdu-speaking island in England? Could Manchester become Chinese-speaking? Will France become Arabic-speaking? Will Somali emerge as the majority language of Sweden?

As parts of England become mono-ethnic enclaves, demands for autonomy and official local bilingualism may arise. Could parts of England one day demand independence? Will England become a federal state with laws varying from county to county as our population becomes ever more ethnically segregated?

An exhausted society

It is useless to dismiss these questions. The only truth is that no society lasts forever. All political phenomena in the UK, including vituperative and extreme demands for equality in racial, cultural and sexual affairs, prove that our society is exhausted. Social change is not leading to greater vibrancy, but rather to demands for intervention in a way that is strangling a free society, boosting the role of the government in society and enforcing unnatural social norms. Civil society is long gone; what has replaced it is media-driven campaigns for state intervention.

We have already become a society that apparently doesn’t seek to survive and therefore doesn’t deserve to survive. This makes the future quite open-ended. The assumption that everything will stay the same is false. That is the only outcome that can be ruled out: once the population changes, the future can no longer be a natural or organic development from the past.

This may seem negative or even depressing, but it does mean that libertarianism as a movement will become more important as time goes by, as a new majority emerges less motivated by strands of English culture that tend towards liberty. Libertarianism is likely to become ever more explicitly an ethnic movement, as English people seek to defend parts of their culture.

A new libertarianism

History is therefore in one sense only just beginning. We mustn’t be too concerned to hold on to the past: the monarchy, the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland etc are unlikely to remain key parts of our identity, and we could end up foolishly battling for the House of Windsor or against Scottish secession, in both cases for no real reason.

We need to reorient debates around issues such as the European Union. The EU is just a temporary arrangement and, as such, will not survive and is not important. What is important is that, to the extent that we need skilled workers, they be taken from European nations and the Anglosphere and not Somalia and Afghanistan. Otherwise, we will lose a sense of how to survive as a society at all. Free speech on cultural issues is a key line in the sand for us—much more so than specific levels of taxation. The Department for Education should be closed down to avoid supervision of all schools on the basis of promotion of multiculturalism and the like. The right to freedom of association becomes more valuable in a multicultural society—but correspondingly much harder to obtain as a result.

Nevertheless, true liberty is the culture of dying English-speaking societies. There is little we can do to change that fact. That doesn’t mean we have to welcome state intrusion in our lives. We can win minor victories. It may even be that Chinese geopolitical domination will be required before we can see more clearly the need to defend our culture.

If the virtue signalling could be dropped and we could allow ourselves to defend our culture and thus our liberties, we might even be able to hang on to some corners of England. A break-up of England into city-states cannot be ruled out, and would possibly be a good thing if in centuries to come English people managed to dominate some of them. One thing is clear: without a society that remembers its English roots and the ancient constitution, that is, a society that self-consciously builds itself on our cultural heritage, there will be no liberty to speak of in the future.