Revolutions are hard to predict. Place a box of matches near a flame and eventually one of them will catch fire. With enough tinder the fire will spread, even if it spreads in unpredictable ways. Mass migration in the West is a potent form of tinder.
In August of 2024 spontaneous riots erupted in England and Ireland in response to the murder of children by African migrants. Violent crime has become commonplace in the capitals of Europe, and everyone knows why. But sometimes the brutality of the crime, the dishonesty of the media, and the apathy of the government strikes a nerve. A critical mass of people notice patterns, and they react.
When the data indicates that African migrants commit crime in vastly disproportionate numbers, the response of liberal journalists is to hide the identity of the perpetrators. The response of politicians is to pass new “hate speech” laws making it a crime to notice patterns and talk about the issues openly. We are witnessing the death throes of an ideology – one that was doomed to fail from the beginning.
Liberalism originated in part as a rejection of the unequal application of laws and social privileges to different people. So it is no surprise that liberals prize freedom and equality above hierarchy and tradition.
The liberal ideals of private property, free trade, and religious liberty took root in the United States and France through two bloody revolutions. After a century of conflict and two world wars, most European countries adopted liberal institutions. Other countries followed suit under the pressure of international institutions created after 1945.
In the decades following the second world war, liberal countries in the West enjoyed relative peace and prosperity, along with scientific and social innovation. But disaffection in liberal countries is growing. Even progressive liberals are beginning to take notice that trust in the post-war international order is collapsing.
In a newly published paper, we argue that liberalism is unsustainable – that recent trends toward low social trust, inter-group conflict, and falling fertility stem from liberal institutions and the social norms they tend to produce. While liberal institutions may not be solely responsible for these problems, they are ill-equipped to address them effectively. Liberalism is an evolutionary dead end, even if it fosters opportunities for wealth and innovation in the short run.
Immigration and Social Trust
Liberals treat freedom of movement as a moral default. The core liberal commitment to openness – to the free movement of people capital – tends to break down borders, and incentivize companies and political parties to import far more immigrants than citizens of liberal democracies want.
Large corporations support mass immigration because it brings in skilled workers that increase innovation, and unskilled workers that bring manufacturing costs down. Progressive political parties have incentives to import low-skilled people who are more likely to vote for a party that offers generous welfare benefits. Progressive intellectuals seem to support mass immigration because they believe that diversity is more important than group cohesion.
In this sense, liberal democracies tend to foster mass migration – via powerful interest groups – even if majorities of citizens within those countries oppose it. As this process proceeds, social trust tends to fall. A large meta-study recently showed that more ethnic diversity leads to lower social trust.
As social trust erodes, people volunteer less, and governments spend increasing sums of money supplying public goods with the machinery of the state rather than relying on people to do so through charity and social expectations. Low social trust also predicts higher levels of political corruption, less compliance with government mandates, and more distrust between ethnic groups that inhabit a country.
Once this process starts, liberal societies have few resources to deal with the consequences since, by definition, they are committed to remaining neutral on whether any comprehensive moral doctrine or set of social norms should prevail. Non-liberal regimes, by contrast, can use the power of the state to seal off the borders, deport unwanted immigrants, and curb the power of corporations and political parties who contravene the interests of political leaders or the preferences of citizens.
Fertility and Stability
A core commitment of liberalism is that the state must remain neutral on matters related to community and family. Liberal governments cannot privilege one lifestyle or religion over another without giving up their basic commitments.
But in an era in which fertility is falling around the world, this kind of political neutrality may be self-defeating. People who are more religious and more politically conservative have more children within countries. And the same holds true between countries – those that are more religious and conservative have more children than those that are more liberal and secular.
If liberal institutions and the attitudes these institutions shape speed up the rate at which fertility falls, they will be replaced with other institutions and attitudes. And if mass immigration continues, it is likely that this process will accelerate. Within those countries, the religious and conservative citizens will outbreed secular progressives.
Indeed, if current trends continue, Muslims from Africa and the Middle East will become the majority population in many European countries over the next century.
Of course, these trends are not baked in. Things change. Revolutions happen. Societies collapse. Ideologies mutate. And countries go to war – with outsiders or between different groups living within a country. We predict that the current century will see liberalism in retreat, and that governments that call themselves “liberal” will become increasingly illiberal in how they respond to challenges posed by the free movement of people and capital, and the crisis of falling birth rates.
Religion and nationalism are powerful forces. They can lead to conflict within and between groups. But they also seem to promote fertility and social cohesion better than liberal polities do. Ultimately, the winners in the evolutionary game of life are those who reproduce the most, not merely those who accrue power or resources at a particular moment in time.
MY OWN comment on this was written years ago. Liberalism and Evolution are exact opposites. and biology will always win when pitted against ideology, With evolution all men are created unequal.
