Exporting Liberalism
One Failed War at a Time
The end of the Afghanistan war has been a sucker punch to Americans, especially Republicans. Part of it was merely partisan. Had Trump ended the war and the evacuation gone better, a larger segment of the GOP would be celebrating, and Democrats would be pushing to impeach for a third time.
Yet another reason so many pro-war conservatives are horrified by the end of the war is that it’s symbolic: their golden calf has failed.
For generations, conservatives were told to take stock in the military, democracy, liberalism, and tropes of a bygone age. In their world, the victors of World War II march hand in hand to vanquish the monsters of their former colonies. A united front of sensible Western countries built on the collective principles of liberalism, secularism, diversity, and democracy is strong enough to beat back Nazis, Soviets, and Islamic terrorists.
Sadly, that world doesn’t exist.
Western Europe is not as it once was. Its people no longer have enough children to replace their parents from one generation to the next. No-go-zones plague its cities. Terrorist attacks have become “part and parcel” of living in a major city there. Most of their economies aren’t growing, and they’re becoming increasingly reliant on Russia and China. Mass populations of Turks, Arabs, and Southeast Asians have changed their politics and made them more hesitant to engage in international affairs in those regions. We are slowly but surely just a few generations away from having a Europe that looks and acts nothing like its former self. Its atrophy is slow but steady and most definitely terminal.
And what of the United States, the last great superpower on which all the world relies?
We are our a nation that values victimhood and tribalism - both political and ethnic - over unity. Lived experiences are more valued than facts. Nearly 70 percent of young Americans are not fit for military service due to obesity, drugs, mental illness, or lack of basic education.
Those who do serve our country are the best among us. They come overwhelmingly from red states whose hometowns are plagued with deaths of despair. Around 85 percent of our fallen heroes in the sands of Afghanistan were white, and 98 percent were men. They are told they have no future in their home country and are asked to sacrifice and die to export that same type of liberalism abroad.
Perhaps we could have spent another 20 years fighting, opening more feminism programs at Kabul University, and turning a blind eye as the ‘good’ Afghans practiced pedophilia on little boys and adolescents. We could have sacrificed more blood and more treasure in a country where no long-term solution is possible. It certainly would have made Dan Crenshaw and the McCain family happy.
The Taliban, however, would always be waiting. If not now, then in a few years or a few decades. Their fight isn’t for some ideology as weakly hemmed together as liberalism.
They have the belief in eternity while we have the gay pride flag over our embassy. They have Allah while we have woke corporations to fill the power vacuum of the God we have removed from schools. They have their homeland, and we have a government whose President fled within a few days taking millions of American dollars with him.
Our growing crisis of identity, terrorism, and liberalism cannot be solved at think tanks in Washington DC or with military contractors in Northern Virginia.
Western people’s only hope to rekindle the spark that built the greatest civilization in the history of man is to rediscover eternal things, rebuild ourselves as a normal nation instead of the world’s policemen, and look to be part of the arch of greatness. Our ancestors did not sacrifice everything to see their gluttonous and hedonistic descendants flush away for the values of French, German, and Jewish philosophers.
We cannot build nations abroad with the values of liberalism because it is failing its people at home. Rebuilding ourselves is the most important project- for the sake of Americans and of the world.