Modernity's Self Destruct Button

My latest essay for First Things

All politics is local, as they say. And so, before we proceed to the big question of this essay—Can modernity survive for much longer?—I want to start with a small one: Will the recent change of government make a difference to the people of Britain?

The recently departed Conservative government was sunk partly by a set of challenges that will be familiar to anyone in a high-income country—or, increasingly, a middle-income one. To start with, taxes are the highest they’ve been in generations, and yet the Conservatives felt compelled to keep funneling money towards health (20 percent of public spending) and pensions (10 percent of public spending) because both kinds of spending benefit their most reliable voting bloc. The Labour Party, in winning power, made exactly the same ­promises, and for exactly the same reason: the grey vote. This means that spending is not going to fall and neither will taxes, the under-housed and over-taxed young be damned.

Meanwhile, discontent over immigration policy was the key driver of the violent unrest this summer. Along with almost every other high-income Western country, Britain is experiencing mass immigration against the wishes of the majority of its voters. Having taken the outcome of the 2016 Brexit referendum literally rather than seriously, the government has stopped the flow of migrants from Eastern Europe and replaced it with a much larger flow of migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent. A country that was 99.9 percent white in 1951 is projected to become minority-autochthonous at some point before the end of this century.

This process has been represented by the British government as a natural phenomenon, as inevitable as weather. Other governments have adopted the same tone. “Over the past few years we’ve seen a massive spike in temporary immigration,” said Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in April of this year, carefully understating both the likely permanence of this demographic change and his own culpability (his government has “seen” these changes, rather than engineered them). Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, described as “far-right” by her critics, has thus far failed to deliver on her promise to reduce immigration. And even Japan, which has historically been alone among ­high-income countries in keeping immigration levels extremely low, is loosening its border ­restrictions.

Either there is a conspiracy at play, or—more likely—something much bigger and more ominous is going on. Britain may have pursued mass migration more intensively than most other countries, but a larger pattern is evident worldwide: The flow of people from the poor world to the rich world in the twenty-first century is as strong, and as historically significant, as the flow of people from the Old World to the New once was.

The governments permitting this flow have made an economic pact with their voters: You may not like mass immigration, but the payoff is lower taxes and higher-quality public services. It’s inevitable anyway, so there’s no point complaining.

And yet it is increasingly apparent that this pact is not being honored. At the time of writing, Britain is in recession, after fifteen years of stagnant growth: a stagnation which has coincided with a historically unprecedented surge in immigration. Britain’s miserable economic prospects are not unique among its peers. Earlier this year, The Economist published a report that analyzed data from thirty-five rich countries. “Whereas in 2017-19 the median country in our sample ran a budget surplus,” wrote the report’s authors, “last year it ran a budget deficit of close to 2.5% of GDP.” The story is the same across all of these countries: weak tax receipts combined with profligate state spending. “How long can the firehose keep blasting?” The Economist asks of these outflows, which are particularly directed towards health and welfare. Now there’s a big question.

I listen to the tentative optimism of my British friends and family, all hoping that our current problems are set to be remedied, at least partially, by our brand-new government. I cannot agree with them, and not only because I take a dim view of the Labour Party leadership. I am pessimistic because I believe that our various problems are in fact just one problem, and it’s a problem that no one—certainly not the British Labour Party—knows how to solve. 

Put bluntly: The people on whom modernity depends are failing to reproduce themselves, which means that modernity itself is failing to reproduce itself. Most voters have no idea that this is happening. Nor do most politicians. But it is happening nonetheless, and we are experiencing its early ­stages in the form of diverse political crises across the modern world.

Read the rest here…