The ‘4 Horsemen of the Western Civilization Apocalypse’ Have Arrived

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Europe is in a turmoil. The government of France fell in the sense that the prime minister was just relieved. There’s alternative governments from the mainstream socialist European model in most of Eastern Europe and Italy and the Netherlands. There’s political unrest in Ireland and Britain.

What’s going on?

The same thing is happening here. I would call it the “Four Horsemen of the Western Civilizational Apocalypse.” In other words, Europe and the United States, and kindred Western countries, are facing four self-inflicted wounds.

The first is what I would call green madness. That is, an elite in all of these Western countries felt that they were at the end of history, they were gonna create heaven on Earth, and they started to dismantle nuclear power, oil-generated power, coal power, and in substitution, subsidized very inefficient and unreliable solar and wind. They stopped producing oil and natural gas.

And the result of this is that their electricity and fuel costs skyrocketed, making them uncompetitive and destroying the viability of the middle classes that are now in revolt.

In the case of Germany, it’s a former shell of itself. It was once the powerhouse of Europe. Its energy costs are three to four times those of the United States.

A second horseman of this apocalypse are borders.

Remember, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, “Yes we can. We can let in a million people from the Middle East.”

But in Britain, in France, in the Netherlands, in Italy, in Greece, and in Germany, the influx of millions of people from the Middle East—poor, often without language facility, coming illegally without legal sanction, without skills, without capital, and with ideas and values that are antithetical to the Western enlightenment—are not assimilating. They’re not acculturating. They’re not integrating at a sufficient pace to avoid social turmoil. The host has not been able or is unwilling to acculturate them into European values.

The result is the populations of these countries are almost 15% to 16% Islamic refugees that are not part of the body politic. And there is social tension, it’s unsustainable as far as the entitlement cost to these host countries, and it doesn’t bode well.

So, we have to restore borders in the West, so to speak.

There’s another problem, maybe even graver, and that’s—I would call it demographic suicide.

The fertility rate is only 1.4 in Europe, and it’s not much better here in the United States, 1.6. We have adopted a lifestyle that suggests that there’s nothing unique or it should not be privileged, that two-parent household with two to three children. That was the basis of Western civilization, and it was necessary for a 2.1 fertility rate to reproduce the culture.

But when you’re down to 1.4 or 1.6, the population is shrinking and ossifying and aging, and there’s not enough young people to support the older people in their retirement.

So, a pension crisis is looming in all these countries, and the result of it is they must, for sufficient labor needs, open their borders and bring in people—often with contrary values to their own—who don’t, as I said earlier, do not assimilate. But if these countries in the West do not reproduce themselves, then history suggests they’re doomed.

There’s a final one, and that is diversity, equity, inclusion. This is the idea that particular peoples, who identify tribally, should be given exemption or preferences from the body politic.

In other words, in the United States, if you claim you’re not white—and that’s a very problematic matter. That’s why I said “claim,” because of the rise of inner marriage and multiracialism. But nevertheless, it’s a very archaic idea that you identify by your superficial appearance rather than the content of your character.

But when you start to provide exemptions from people, or give them preferences and admissions and hiring and retention and tenure, or you suggest that people of a particular superficial appearance shall be given exemptions from law, the consequences of crime, or the consequences of failing to meet expectations of schools, then you’ve created—whether you like it or not—the beginnings of tribalism. And tribalism is inconsistent with the Western Enlightenment, as we see in Europe and as we see in the United States.

I’d like to finish by saying these can be corrected. These Four Horsemen of the Western Apocalypse can be driven out. It’s because they were self-inflicted in suicidal fashion.

All we have to say is: “We’re going to go back to a commonsense policy about energy. We’re gonna secure our borders and have legal-only immigration. We’re gonna encourage two-parent families, nuclear families, to have two children or three children. And we’re going to start to assess people not by their superficial appearance, but as individuals.”

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