I’ve been chewing on Kristor’s observation that, to put it bluntly, the West is now completely leftist. Aside from a few antiquarian pocket-realms, there is no point of strength or power that promotes or defends anything other than leftism. This inescapable conclusion is in many respects disturbing and disheartening and in others liberating.

Even if we can build our own cultural enclaves, the Left will not leave us in peace, nor will the enemies outside our gates be idle. We ought to purge the poison of leftism from our civilization’s bloodstream. Otherwise, Western civilization will perish.

This is an eminently Western outlook. From the pass at Thermopylae to the Catalaunian fields, from the walls of Constantinople to the forests of Tours, from Paris to Jerusalem to Constantinople once more, from Malta to Vienna and even to Rorke’s Drift, the history of the West is replete with heroic defenses against impossible odds.

But what do you do when the barbarians are at the gates ready to sack your city and everyone of any importance within is inclined to let them? You could try to rally the populace, but you’d lose, and even if you won, the primary beneficiaries would be the very backstabbers you were rebelling against. They wanted to stop you when their very lives were threatened; once you’ve given them security, they will pull out their knives and get to work. It seems that the city is beyond saving, and frankly, should be destroyed. The prudent man will recognize this fact and take the measures necessary to secure the future of himself, his family, and whatever else he can salvage.

(The tension between these two perspectives, by the way, was the main point of Separate Ways.)

If Kristor is right, and I believe he is, then there is no Western civilization for us to defend. Sure, the West is a geographical expression; sure, there are people living there; sure, there’s the idea of the West, but tectonic drift isn’t our enemy, the people don’t want our help, and the idea, well, that idea includes and incorporates leftism, which is a Western invention after all. The triumph of leftism means that we, as enemies of the Left, are also enemies of Western civilization as it has evolved in real life.

Here’s a supreme irony: everyone opposes Western civilization. Everyone. The invading hordes are, of course, interested in looting the West; the Left believes they need to destroy the West in order to achieve universal salvation; we want to see the West fall, so that it can rise from the ashes. Very few support the West as it exists.

Still, such defense as there may be is in the hands of the Left, and that creates an interesting situation. Self-preservation, if nothing else, may force leftists to jump ship, or otherwise change their ideology. The possibilities for the future are basically these three:

1. The Left sides with the invaders of the West and successfully suppresses any resistance.
2. Leftists adjust their ideology to allow for effective defense.
3. Leftists abandon leftism, trading it for a new ideology.

2. and 3. look very similar, but there’s an important difference: in 2., leftism remains ascendant at least officially, which has a variety of qualitative effects.

Before looking at these three possible outcomes, let’s perform a thought experiment on a smaller scale. Specifically, let’s imagine that the Left decides to squeeze the university system, cutting off all federal funding until minorities receive their fair share of tenured professorships. The analogy between universities and the society as a whole is not perfect, but it can still be illuminating.

Academia has three ways it could respond: it could argue on its own behalf using parts of leftist ideology, it could cast aside leftism altogether, or it could bend over and be screwed. The humanities and perhaps even the social sciences would go with the third option—they’re too committed to the most radical forms of leftism to seriously dissent—but the STEM and professional fields are independent enough that they might do something different.

In order to justify their lack of diversity, these fields would have to some kind of race realism. If they stick with leftism, this would be reviving something like early 20th-century progressivism: the universities train expert technologists who perform vital social functions, such as building airplanes and computers, or healing the injured and sick. Prestige in the field is handed out according to results, and some races produce better results.

What the right-wing version of this response would be is hard to say. There are, of course, conservative defenders of academic privilege, but their conservatism is the leftism of twenty years ago, if that. The actual Right these days is hostile to the present system of higher education, reciprocating its feelings, and so would be perfectly happy seeing the groves of academia hewed down.

Whatever the arguments proffered, however, the leftists controlling the state are unmoved and shut off the money spigot until the professors yield. In due course, adequate numbers of blacks and Latinos are hired and given tenure, many of them in positions for which they do not remotely qualify because there simply aren’t enough qualified minorities to fill all the necessary positions. The star of the academy falls, and potential students begin to go elsewhere. It is still possible to get a good education at a university (especially since a good chunk of the actual teaching is done by non-tenure track faculty and graduate students who don’t have enough money and prestige for anyone to be concerned about their diversity), but the expense grows and the reward shrinks.

At the same time that students abandon university education, universities experience a flight of the competent: the best and the brightest, especially in technical fields, realize that academic life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and move to the private sector. Some do actual work, while others join alternative educational institutions. These schools are unlike to provide the same breadth of education as universities do, but they do prepare students for remunerative work.

The Left, of course, does not take this challenge lying down. The government subsidizes college students, keeping attendance up, and cracks down on alternatives. In the short-run, this means that the quality of education falls. The long-run outcome depends on whether or not the existing state maintains undisputed power, which brings us back to the original issue of how the Left responds to invasion from abroad.

Suppose the Left persecutes Westerners. Then we’d see a similar flight of the competent from existing institutions, and the Left would crack down on them just as it would on alternative education institutions. In order to escape the Left, skilled workers will collaborate with the invaders, offering their services in exchange for protection. Eventually we’d see a largely non-white society with enclaves of skilled whites. Leftism would provide the ideological justification for this arrangement so long as whites proved themselves useful and the new rulers were prudent.

Now imagine leftism reforms itself a bit to allow for exclusion of non-whites from Western countries. This scenario I do not see lasting very long. Whatever particular principle it is—universalism, humanitarianism, egalitarianism, anti-white racism, general nihilism—that one believes is at the bottom of leftism, it will undermine any such reform attempts. The world in this scenario looks much as it does in the first, only blacker and browner and with even more people turning toward Mecca. At least leftism as an ideology dies out.

Finally, imagine there’s no leftism—it’s easy if you try. The alternative to leftism has to have both a racial and a religious basis: the West belongs to white Christians. No alternative will work. For all the ferocity of ancient pagans, today paganism has less vitality to it than a cow mutilated by aliens. Political outcomes depend on how quickly the jettisoning of leftism takes place—if it happens soon, some semblance of democracy may survive; otherwise, something else.