Thread by @Doc_0

The utter failure of nation-building in Afghanistan, where the Taliban is rolling up the whole country with little resistance while U.S. troops are still boarding the planes for home, has profound implications for Western civilization in an age of globalism and mass migration.

The great nation-building crusade of the neocons was a complete and absolute disaster. 20 years, billions spent, so many lives lost, and we made few lasting impressions on Afghanistan. We walked across sand, and now the evening tide of savagery rolls in to erase our footprints.

Iraq teeters on the verge of becoming an Iranian satrapy, with Tehran's militia proxies brazenly attacking American positions. Obama's nation-building in Libya unleashed a decade-long hell of warlords and terrorists that will now become part of Turkey's Islamist empire.

It's fashionable today to chuckle that OF COURSE nation-building was always doomed to fail. Who was ever foolish enough to think otherwise? All the cool kids claim they knew it was a futile endeavor from the jump.

And yet, many of the same people are staunch advocates for open borders, mass migration, unlimited refugee tidal waves from failed states. Suddenly nation-building *isn't* futile, as long as we transplant huge chunks of the subject populations to our home soil first.

But the whole lesson of nation-building's failure is that some populations have deeply ingrained traditions, cultural tendencies, religious ideologies, etc. that make it folly to plant seeds of democracy and hope they grow into mighty trees of liberty.

The vague hope is that "assimilation" will somehow work its magic and overcome the factors that made nation-building fail. But assimilation requires a strong national ethos in the host country to transmit its values, and it helps if the immigration input is carefully controlled.

We've seen painful examples of what happens without those safety measures: mass migration producing ethnic enclaves, insular and alienated communities that bring a lot of their bad habits and destructive tendencies along with them.

Socialists assume generous welfare states can alleviate the poverty that supposedly nourishes destructive cultural tendencies. There is no evidence of this working - quite the reverse. Welfarism breeds alienation and resentment, producing a hostile permanent underclass.

The nation-building crusades of the new millennium turned entire countries into welfare cases, and look what happened: corrupt elites stole the money, the public seethed with resentment, extremists exercised REAL power through violence against fragile transplanted "democracy."

In other words, much the same thing that happens to permanent welfare-fueled underclasses in Western cities. The same ugly game of corruption, alienation, failure to transmit positive cultural values, and vulnerability to extremism, just with different players.

It was always a mistake to assume "democracy" could be planted like a tree that would grow roots of classical liberalism. It's the other way around: the foundations of classical liberalism must be strong before a system like the American republic can be built on top of them.

That's not just a lesson to be applied to foreign nation-building adventures and mass migration, either. The foundations that support the American republic are under sustained attack, and they are cracking. We can become Afghanistan more easily than Afghanistan can become us.

Here's the most disturbing thing about the Taliban advance: we spent decades, billions of dollars, training and equipping the Afghan military, but they keep surrendering or running away after providing minimal resistance. They don't see anything worth fighting or dying for.

The Taliban doesn't always have to terrorize the Afghan military into submission. Sometimes they just announce they're taking over, they promise to keep the proverbial trains running on time, and everybody just shrugs and lets them in.

Don't you see echoes of that happening all across the world? Militant ideologues taking over institutions with little resistance from people who don't think there's anything worth fighting for, even when the fighting isn't physical? Submission as the path of least resistance?

If you will not fight for the pillars of your republic, you cannot defend what sits atop them. If you won't defend the roots of freedom without compromise, the tree will wither. It's not really that hard to convince people that nothing is worth fighting for.

The "root cause" of extremism is not poverty, or joblessness. It's contempt. Savagery flourishes when civilization is not worth fighting for. Remember Afghanistan, and beware of anyone who claims YOUR civilization is not worth fighting for. /end