“Canada in Decay” Is True to Western Liberal Values: A Rejoinder

The final exchange in the debate between Professor Ricardo Duchesne and Professor Matt McManus over the book Canada in Decay and Canadian immigration policies.

Disingenuous Reply I

It is hard to imagine a more disingenuous reply than Matt McManus’s response to my assessment of his review of Canada in Decay. When I said Germany and Spain were liberal nations before the globalist rulers decided to embrace mass immigration, I was not denying the historical reality of fascism in these nations. McManus knows this. A clearly stated claim of my assessment was that—if we insist immigrant diversity is an intrinsic requirement of liberalism and that any opposition to diversification is racist and illiberal—we would have to identify the nations that fought fascism during WWII as racist and fascist. We would have to say that all the European nations were illiberal up until they adopted multicultural citizenship sometime after the 1980s, even though they were full-blown liberal democracies with equal rights for all citizens regardless of ethnicity.

When and why Western nations came to the decision that they should be classified as fascistic unless they committed themselves to diversity—and to the replacement of their ethnic millennial identities with a multicultural identity—is a key question of Canada in Decay. When did “liberals” decide that there is no such thing as a native “Dane” or a “Frenchman” with ancestral ties any more than there is no such thing as a foreigner-to-be-immigrant who is not a “Dane” or a “Frenchman”? Another central claim of my book is that there is nothing in the meaning of a liberal nation that requires such a nation to import millions of new minorities. Liberalism only requires the recognition of the equal rights of historical minorities already inside the nation. The claim that liberalism requires diversification is a result of the infiltration of liberalism by conniving cultural Marxists.

What is cultural Marxism?

McManus keeps harping away against the term “cultural Marxism” because he imagines himself to be a true liberal in his establishment call for the diversification of all European nations. He wonders how this label could be used against Kymlicka, Charles Taylor, and conservatives alike when none of them were “Marxists.” “What any of it has to do with Marxism, cultural or otherwise, is beyond me,” he writes. “Marxism is about nothing if it is not a critique of capital and capitalist societies.” It looks like the term “cultural Marxism” is not clearly understood in his response. It is, however, a very common term in the dissident right.

I defined this term formally in my book, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age (2017). In Canada in Decay, its meaning is contextualized within a long narrative, in the same way that leftists use a whole array of terms without offering formal definitions (“capital,” “capitalist societies,” or “Marxism”) because these terms are common knowledge in their circles. The expectation is that one should define these terms only if one’s argument is directly about them, but otherwise, readers are generally satisfied with contextual meanings.