Anthony Koch: How conservatives helped the left undermine the West
The great tragedy is that the right once understood the moral dimension of civilization
For years, conservatives have comforted themselves with the illusion that the destruction of the West was entirely the doing of the left. They have blamed progressive ideologues, globalists, and utopians for the failed experiment of multiculturalism, the open borders that reshaped their nations, and the cultural relativism that hollowed out the moral foundations of their societies. But this is self-deception. The truth is that the so-called right, the respectable suit-and-tie centre-right parties that governed most of the West for the better part of the last half-century, are just as responsible for the decay of our civilization as their left-wing counterparts. They were not innocent observers. They were in power, and they made the choices that brought us here.
In France, the Gaullists and their successors ruled for decades under various names: the RPR, the UMP, and now Les Républicains. For much of the Fifth Republic’s history, the right, or what passed for it, held the presidency, the legislature, or both. And yet what did they conserve? Immigration surged but assimilation collapsed. Multiculturalism became orthodoxy not because the French right was defeated in battle, but because it surrendered without a fight. The men who claimed to guard the Republic’s identity replaced conviction with caution, sovereignty with symbolism, and principle with polling. They preached integration but allowed the parallel societies of the banlieues to fester, all the while insisting that national unity could survive as a slogan even as it disappeared as a lived reality. They spoke of secularism and French values yet abandoned the expectation that newcomers — like generations of successful immigrants before them — must adopt and uphold the shared civic and cultural values that made France what it is.
Germany tells the same story. The Christian Democrats, the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, have been the dominant force of postwar German politics. Their rule has been nearly continuous, their influence immense. Yet it was under Angela Merkel, the embodiment of moderation, that Germany’s identity was most radically transformed. Her 2015 decision to open Germany’s doors to over a million migrants was not an act of the left. It was an act of the conservative establishment. It was done not in the name of ideology but of morality, and therein lies the irony: the moralism of the centre-right has been no less destructive than the utopianism of the left. Merkel’s gesture, however well-intentioned, fractured the European consensus, destabilized domestic politics, and sent an unmistakable signal to the world that Europe’s borders were optional. She governed as if sentiment could substitute for sovereignty, and Germany is still paying the price.
Across Europe, similar patterns repeat. The so-called conservative parties in Britain, Spain, Italy, and Scandinavia have all held office for long stretches of time. They could have reversed course, tightened unfettered immigration, restored national pride, and reasserted the cultural norms that bind a people together. Instead, they chose cowardice cloaked in civility. They courted respectability and the approval of editorial boards, terrified of being called cruel or reactionary. Their guiding principle became “not to be hated,” as if a society could be saved without confrontation. They governed as managers, not as leaders, as administrators of decline and custodians of decay. They inherited institutions built by stronger leaders and allowed them to crumble out of fear that renewal might offend.
Canada and the United States have not been immune to the same disease. In Canada, the Progressive Conservatives and later the federal Conservative Party presided over the codification and expansion of official multiculturalism, a policy that, under successive Liberal and Conservative governments alike, transformed national identity from something shared into something merely managed. Brian Mulroney enshrined multiculturalism as a cornerstone of Canadian political consensus. Stephen Harper, though more cautious, did little to challenge its assumptions. The Conservatives spoke of integration but funded the same bureaucracies of fragmentation. Even in opposition, they supported the immigration policies advanced by Liberal governments, even when evidence showed integration was faltering and housing, health care, and wages were suffering. And let it be said plainly: this is not a rejection of immigration itself — immigration has built and enriched Canada — but a rejection of immigration without expectation, without integration, and without the insistence that newcomers join a common civic nation rather than reside in parallel ones.
South of the border, the Republican Party tells a similar story. For decades, it has thundered about illegal immigration while quietly enabling legal migration on a massive scale. Ronald Reagan, the icon of modern American conservatism, granted amnesty to millions in 1986 under the Immigration Reform and Control Act, declaring it a one-time correction that would fix the problem forever. It did not. The border remained porous, and the precedent was set. Later Republican administrations promised toughness but delivered managerialism: walls half-built, enforcement half-hearted, rhetoric disconnected from results. Even when they controlled Congress and the White House, Republicans flinched from using power to reform a system that rewards chaos. They were terrified of the media, of corporate donors, of their own moral uncertainty. They governed as if the question of who enters and who belongs were a matter of economics, not of identity. The result has been a steady erosion of social cohesion and the rise of populism as the only force willing to name what the establishment right refused to confront.
The great tragedy is that the right once understood the moral dimension of civilization. It understood that a nation is not just a collection of individuals but a covenant between generations, bound by memory and duty, by a shared story and shared obligations. But over time, the conservative parties of the West became liberal parties with slower reflexes. They adopted the language of compassion, the theology of globalism, the logic of markets, and the aesthetics of restraint. They preached prudence while practicing abdication. Their idea of stability was to manage the revolution rather than resist it. Every time they were given power, they promised to correct the excesses of the left, and every time, they merely administered them more efficiently.
It is no accident that populism has risen from the ruins of this betrayal. People were not seduced by extremism; they were abandoned by moderation. When citizens looked to the mainstream right for protection from mass migration, from cultural dissolution, from the erosion of meaning, they found bureaucrats instead of believers. They found a politics of hesitation, a cowardly centrism that worshiped process and feared conviction. And so the right’s greatest sin was not malice but weakness. It mistook compromise for virtue, consensus for peace, and delay for wisdom. In the end, it was the polite right that gave the left its victories, one concession at a time.
Conservatives must face this truth without evasion. The West is not being undermined by its enemies alone. Blame its caretakers, those who thought they could preserve civilization by yielding its substance while keeping its name. The crisis of the West is therefore not only moral or cultural but political. It is the collapse of a conservative tradition that lost the courage to conserve. Until the right admits its complicity and rediscovers the virtue of defiance — rooted not in exclusion, but in the defence of the shared civic and cultural inheritance that newcomers are welcome to join and strengthen — it will remain unfit to lead. For repentance must precede redemption, and only when the right stops excusing its own failures can it begin the work of renewal.
Left wingers like to claim that there is no left wing party in the US. Maybe the fact that "conservative" parties have helped the left undermine the West suggests that they're not really conservative, even if that doesn't stop left wingers continuing to hate them as the incarnation of evil. For example in the UK, the Conservative party talked right but governed left. Which is why the "far right" or "hard right" of today isn't extreme at all
