Generals always fight the last war. The media theorist Marshall McLuhan made a similar point when he argued that we understand the effects of new technologies in terms of past ones. He called this rear-view mirror thinking. Right now, Western countries are suffering from a collective exercise in rear-view thinking about the effects of digital technology on mass migration. Rather than seeing the unique functions of digital technology, we have assumed it has the same homogenizing effects as prior information technologies. That exercise of rear-view thinking is accelerating cultural replacement.

Let’s take stock of where we are. Since the 2010s, it has become clear that we are living in the end of the end of history. Having studied the West for decades, China and Russia decided not to imitate it but to pursue their own civilizational paths. Islamic civilization had long been pursuing its own. As the geostrategic ambitions of those three civilizations became clear, the concept of “the West” gained fresh life.

The civilizational paradigm seemed perfectly poised to address these new clashes. You might call it Samuel Huntington’s posthumous revenge over Francis Fukuyama. Many liberals and conservatives embrace a quasi-Huntingtonian paradigm of a clash of civilizations, in which the liberal democratic West is ready to face off against its rivals. It’s enticing. But the weakness of this paradigm is that it conceals an increasingly incoherent concept of Western civilization.

Huntington’s best critic, the political scientist James Kurth, made this point. In his 1994 essay “The Real Clash,” Kurth argued that Huntington played down the growing conflicts emerging within the West. Sometime late in the previous century, it repudiated the institutional arrangements of mid-20th-century liberal democracy and went in a new direction. Kurth argued that

the real clash of civilizations…is already underway within the West itself, particularly within its central power, the United States. This is a clash between Western civilization and a different grand alliance, one composed of the multicultural and the feminist movements. It is, in short, a clash between Western and post-Western civilizations.

Multiculturalism and feminism are more than a set of ideas—they are social technologies for administering society. Moreover, they claim the need to have absolute efficacy in every human activity. Anti-discrimination law cannot stop at the door of a privately funded school, business, or social club; it must pry its way in, enlisting state police power when necessary.

Feminism is the social technology that, by assuming men and women are the same and can contribute equally to the same order, renders them interchangeable in politics, work, and the home. In effect, it treats men and women as replaceable. Multiculturalism is the social technology that, by assuming all cultures are the same and can contribute equally to a liberal and democratic order, renders cultures and peoples interchangeable within a single administrative order. In effect, it treats all cultures as replaceable.

These assumptions of sexual and cultural replaceability were locked in by the development of information technology and a way of thinking about its effects. Let’s set feminism aside and focus on how that happened with multiculturalism.

Digital Tribalism

In 1965, the U.S. Congress passed the Hart-Celler Act. It opened America to all cultures, banning the national origins system that looked too much like racial discrimination. But what if some thought certain cultures were not compatible with America’s? Senator Ted Kennedy had a rebuttal ready.

In 1965, debating Hart-Celler, he scoffed at those who said immigrants don’t assimilate. “In an age of global television and the universality of American culture, their assimilation, in a real sense, begins before they come here.” Kennedy assumed that, thanks to a particular kind of information technology, the world was already becoming American. Globalization brought television, which brought modernization, which brought Westernization and Americanization to all cultures.

That’s the subterranean promise of the end of history: thanks to the homogenizing power of information technology, even if we can’t invade the world, we can certainly invite the world in without changing anything of substance about our political system.

Kennedy incarnated a misplaced confidence in the capacity of information technology to serve as a force for coherence. But he was looking backwards. Kennedy had grown up in a country where assimilation worked because of a particular technological environment. When people left their countries for a new one in the early 20th century, they were cut off from kin, clan, and tribe by distance, relying on the written word to transmit substantive communication. Over time, severed from old connections, they built a new home.

We can understand why Kennedy assumed TV’s homogenizing effects: in 1965, there were only three national channels. But in the 1960s, that centralized world was already breaking down. McLuhan anticipated that the instantaneous communication technologies of the electric age would thrust us into virtual relationships with others, enhancing our connections to our preferred groups and kin.

McLuhan’s concept of the global village was not something from John Lennon’s “Imagine,” but a depiction of a tribal world haunted by in-group preference, mistrust of outsiders, and the threat of violence. Or to put it differently, a migrant who sails the Atlantic to America leaves his co-ethnics behind. But a migrant with a smartphone keeps his co-ethnics in his pocket. What are the implications?

Migrants use digital networks to coordinate entry and exploit loopholes in the legal system. Events at Ceuta this summer provide a snapshot of how that happens.

In lieu of integration, migrants develop transnational ethnic client politics. They construct parallel power centers that pressure others to encourage chain migration. Recent reports from Britain allege that gangs are coercing or bribing single mothers to name asylum seekers as fathers on birth certificates. These ethnic cartels capture parts of the state apparatus; those promoted within the state system leverage their official positions to deliver benefits to their co-ethnics, both within their host country and beyond. One example of what happens when they reach the top came in 2021, during the evacuation of Kabul. Then-Canadian Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan directed special forces to rescue non-citizen Afghan Sikhs instead of Canadian citizens.

Digitization also makes it easy to preserve traditional identities. Since the migrant crisis, 70% of asylum-seekers admitted to Germany have been Muslim. According to Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, nine out of ten retain their religion. Of all religious migrants, Muslims are the most likely to use digital content “at least once a week.”

All this undermines notions that digital technology homogenizes cultures through Westernization. It’s an environment conducive not to assimilation in a national civic culture but to cultural replacement.

That process, described by Renaud Camus as the “Great Replacement,” is certainly one part of our post-Western future. It’s deeply intertwined with what Camus calls the “Little Replacement”: the transformation of our cultural reference points that encourage us to think there is nothing special about our own achievements. Between peoples and cultures, we can swipe left or right as we like. No serious evaluation or judgment is needed. You can easily go from one to the next, with just a few emotional pangs in between.

The Great Replacement is not a conspiracy orchestrated by a cabal but the effect of a social technology. But there is a process of post-Western transformation that is happening much faster.

The Wrong Choice

The effects of the social technology of multiculturalism in the digital age are decoupling the Western nation-state. The shrinking civic nation or ethnos of the majority now competes with numerous ethnoi (nations or tribes) for control of increasingly scarce state resources. That conflict raises the specter of tribal violence that McLuhan predicted.

Western elites know this. During the 2010s—consider the pivotal year of 2015 and the migrant crisis—they made a choice. Instead of opting for border control, they chose to control information.

Since 2015, multiculturalism has required controlling and curating volatile online speech to manage the effects of digitization and blunt the specter of tribal violence. It’s also another exercise in rear-view thinking: harking back to an older, centralized, homogenizing media environment and imagining that, with sufficient control, we can recreate it—then becoming increasingly desperate and despotic when we cannot. That’s our immediate post-Western reality: in response to instantaneous communication, we are locking in a new system of governance that polices political speech, suppresses civil liberties, and hands over more power to the “Court Party”—the parastate of judges and NGOs that are shielded from legislative accountability.

As long as we are still enraptured by the late 20th-century confidence that any culture can integrate into the West, we will continue to be pulled in this post-Western direction. We need clarity of vision to understand that the era of integration is over. The technological conditions that underwrote it are no longer possible.

This affects policymakers who want to embrace “the clash of civilizations” paradigm to confront our geopolitical challengers. Thanks to constant mass immigration, the new national settlements and cultural coherence that could sustain their preferred grand strategy have not had time to emerge. Those eager to pursue this strategy in Iran or elsewhere need to understand that it is premised on a shrinking constituency. Moreover, they must reckon with growing transnational ethnic tribes that mobilize against it.

The way forward is to revisit the 2015 choice between information control and border control. Steps are already being taken in the latter direction: even Poland’s anti-populist government has found geopolitical reasons to suspend asylum claims at its eastern border. Many solutions don’t require any new statutes: the Trump Administration has, for example, reduced immigration from Muslim-majority countries to near-zero without statutory reform. One important part of the remigration agenda—providing voluntary inducements for migrants to leave by restricting welfare, banking, and government services to legal residents—is simply what the plain text of many statutes already demands.

Some thinkers say crowns are lying in the street waiting to be picked up, but much of the scene is more mundane: a matter of venerable, viable policy levers waiting to be pulled for those who stop looking in their rear-view mirrors and gaze ahead.