A review of the differing reactions to Christopher Caldwell’s 2011 Reflections on the Revolution in Europe and Douglas Murray’s 2017 The Strange Death of Europe.

The Coming Battle for European Civilization: "America would not thrive in a world with a despotic or destroyed Europe."

...I believe that the European people’s desire that Europe remain home for them is the most natural and defensible of human political longings. I also believe that the elite globalist consensus, that China can be China and India can be India but Europe can be turned into a repository for anyone in the world who can get there, if it comes to full fruition, will destroy what has been one of mankind’s most fruitful and innovative civilizations. I, of course, say this with full cognizance of the dark points in Europe’s past, some of which have been very dark indeed.

I also believe, in ways perhaps analogous to what past American statesmen believed when Europe was threatened by Nazism and later communism, that America would not thrive in a world with a despotic or destroyed Europe. There are deep cultural reasons why we sent millions of men to fight in Europe during the last century, lavishly funded European postwar reconstruction, and consider our NATO allies to be cultural and political kin in ways we don’t feel about other nations. I am not optimistic by nature, and don’t believe success is inevitable or even likely. To prevail in the coming years, Europeans will have to elect governments that are able to say “no,” that are willing to distinguish between genuine refugees and economic or welfare-seeking migrants, that will deport some or all of the latter as they see fit, and that will institute measures that make immigrating illegally to Europe as unlikely as immigrating illegally to China (to take one example of a society that has no impulse to commit suicide).

The Europeans may yet succeed but the outcome is very much in doubt. On one hand, there are literally hundreds of millions in Africa and the Mideast and the Asian subcontinent who believe that their situations would be improved by moving to Europe and who increasingly have the means to set such plans in motion. They are enabled by a deeply entrenched European globalist elite that, out of a combination of guilt, civilizational weariness, and a genuine belief that borders are obsolete, wish to pose no serious obstacle to their entry. On the other side are burgeoning sentiments of the majority of the European people, who still have access to the tools of democracy and the ability to change their elites. Allied with them is a growing coterie of intellectuals, many of them formerly on the left, who realize that they don’t want their civilization to end after all....