Hope for the Western World in Crisis

 by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

This year, throughout the Western world, hard-working people made their voices heard and put their trust in the Right. New political parties were forged: in the UK, the Right-wing Reform Party won 4 million votes and gained 100,000 members; in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders helped to form an historically Right-wing government; and Italy, Sweden, Austria, Finland, the Czech Republic, and Germany have all seen the popularity of patriotic conservative parties rise, especially among the young. Trump once again defied expectations – you would think people knew to expect the unexpected! – and won the popular vote by a healthy margin. Critics of gender ideology, shunned for years, have seen their work pay off: puberty blockers are now banned in the UK and governors in the USA are working to ban federal funding for transgender surgeries and continuing their advocacy for children’s safety apace.

People who have been betrayed or forgotten are rallying against the discursive strictures of woke-inflected neoliberal regimes. They are also sending a message to weak so-called “conservative” parties whose policies are indistinguishable from the quasi-socialist, anti-patriotic Left. Make no mistake: the Western world is in the midst of several concurrent crises. But, thanks to the democratic mandates issued by the people in 2024, there is hope.

The critical issue underpinning this turn to the Right is immigration, an issue hitherto thrust into people’s public and private lives while simultaneously kept strictly outside of the realm of acceptable discussion and debate. Mass movement from the Islamic world into Europe has forced people with sanitized liberal views, inherited from media and education, to confront the problems of cultural incompatibility. In the States, Biden’s disastrous border policy has similarly become impossible to ignore. The fact that a new debate is shedding light onto the fault-lines of the American Right – H1-B visas for Indian nationals to work in the USA – is, at the risk of sounding trite, something to celebrate. The Overton Window has now widened to the extent that remigration is an unavoidable talking point for governments, no longer relegated to anonymous corners of the Internet.

While it is easy for any faction to be divided, as the Left has been for the last decade, we should pause and be grateful that this conversation is happening at the heart of the American government and in the biggest, freest public forum there is: Musk’s X. Thanks to the continuing vibe shift, we are now well-positioned to openly make the sensible case for scrupulous immigration policy and provide a robust critique of the pipe-dream of automatic cultural integration of migrants from the developing world. We can stand up for those who have been left behind in their own countries; we can lead the charge against managed decline and the “culture of mediocrity”, in the words of Vivek Ramaswamy, that entices States and businesses to outsource labor in the first place.

In 2025, we have the momentum and mandate to civilly and openly challenge the platitudes of civic nationalism which have motivated States to escalate immigration and enforce cultural relativism to deal with the fallout. Debate is not meant to drag on infinitely, but to test hypotheses and to increase the knowledge of the community. The telos of such a discursive process should be unity – as much of it as possible – on matters of existential importance. I hope that 2025 is the year that we resist contrarian factionalism and instead unite the Right around a combination of hard data and pragmatism. I am confident that governments like that of the UK, for instance, will soon no longer be able to keep data on crime and demographics hidden from view, thanks to the brave advocacy of newly-elected champions like Reform MP Rupert Lowe. But for this to happen, conservative voters and representatives cannot lose momentum.

Conservatives: you are emboldened. Now that anyone with anti-woke instincts can be confident that they side with the majority, we must continue to resist the loud minority which still inhabits mainstream bureaucratic, journalistic, and academic institutions.

There is also hope, amidst the chaos, for the future of Israel and for peace in the Middle East. Following Netanyahu’s failures leading up to Hamas’ genocidal attack on October 7th, he has followed up on his pledge to seek to destroy Hamas and to tackle the existential threat of the Iranian regime. As we go into the new year, Hezbollah and the Houthis – Iran’s major proxies – are in tatters. Thanks to Israel’s show of strength, there is cause for cautious optimism: the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear regime and the rekindling of the Abraham Accords may be on the horizon. While there is still serious work to be done towards dismantling the ideological stranglehold of Hamas on Gaza (and on the Western Left!) Israel stands firm. And while we cannot rule out the risk that Bashar Al-Assad’s fallen regime will precipitate the return of jihadist rule in Syria, I have hope that this year might be better than the last in the Middle East.

https://www.restorationbulletin.com/p/a-new-year-message