I’ll try to answer to HVT’s question about what I believe the benefit of admitting Syrian refugees to be tomorrow. Today I want to give Larry Koler’s question my best shot. Larry and several other Ricochet members asked me why I feel confident that the United States won’t end up like Belgium — in other words, with a large, poorly assimilated community of easily-radicalized, potentially violent Muslims on its hands, who bring with them the most degraded pathologies of the communities from which they come.

If the European experience of Muslim immigration has been so unhappy, Larry asked me, why should we expect the American experience to be any different?

First, I too consider this an open question, at this point, particularly given that so many of you are telling me it is. But I didn’t ten years ago, when I wrote a book titled Menace in Europe: Why the Continent’s Crisis is America’s, Too. One of the subjects I wrote about — not the only one — was Europe’s experience of Islamic immigration. That part of the book received too much emphasis, though. The argument I was making was that Europe’s inability to make Europeans out of Muslim immigrants was a symptom of a wider problem; and it was that wider problem I was writing about.

Crown Forum’s sales force wanted the title Menace in Europe: Why the Continent’s Crisis is America’s, Too. I didn’t like it, and didn’t feel it described the book, but I didn’t have the confidence to insist on keeping my title. Mine was Blackmailed by History: The Sleeping Ghosts of Europe Wake. The sales force thought the books with the word “History” wouldn’t sell, and that it had to have “America” in the title, or people wouldn’t think it relevant to their lives. Perhaps they were right. The book didn’t sell all that well anyway, but perhaps it would have sold even more poorly had I insisted.

Doing the research for that book, and writing it, led me to conclude that America was so different from Europe, historically and culturally, that it was unlikely to replicate Europe’s pattern. But here’s a point I’d stress: I wrote that book ten years ago. It’s possible, as some of you argue, that the United States has been so fundamentally transformed since then that my arguments no longer apply. But if so, I submit, we have much bigger problems than the admission of 10,000 Syrian refugees.

In the first chapter, I described a series of recent terrorist attacks in Europe, all committed by Muslim radicals, and noted — this was in 2005, long before anyone had heard of ISIS — “‘The same thing will happen soon in the United States, and the bombers will come from Europe.’ They will come from Europe because it is comparatively easy to enter the United States if you carry a European passport, and because Europe is — as it has always been — the breeding ground of the world’s most dangerous ideologues.” Fortunately, it didn’t happen as soon as I thought it would, but obviously, I stand by that prediction.

The title Blackmailed by History was meant to evoke two themes:

The first theme is that Europeans are behaving now as Europeans have always behaved. Many seemingly novel developments in European politics and culture are in fact nothing new at all — they have ancient roots in Europe’s past. And what is that past? From the sack of Rome to the Yalta Conference, that past has been one of nearly uninterrupted war and savagery. Ethnic wars, class wars, revolutionary wars, religious wars, wars of ideology, and genocide are not aberrations in Europe’s history, they are its history. An interregnum from these ancient conflicts endured from 1945 to the end of the Cold War, when Europe’s destiny was in the hands of the two superpowers. With the collapse of the Soviet Empire, however, history has reasserted itself: Those disturbing sounds from Europe are its old, familiar ghosts. They are rattling their chains.

The second theme is that this history has culminated in a peculiar, powerful European mood. Europeans, especially young Europeans, sense in their lives a cultural, spiritual, and ideological void, one that is evident in the art, the language, the literature of contemporary Europe; in the way they talk about their existence in cafés, in discotheques, and on the Internet; in their music, in their heroes, in their family lives, and above all in the way they face threats to their civilization — and ours.

Two historic events in particular had reverberated through Europe, I argued. The first was the death of Christianity. Europe has in the past several centuries seen a really complete loss of belief in any form of religious faith, personal immortality, or salvation. The past two centuries may in a sense be viewed as a series of struggles to find a replacement for this loss: In France, the idea of France itself; in Germany, the mystical Aryan ideal.

The second was the utter, the complete catastrophe of the two World Wars, which put an end to every form of idealism in Europe. It’s impossible to understate the effect of the postwar aftershocks: All secular substitutes for faith, particularly those based in the notion of the supremacy of European culture, have lost their hold, and understandably so: What Frenchman can stand before the graveyards of Ypres or Verdun and without choking on the words profess his allegiance to the mission civilatrice? This loss of cultural confidence, I argued, made Europe particularly incapable of firmly asserting European values, given that it had none — beyond a sense that life should, at least, be well-ordered and pleasurable. Social and moral structures in Europe had, I argued, become bureaucratic structures: Like Turing machines, they served ends that weren’t specified and might not even exist.

“The fall of ideologies now casts a deadly shadow over every ideal,” wrote the French philosopher Chantal Delsol. Utopian ideologies were in their capacity to inspire like cathedrals, and Europe has watched the collapse of one cathedral after another, leaving modern Europeans humbled and paralyzed by self-doubt.

Now we get to the part where I have to ask myself: To what extent is this now true of America? A poll conducted in 2002 found that while 61 percent of Americans had hope for the future, only 29 percent of the French shared it, and only 15 percent of the Germans. At the time I wrote that book, suicide was the second-leading cause of death among the young and middle-aged; in the United States it was the eighth. I did not see it as an accident that Americans were both more hopeful than Europeans and more apt to believe that their country stood for something greater and more noble than themselves.

But do they still feel this way? In America, hope for the future is now, according to polls, the lowest on record — especially among older Americans. And as I’ve written here before, the American suicide rate is rising precipitously, even more so if you consider drug overdose as a form of suicide.

At its fundament, the radicalisation of European Muslims is a distilled form of anti-Occidentalism. It derives from this group’s profound alienation from Europe. A large part of this alienation is socioeconomic: The social and economic composition of the Muslim community in Europe is different from that of the United States. In the United States, Muslims are geographically dispersed; in Europe, they are concentrated and ghettoized. In the US, Muslims are largely middle-class professionals; in Europe, most remain stubbornly stuck in the working class or unemployed underclass. This is not the cause of the terrorist impulse. (The terrorists themselves tend to be strikingly prosperous by comparison.) Terrorism is caused by an ideological virus. But this virus propagates best under certain breeding conditions: Societies with large cohorts of frustrated, hopeless, unemployed young men find their immune systems compromised when diseases of the soul are at large. In this respect, there is now a parallel to the United States; and perhaps it’s a warning sign that there are a shocking number of young, male Americans — radicals without access to an Islamist ideology, but radicals all the same — who feel most alive when committing acts of sensational violence.

Muslim immigrants to Europe were never expected to integrate. They were never expected, even, to stay in Europe: They were brought to Europe to fill postwar labor shortages in Europe’s factories. They were never truly welcome; and they knew this all too acutely. The experience of immigration wasn’t redemptive, as it has historically been in the United States; it was bitter.

To quote again from the book:

No one but a fool would argue that the United States is free from religious and ethnic tension, that immigration is an uncontroversial issue in America, or that there are no Islamic radicals in the United States. It is a difference of degree — but differences of degree can amount to a difference in kind.

Another key point: Education and social class upon arrival appear to account, in Europe, for the radically different markers of assimilative success in immigrant communities — far more so than religious belief. The evidence? In England, for example, Muslims immigrants whose parents were educated, English-speaking professionals fared just as well as Hindus.

Why, I asked — and again, this was in 2005 — were Bangladeshi and Pakistani immigrants to the United States less alienated, less economically marginalized, and less anguished than those in Britain, and why did they show less inclination toward antisocial behavior, including Islamist violence? I concluded — after considering several hypotheses — that the key lay in Britain’s class structure, a stubborn relic of the feudal era, which made upward mobility a remote dream. By contrast, the United States has always been a country of settlers: The idea that an immigrant may arrive penniless on Ellis Island and become, through thrift and industry, a millionaire has until recently been a central and defining trope of American national mythology.

But most important distinction is something hardest to quantify: Immigrants to America have always wanted to become American. Choosing America, as the Brazilian poet Nelson Ascher wrote to me, “usually implied accepting Rilke’s dictum: You must change your life. … Muslims who opt for the U.S. do it because they are tired of being Muslims and want to keep, in the long run, at best, only some culinary habits. Not so in Europe.”

The book is about many other things, including my fear that other historic sources of European radicalism had only been temporarily stilled. I fear I’m right about that. Anyway, you can read the whole thing to see all of my arguments spelled out, with footnotes, but in essence: I assumed the United States of 2005 would readily assimilate Muslim immigrants as completely as it had every other kind of immigrant before.

But perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps the loss of two wars, the financial crisis, and the Obama administration have so fundamentally destroyed America’s boisterous self-confidence, its Borg-like ability to take any human being and make him an American, that admitting  10,000 Syrian refugees would be the last straw.

If so, however, the Syrian refugees are not the problem.

I’ll close with what I thought perceptive comments from Josh Treviño’s Facebook page:

… the purported cultural and political perils of mass immigration are actually societal weaknesses of the destination countries. (All things being equal, added population is added economic activity, which is added power: a good thing.) If you’re a nation with a robust birthrate and a Jacksonian sense of self, and you don’t mind demanding its swift adoption by new arrivals, then those arrivals can be properly additive. If on the other hand you are barely managing a replacement birthrate and you aren’t terribly sure it’s fair to make the folks just off the boat declare allegiance to the flag, whichever flag it is, then they will respond as rational people do, and de facto colonize rather than emigrate. In other words, the base problem isn’t the migrants — it’s us. …

… this passage from Hinderaker needs addressing, as it is such a commonplace on the anti-immigration right. It is wrong, but it is not irrational:

“[T]here is no possible way for the advanced Western countries to absorb the billions of people who would like to live in them, especially since most of those who want to enjoy the material fruits of Western democracy have little or no understanding of the values and principles that make Western societies successful.”

This is partly correct: the average migrant from source country X probably has little appreciation for, and still less experience of, liberal democracy and its underlying principles. The boats aren’t loaded with Jeffersonian ideologues — they’re loaded with, well, people who have experienced and understand the things they have. The reason they’re on those boats, or on that trek, is because those things have been the opposite of the fruits of a law-ordered liberty. So far so good. This is a problem.

What gets missed, however, is that it has always been a problem: the great waves of migration to the United States in particular were not a consequence of political liberality taking root in faraway lands and inspiring its adherents to cross oceans. They were consequences of a life marked by pogroms, autocracy, and rape by Cossacks; or by grinding near-serfdom in Calabria; or by brutal landlordism willing to starve your family to death in County Cork; or by genocidal violence in the fields outside Phnom Penh. We forget that the prime driver of millions of to our shores in particular across centuries was not high-minded idealism, but a sum of human misery and oppression so staggering as to defy comprehension. Sure, there are the Peter Schramms and the Lee Ung-Pyongs who fled for freedom in an atmosphere of considered appreciation for the merits of liberty — if you haven’t read Schramm’s epic “Born American, but in the wrong place” essay, look it up immediately — but there are vastly more who just wanted a life of decency, safety, and dignity, not because they were raised to experience any of those things, but because they were human.

A nation grounded in a proposition about the basic nature of humanity was prepared to receive and educate them to that end, to the point that we ended up a country sustained by the descendants of tyranny, all the more determined thereby to defend liberty. If we aren’t that place any longer — and perhaps Europe, a land of blood and soil, never was — then let’s be honest about it. Yesterday, at Sunday School, I had the privilege of teaching among the students three young women, all sitting together as friends: one from Russia, one from Eritrea, and one from Lebanon. One could hardly imagine national origins more steeped in autocracy, repression, and violence, yet here they are, fully American and consciously appreciative of it — explicitly because of those origins.

That’s what America does. If that’s no longer what we wish to do — if we now fear them more than we believe in ourselves — then let’s at least conduct the conversation with that honesty, rather than cloaking our un-confidence in the pretense of superiority.

I agree. This small number of refugees — who have certainly been better vetted than most immigrants — are not apt to hurt us. If we fear these refugees more than we believe in ourselves, however — and it seems that we do — then keeping them out will in no way fix the problem. It will only serve to mask a problem that is  vastly more serious. And that problem is that we no longer believe in ourselves.

This past week has prompted a deep crisis in confidence in me, certainly. Until now, I would have placed myself solidly in the camp of American conservatives. I cannot imagine pulling the lever for Hillary Clinton; but I’m suddenly forced to imagine sitting this one out. It is tragic, but I can’t imagine voting for politicians so defeatist about America, so crushed by this past decade, that they think five-year-old Syrian orphans pose a serious threat to the greatest and most benevolent superpower history has known — a country that invented the modern world, put a man on the moon, is exploring Mars, has the world’s freest press, that invented the Internet, conquered epidemic disease, destroyed the Nazis, defeated Imperial Japan, sent the Soviet Empire to the ash heap of history, and is still the source of 90 percent of the world’s real creativity — and still represents a dream of redemption for so many countless people on this suffering planet. That defeatism, that fear, is not the America I knew growing up, and the willingness to luxuriate in that despair and defeatism — and use it for electoral advantage — sits poorly with me, a proud American. This is not the America that made us the greatest country the world has ever known, but a county like any other, and while I will always love it and be grateful to it; clearly something precious has been lost, and it is a terrible thing to see.

If excommunication from the conservative movement is the price I’ll pay for saying this, so be it. But here I stand. I can do no other.