The Anglosphere has been a force for good, helping to elevate the condition of humankind. United by much more than a common language, Britain, the USA, Australia, Canada, as well as India, Singapore and others, share many of the same ideas and institutions essential for the preservation of individual freedom, private property rights and representative government.
We tend to take familiar things for granted and so familiar are we today with those values that we may assume they are a natural part of the human condition. In fact, they are the legacy of a particular tradition rooted in England and America, and they help to explain why it is that English-speaking states have been so successful.
In the past, threats to the Anglosphere were external, posed by the Nazis or Soviet Communism. Today, the more pernicious danger to the Anglosphere – and the global order it underpins – comes from the disease of cultural relativism within.
Cultural relativism is a radical Leftist ideology which maintains that every culture is of equal worth. It is, for example, the idea implicit in multiculturalism and it helps explain how first political correctness and, more recently, “woke” ideas have managed to migrate into wider society.
Suffice to say the idea that every culture is of equal worth is a nonsense. Yet if you believe that to be true, it is impossible to appreciate what makes the Anglosphere so exceptional. Indeed, the only thing the Left sees as exceptional about the Anglosphere is its wickedness, source of the world’s original sins – slavery, imperialism and free market capitalism.
Nowhere is the Left’s woke agenda more destructive than in the United States. There, activists are battling to re-racialise nearly every aspect of life, with the consequence that young Americans are taught that their nation’s economic and technological achievements are evidence of exploitation. Instead of recognising the founding of the United States as a moral milestone, the so-called 1619 Project teaches them that their nation was established as a plot by a slave-owing patriarchy. The effect of this is to demoralise and disorientate the US at a time when the world desperately needs American leadership.
The idea that English-speaking states might sit naturally as part of an international alliance is itself beginning to fray. For decades, the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia have formed the Five Eyes intelligence sharing alliance. Recently, however, the US moved to exclude New Zealand over concerns that the Kiwis, under Jacinda Ardern, had grown too close to Communist China. That would have been inconceivable in the past.
Canada, too, has been badly infected by an American wave of woke ideology embodied in the form of its disastrous prime minister, Justin Trudeau. Canada has long been an uneasy compromise between French and English speakers, one reason that multiculturalism was made official state policy fifty years ago. But what does multiculturalism mean if there is now doubt over what Canadian-ness even is? Robbed by the Left of a common narrative and identity worth embracing, what becomes of any country? And what hope is there for assimilating new arrivals in this era of mass migration without respect on both sides for the host culture?
The extreme Left would not stop there. They aim ultimately to delegitimise the very existence of a number of English-speaking states, regarding them as built on “stolen land”, with the effect of erasing history and shattering social solidarity.
If the Left succeeds in making it impossible to define what it means to be British or American in terms of a distinctive set of principles and ideals, what then? That would invite those on the far-Right to define nationhood in terms of “blood and soil” nationalism, something that, in marked contrast with continental Europe, has never been part of the Anglosphere tradition. Now that really would be a disaster.
Douglas Carswell is President and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy
