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Youth For Western Civilization Get Ready for (Culture) War

Posted August 20, 2009 by Patrick Young, Esq.

This year I have devoted a lot of space to the development of a far-right political force which seems to have been mobilized by the election of our first non-white president. It adopts many traditional conservative themes like fear of immigrants, but places them within an apocalyptic framework and relies on a much more confrontational and miltant approach to political advocacy. One of the groups I have paid particular attention to is Youth for Western Civilization. With colleges back in session next week, I wanted to look at the thinking behind this group.
I know that familiarizing yourself with the ideas espoused by groups like Youth for Western Civilization can be tedious, but as with the birthers and the death panelists, these factions are picking up supporters on the far right.
Kevin DeAnna, who describes himself as the founder of Youth for Western Civilization, has written an e-essay in which he takes a long look backwards at the founding of his controversial organization less than a year ago. The group, which calls itself a right-wing youth movement, has particularly targetted the foreign-born and members of minorities as a threat to American “civilization”.
DeAnna, though, does not just dislike immigrants, he is jealous of their children:
Mass immigration from the Third World is not just permitted but hailed as a moral imperative and encouraged by leaders of both political parties. The children of those immigrants receive preferences in education and job placement over Americans whose roots go back to the Founders.
Because in a good America, we would privilege people based on the arrival dates of their ancestors, no doubt.
A lot of the essay is just weird. For example, DeAnna says that:
Universities are filled with “ethnic studies” and “women’s studies” majors who are skilled in organizing protests against Western Civilization, but can’t read the books that define it.
Does this mean that he thinks that women and blacks can’t read?
Then there is this:
News articles habitually reference public schools removing the names of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, to be replaced by some community organizer or another who was successful at stealing taxpayer money.
I must have missed those “habitual references”. Unless he is talking about the renaming of a Hempstead school for Barak Obama, which I think he is. In which case, the school was not renamed for “some community organizer”, it was renamed for the President of the United States.
The fact that we have been under Republican presidents for 20 of the last twenty-eight years has not delayed for one minute the leftist tide sweeping away American culture (and the renaming of schools):
During the Age of Reagan and conservative hegemony, the New Left decisively won the culture wars, by largely abolishing, often through state fiat, the previously existing culture….[T]he traditional Protestant and upright culture that once characterized American society as a whole, as well as the United States’ identity as a Western nation-state, won’t last much longer if present trends continue.
Apparently before the 1960s, we were all Protestants and upright, or uptight as the children of these Protestants came to view their parents. DeAnna has no problem ignoring the African Americans who created our dominant musical cultures of the blues and jazz, or the Catholics like Eugene O’Neill, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Flannery O’Connor, not to mention Jewish writers like Saul Bellow and Phillip Roth, whose literature helped define 20th Century America.. And then there are Aaron Copeland and Lenny Bernstein, our two best known classical composers.
Where do the Youth For Western Civilization see hope in America? From nutty Ron Paul:
Perhaps the reason behind this disconnect is that the Paul movement is the beginning of the post-conservative era for the American Right. If conservatism is about defending established institutions, Paul is not conservative. The liberty movement fundamentally challenges the legitimacy of the state, and implicitly challenges the cultural regime that supports it. A group that can cheer wildly when Abraham Lincoln is denounced as the worst president in American history is certainly a radical departure. The Paul movement’s historical revisionism, anti-state line, overt hostility towards the corporate (as opposed to capitalist) and government establishments, and indifference towards questions of respectability and permissible associations suggest that a decidedly anti-system Right is emerging.
This is how strange the tribute to Ron Paul gets:
The Ron Paul movement must be credited for opening up space for conservatives on ideas such as… secession
So, Ron Paul is to be applauded for suggesting that the United States be broken up?
What is the ultimate goal? It is moving beyond conservativism and pro-American nationalism towards a revolutionary right:
“A post-conservative and post-national right can maybe be a voice for a “revolution” that isn’t just rhetoric.”
The recruitment of new revolutionaries from among the class of 2013 will be the first task of the Western Youth.