"There's more than one way to lose a war."

Mark Steyn writes,

...The Islamists are militarily weak but culturally secure. A year on, the West is just the opposite. There's more than one way to lose a war.

Mark links to a piece by William Kilpatrick:

...Cultural shame rather than cultural pride rules the day. And, not surprisingly, people who are ashamed of their culture can't be counted on to defend it.

Mark:

That's true. The Dallas School Board has smoothly progressed from chiseling the names of Confederate generals off its schools to "studying" whether also to remove the names of Jefferson, Madison and Franklin. Without whom there would be no such thing as America. Indeed, without whom there would, in a certain sense, be no you. The erasure of your total civilizational inheritance turns everyone into "Dreamers" - blank slates who find themselves in America through mere quirk of fate, and for whom the great Republic is no more than a geographical location. Or if you prefer, Un-Anchored Babies: You can be born here, but, if the entirety of your culture has been wiped clean, what's the diff? Once Jefferson and Madison and all the rest are gone, a kid whose great-great-great-whatever got off the Mayflower is no different from the child of Mexican drug smugglers: we are all children of Year Zero.

...William Kilpatrick is correct: A culture that will not defend its past is unlikely to defend its future. Indeed, it may be so obsessed with contempt for its past that it can no longer even discern threats to its future. Or, come to that, threats to its present.

Because any useful conversation on the subject would necessarily involve "refugee" policy, and broader questions of immigration and assimilation.

And that's controversial because you'll get accused of being a racist.

The left wants to keep dissent in the shadows; anonymity plays by their rules. One of the reasons that Donald Trump won the election is that, whether by instinct or calculation, he said "I'm going to go on stage and stand between Jeb and Marco and say the things that most people only say furtively and off the record." There's a lesson in that.

...Even with warts, we're still the civilization that built the modern world. And that doesn't change even if you quintuple the warts.

...An atheist, for example, may sincerely loathe all religions, but should have sufficient of a survival instinct to recognize that his atheism is more genially tolerated by Christianity than it ever will be by Islam. The truth is that atheism is a very minor sub-sect of the skepticism and curiosity that defines Judeo-Christian societies and their attendant triumphs in science and the arts, and is notable by its wholesale absence from the Muslim world.

But "the cultural side of the struggle" is what will determine it, not unmanned drones in the North-West Frontier Province. As long as the home front is dominated by unmanned drones droning on about the evils of the western inheritance, we're going to lose. The real battleground was never Raqqa or Kabul; it has always been New York and Paris, London and Rome.

Read more here.