The ongoing and not-so-gradual loss of American Civilization is the result of two related phenomena: the invasion of our country from the southern border, and our elites' culture of self-loathing that oozed out of the noxious slime of the 60's. 

Western Europe is rapidly losing its own civilization for identical reasons (with invaders more poisonous than America's, and its own reproductive decadence, thrown in to expedite the process).

The first phenomenon -- the invasions -- wouldn't be happening in either place had they not been preceded by the second -- our elites' descent into cultural self-hatred.

All self-respecting civilizations defend themselves vigorously from hostile invaders.  

Examples from the West's own past are legion:  

Europe, circa AD 732 (Battle of Tours -- the Franks, in the heart of Europe, halt the onrush of imperialistic Arab Islam); the Spanish Reconquista, circa 800-1492 (the Spanish, aided by other Western Europeans, take back the entirety of Iberia after its 8^th century conquest and occupation by Arab Islam); the Crusades (a strengthened Europe emerges from the dark ages to strike back against a four hundred year siege of Europe from east and west -- and theft of  the European Levant -- by imperialist Arab and Turkish Islam); Vienna, 1683 (heroic and successful defense of Vienna by Austrians, Poles and Germans, against invading Turks).

The list could go on.

Other civilizations that thrive today were no less tenacious in self-defense through their history: Hindu India fought valiantly and successfully against Islamic invaders to retain its cultural identity; China -- whose elites today have absolutely no problem with cultural self-respect -- successfully resisted the forces of cultural dissolution during a hundred year occupation by the Mongols; and Japan -- still secure today in its own self-regard -- kept its culture and civilizational identity for a thousand years and shows no sign today of giving it up.  

Only the West -- and, really, only the West's elites -- has become infected with the fatal virus of civilizational self-loathing.

At some point during the 60's -- that wrongly celebrated but actually destructive time -- shallow and over privileged members of my own post-war generation got the idea that our civilization's errors (slavery, the industrial scale brutality of WWI, WWII, the excesses of industrial pollution, our own 19th century colonialist arrogance towards others) meant that we are not merely imperfect (a useful insight), but that we are perfectly bad (the reduction of a useful insight to self-destructive absurdity).

And so America's educational system, gradually echoed by its popular culture, began teaching that falsehood to our children, along with the risible lie that all other cultures, especially stagnant and unproductive ones, are profoundly admirable.

The electoral consequences of those lessons are now hitting us in the face: the clueless under 30's (by 2012, probably the clueless under 35's), unsurprisingly, are voting for the Party whose candidates sound most like their teachers and the movies.

I saw this coming by the early 1980's.

Living in Berkeley helped, where the sickness was more advanced.

The Left, having lost the post 1968 electoral wars that flowed from its 60's excesses ('68, '72, '80, '84, & '88), merely went underground (see Bill Ayers' post Weather Underground career in "education"), burrowing into the key institutions of society.  They were in effective control of the public schools of Berkeley by the 70's.

By the 80's they were surfacing everywhere, in Academia, the public schools, the media and the popular culture. But then there were still other voices.   

I suggested then that we'd better get into the cultural fight at its key choke points, and start body-punching, or the 60's Left would do to those institutions what they'd done to Berkeley.

But nooooo ... all the writers at the little conservative magazines and think tanks said, "We've won, we've won ... see, Reagan's in the White House."

Big mistake.

Politics always follows culture, and we started giving up our culture's principal consciousness-forming institutions in 1975, when the post war 60's crowd was getting its first Ph.d.'s.

And for the last 10-15 years those institutions have been the personal property of the Western-civilization-hating Left. 

Contrary voices, for the most part, have been snuffed out.  Here and in Europe.

Lenin said "Give me the schools for five years, and I will give you a revolution that will endure forever." Or something like that.

If five years will do it, what will be the consequences of having given up the educational system (and the popular culture) for twenty-five years?

Our task is not merely to stop the ongoing physical invasions of America and Europe.  Those unopposed invasions, by groups most of whom who seek fundamental, culturally destructive revolution in both places, are the symptoms, not the causes, of our decay.

We must teach the young, and many others who've forgotten, the remedial truth that they are the luckiest generation in human history -- because they are the inheritors and beneficiaries of 2500 years of accumulated human material and moral improvement, about 95% of which has been the gift to them and to the world of the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian civilization of the West.

Once this indisputable truth is again widely appreciated in the West, the other critical insight can emerge: that the West has at least as much right as any other culture to preserve itself from the collapse that mass invasion by will cause.