Moral Universalism and the Minnesota Lesson

In the West, it is a widespread belief that everybody else in the world shares our perception of right and wrong, 

but nothing could be further from the truth.

American Thinker 

As highlighted by non-Western immigration, the West’s crisis is primarily about the loss of confidence in its own moral and civilizational foundations. The “fault line,” in Samuel Huntington’s terminology, is the fateful encounter between a civilization that doubts its very right to exist and rival moral systems unaccustomed to doubt altogether.

Modern Western liberalism rests on a deceptively simple premise: that human beings, regardless of origin or creed, will respond to freedom, generosity, and equality with reciprocal goodwill. From this assumption flows an expansive immigration regime, a permissive multicultural ethos, and a political culture that treats skepticism as prejudice and prudence as moral failure. Yet the growing tension between liberal democratic norms and Islamist political ideology exposes the fragility of this moral universalism. The collision between a self-doubting West and a political theology that does not share its premises about equality, citizenship or truth actually poses an existential challenge.

The West once understood itself as the bearer of a particular civilizational inheritance that nevertheless made universal moral claims. Its universalism was not abstract but rooted—emerging from specific historical experiences, religious traditions, and institutional forms. Today, however, Western elites increasingly mistake universalism for interchangeability. They deny that civilizations differ meaningfully in their moral assumptions or political consequences. In doing so, they abandon the cultural confidence that once allowed the West to extend hospitality without fear of dissolution.

Political Islam—Islamism—is usually distinguished from Islam as a private religion. The former stands for more than heightened religiosity or cultural conservatism. It is a comprehensive political worldview that subordinates civil law to religious authority, rejects the moral equality of believers and non-believers in governance, and understands political legitimacy as derived from divine command rather than popular consent. Liberal democracies err gravely when they assume that such a worldview can be neutralized by welfare benefits, civic education or symbolic inclusion alone. Ideologies are not dissolved by kindness; they are challenged by rival moral clarity.

This error is not accidental. Liberalism, especially in its post-Christian and post-national form, has lost confidence in its own moral foundations. It nonchalantly treats all value systems as functionally equivalent, all conflicts as misunderstandings, and all resistance as the product of exclusion or trauma. Moral relativism, once a tool of anthropological humility, has become an instrument of political paralysis. A society that refuses to judge cannot defend itself. The result is not tolerance but blindness—an inability to recognize when liberal norms are being exploited by actors who do not reciprocate their moral commitments.

Europe offers the clearest warning of this dynamic. Its struggles with parallel societies, communal voting blocs, speech restrictions imposed in the name of tolerance, and the quiet erosion of secular public space are dismissed as cautionary tales exaggerated by reactionaries. Yet Europe is not destiny; it is diagnosis. Its predicament reveals what happens when civilizational self-confidence collapses and is replaced by administrative humanitarianism. The lesson is not inevitability but consequence.

The Minnesota experience provides a microcosm of this broader Western failure. Over several decades, state and federal authorities pursued an aggressively humanitarian resettlement strategy, motivated by compassion and moral idealism. Yet compassion untethered from realism becomes an instrument of self-deception. Persistent reports of welfare fraud, clan-based political organization, and resistance to assimilation have been treated, not as governance problems but as taboo subjects. Institutions trained to interpret all disparities through the lens of victimhood are structurally incapable of asking whether certain cultural or ideological frameworks actively undermine liberal expectations of transparency, equality, and civic trust. 

At the heart of the matter lies a fundamental philosophical mismatch. Liberal democracy presumes that citizens are equal before the law, that truth is not contingent on group loyalty, and that political authority is limited, accountable, and ultimately secular. Islamist political thought, by contrast, divides the world into believers and non-believers, privileges communal allegiance over individual conscience, and sanctions strategic deception in service of religious or collective goals. These principles are not fringe distortions; they are embedded in classical jurisprudence and selectively revived by modern Islamist movements. To acknowledge this is not bigotry; it is intellectual honesty.

Western elites persist, nonetheless, in treating all moral systems as morally interchangeable. This is why appeals to shared “values” ring hollow. Values are not abstractions floating free of history; they are embodied in institutions, habits, and moral expectations shaped over centuries. When Western officials assume that newcomers will naturally internalize liberal norms simply by exposure, they confuse procedural inclusion with moral convergence. In reality, moral systems compete, and the one that doubts itself most fervently is rarely the one that prevails.

The political ascent of figures such as Ilhan Omar illustrates this tension vividly—not as evidence of conspiracy, but as a symbol of elite moral confusion. Omar is frequently presented as proof that American institutions are inclusive and representative. Yet her public rhetoric and policy positions consistently express hostility towards American power, Western moral authority, and the legitimacy of national cohesion itself. Criticism of these positions is routinely deflected by appeals to identity, as though religious or ethnic background confers immunity from civic scrutiny. This dynamic exemplifies a deeper dysfunction: the substitution of symbolic representation for substantive loyalty to constitutional principles.

It is neither conspiratorial nor xenophobic to recognize that political Islam operates globally as a rival civilizational project. Like all such projects, it adapts tactically to local conditions. In liberal societies, this means working within legal frameworks while rejecting their underlying moral legitimacy. The expectation that such movements will abandon their long-term ambitions out of gratitude misunderstands the nature of ideological commitment. Liberal goodwill is not universally interpreted as virtue; in some moral frameworks, it is perceived as weakness, decadence or proof of civilizational decline.

This brings us to the unresolved question beneath all immigration debates: is morality universal, or is it culturally mediated? Liberalism insists on universality while simultaneously denying the cultural foundations that once sustained its claims. It demands tolerance for all value systems except those that assert their own superiority—yet cannot explain why its own moral commitments deserve allegiance if they are merely contingent preferences. If morality were truly self-evident and universal, there would be no need for civic education, cultural transmission or moral boundaries. The very existence of liberal institutions testifies to the opposite.

The West’s Judeo-Christian inheritance—disavowed but never fully replaced—once supplied a moral grammar emphasizing truthfulness, individual dignity, and the limitation of power. As this inheritance erodes, liberalism loses its immune system. It becomes incapable of distinguishing between difference and danger, pluralism and fragmentation. In such a state, it welcomes rivals not as guests, but as heirs—without ever asking whether they accept the moral terms of the household. 

None of this implies that Muslims as individuals are incapable of loyalty or citizenship. Some are exemplary citizens who embrace liberal norms sincerely. The issue is whether Western societies are willing to articulate non-negotiable civic expectations and enforce them without apology. A democracy that cannot say “no” is not tolerant; it is negligent. Integration is not a one-way moral obligation imposed on the host society. It is a reciprocal process requiring adaptation, accountability, and allegiance to the constitutional order.

The Minnesota case, then, is not an anomaly but a warning. It reveals what happens when humanitarian impulse is severed from political realism, when ideology is mistaken for culture, and when elites confuse moral aspiration with moral achievement. The lesson is not to abandon compassion, but to discipline it with prudence. Liberal democracy can survive diversity. However, it cannot survive the systematic denial of its own civilizational limits.

Ultimately, the question is not whether the West should be generous, but whether it should be honest. A society unwilling to defend its principles will eventually lose them—not to superior arguments, but to its own refusal to recognize that not all worldviews seek coexistence on equal terms.

The tragedy of the West is not that it is being challenged. The natural order of the world is that every civilization—like a “living organism,” to quote Oswald Spengler—must fight for its survival sooner or later. No, the tragedy is that the West no longer believes itself worth defending. As if determined to die.