What makes a person forego his or her regular professional or personal routine in order to stalk federal law enforcement? What makes that person agree to put himself in close proximity to those law enforcement officers, in the freezing cold, even after multiple incidents have resulted in the death of similar activists?
It’s a question worthy of serious consideration, given that more than 34,000 Minnesotans have joined various agitator groups to learn to be U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement “observers.”
I think I know what James Burnham, one of the most important (if today largely unknown) American thinkers of the 20th century, would say about anti-ICE activism. Burnham would say it’s a clear example of liberals’ attempts to accelerate the suicide of their own civilization.
The Leftist Turned Champion of Conservativism
By the time Burnham published his book Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism in 1964, he had already lived an extraordinary life. The son of a poor English immigrant who by his thirties had become a railroad vice president, Burnham grew up in privilege and attended Princeton and Oxford in the 1920s (he had J.R.R. Tolkien as a professor). Burnham got a job teaching philosophy at New York University and in the 1930s embraced Marxism, having rejected his mother’s Catholicism.
Yet despite being a trusted collaborator of the exiled communist Leon Trotsky — writing for a variety of prominent left-wing publications — Burnham was something of an intellectual independent, reading Aquinas and Dante alongside Marx.
Disgusted by Stalin’s Soviet Union, Burnham began moving away from the left. His 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution, proved to be incredibly prescient, warning that the West was increasingly beholden to an unaccountable oligarchy of experts — we now call them woke technocrats. During World War II, Burnham worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor to the CIA, and after the war helped found a “Congress for Cultural Freedom,” which promoted a liberal but anti-communist alternative to communist propaganda.
By the time he published Suicide of the West, the stalwart anti-communist had become one of conservatism’s leading intellectuals, writing for William F. Buckley Jr.’s magazine National Review. Buckley labeled Burnham “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” He died in 1987, and as recently as 2014, all of his books were “listed as ‘Out of Print,’ or being of ‘Limited Availability.’” Yet their relevance has only grown.
How Leftists Accelerate Civilizational Collapse
In Suicide of the West, Burnham censures those of the West “who hate their own civilization, readily excuse or even praise blows struck against it, and themselves lend a willing hand, frequently enough, to pulling it down.” The reasons leftists do this originate in their beliefs about human nature and society. They believe man’s nature is not fixed but changing, “with an unlimited or at any rate indefinitely large potential for positive (good, favorable, progressive) development.”
Burnham contrasts this with the traditional conservative position, “expressed in the theological doctrines of Original Sin,” which posits that human nature has “a permanent, unchanging essence, and that man is partly corrupt as well as limited in his potential.”
If you reject original sin and think humans are capable of perfection given the right external circumstances, that changes everything, from education to government. For leftists, the goal of education is not to produce a good citizen schooled in traditions and habits of virtue, but to “overcome ignorance.” The more ignorance is resolved and “faulty social institutions or arrangements” are identified and defeated through reform governed by “expert” bureaucrats, the more society improves. Moreover, if society, rather than individuals, is the problem, this creates a permissive attitude toward errant members of the community, “particularly if they belong to groups designated as marginalized.”
When it comes to the “marginalized,” Burnham observes that the liberal feels an indelible, often overwhelming sense of guilt. “The guilt of the liberal causes him to feel obligated to try to do something about any and every social problem, to cure every social evil.” Yet this feeling of guilt is nonrational, leading the liberal to simply do something about the social problem, “even when there is no objective reason to believe that what he does can solve the problem — when, in fact, it may well aggravate the problem instead of solving it.”
Societal Suicide in Activist America
The above (very brief) summary is illuminative when it comes to citizen activists engaged in relentless, provocative confrontation with federal immigration enforcement. Those agitating against immigration enforcement have been indoctrinated not in patriotic love for America, but cynical rage toward it (epitomized in the celebrated if ridiculous comment by musician Billie Eilish about no one being “illegal on stolen land”). This, even after Minnesotans learned that Somali migrants had fleeced taxpayers of an estimated $9 billion through welfare fraud schemes.
Because left-wing activists believe human nature is fungible and all social problems can be solved through political programs and social engineering, it means individual people — such as criminals and illegal aliens — cannot be held responsible. Indeed, those criminals and illegal immigrants are predominantly from “marginalized” groups and thus require protection rather than legal prosecution.
Meanwhile, the leftists feel an underlying guilt that their race, gender, or religion somehow makes them partly responsible for the suffering of the “marginalized,” which further propels them to seek civic atonement. That they are actually obstructing law enforcement from removing criminals from their communities is irrelevant; ironically, a misplaced assurance in the righteousness of their cause drives them into the streets with signs, whistles, and smartphones.
“Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide,” wrote Burnham more than half a century ago. “Except for mercenaries, saints, and neurotics, no one is willing to sacrifice and die for a progressive education, medicare, humanity in the abstract, the United Nations, and a ten percent rise in social security payments.”
Left-wing agitators think they are saints (and future martyrs), but the prophetic Burnham could perceive what they truly were: men and women who, schooled in an ideology of self-hatred of their own culture and civilization, are deluded into hastening its demise. They are to be pitied, and prayed for.
Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He is a regular contributor at many publications and the author of three books, including the upcoming “Wisdom From the Cross: How Jesus’ Seven Last Words Teach Us How to Live (and Die)” (Sophia Institute Press, 2026).
