What happens when a society loses the traditions, institutions and shared obligations that once gave people a sense of belonging and purpose? In this adapted excerpt from Anti-Civilization: The Collapse of Society and the Case for the Common Good — now available from Sutherland House Publishing — Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard examines what this loss has meant for Generation Z, the first generation to come of age fully within this new landscape.

Generation Z — those born from 1997 to 2012 — are reaping the fruits sown by the baby boomers, the “sixties generation,” who, in their libertarian fervour, broke the chain of transmission without realizing that the cultural and moral heritage they had received was precisely the condition of their freedom.

As generations succeed one another, the traces of this precious heritage fade and young people are orphaned of the civilizational transmission they desperately need. The idea that culture, established customs and civilization are burdens for human beings ultimately proves to be the greatest of “ luxury beliefs .” Because we took these treasures for granted and neglected to maintain them, we sorely miss them today.

The breakdown of value systems and social relationships has left behind a field of ruins. Several studies conducted among young Americans at the forefront of Western trends, point to a worrying impoverishment of social ties. They have fewer close friends and see them less often than before. Love is also in decline : young people have less sex than their elders did at the same age, and young people in relationships are sleeping together less often. It seems that “social distancing,” a term coined during the pandemic, has become an established reality. Unsurprisingly, a desocialized civilization is also one that has fewer children and where people become parents later, now after 30, in most of the Western world.

Has this “ open society ” made them happier? On the contrary , Generation Z is swept away by a nihilistic temptation, more inclined to believe that life has no meaning, to doubt themselves and to have a pessimistic view of the future. It would seem that individualism has created a need for identity, belonging, and reference points that have not been fulfilled by the void that has been offered to their generation.

The impoverishment of general culture, which, at present, dismisses the great works of the Western canon, goes hand in hand with a closing of the mind and horizons, making us incapable of communing with what came before us. As French essayist and politician François-Xavier Bellamy writes ,“Our ignorance renders statues mute, images indecipherable, texts incomprehensible; the signs we have inherited lose their meaning.”

This “ precariousness of all spheres of existence” logically translates into a “ demand for protection, measure and limits ” to serve as a guide in an unknown and strange world to which they have been deliberately denied the keys. Left to fend for themselves in a labyrinth without a map to guide them, young people have every right to hold this new world accountable for abandoning them.

Increasingly, observers are realizing that the younger generations reject the progressive project as much, if not more than their elders, and are among the most enthusiastic supporters of the populist shift to the right. In the 2024 U.S. election, no less than 56 per cent of men and 40 per cent of women under the age of 30 cast a Republican ballot, whereas in 2008, 66 per cent of young people had voted for Barack Obama.

The first voters to rally behind Donald Trump in 2015 were Americans who were “ civically disengaged ” and experiencing the most severe social isolation. In France, the National Rally can count on voters who are significantly younger than those of Emmanuel Macron, to the point of challenging the far-left La France Insoumise as the “ party of youth .” In Canada, the arrival of Pierre Poilievre at the head of the Conservative Party has given rise to the same phenomenon: for the first time in recent history, young Canadians are voting more to the right than their elders.

Contrary to all expectations, it seems that increasing numbers of young people, disenchanted with the broken promises of deconstruction, agree with American political theorist and author Patrick Deneen that liberalism has failed , and wish as American political scientist Robert Putnam does for an “ upswing ” in Western civilization.

But how does one rebuild civilization on the ruins of deconstruction? Such a revival, on an individual and collective scale, requires, above all, a break with the concept of the atomized individual in perpetual struggle with the institutions that surround him. The present times call for a truly “post-liberal” reflection, which will dare to ask once again the question that was taboo for the great liberal thinkers of the last century: what should I do with my freedom? How can I lead a good life as a free person?

In line with Western tradition, from Aristotle to Christianity, let us think of a humanity and individuality that strengthens society, rather than setting itself against it. As American political philosopher Michael J. Sandel argues , “We are most fully human when we contribute to the common good and thus earn the esteem of our fellow citizens for the contributions we make. According to this tradition, the fundamental human need is to be needed by those with whom we share a common life.”

Therefore, we need to reverse the trend toward individual secession in order to rebuild community and mutual responsibilities, instead of commodifying solidarity through digital intermediaries. This means that there is no natural right to non-integration, contrary to what the theorists of multiculturalism claim. Those who join a nation and benefit from its social model must, in return, agree to embrace its customs.

This also means that the value of elites is measured by their contribution to the common good, not by the amount of prestige or capital they manage to accumulate for themselves. As Rod Dreher explains , “Civilization doesn’t exist to make it possible for individuals to do whatever they want to do. To believe that is an anthropological error. A civilization in which no one felt an obligation to the past, to the future, to each other, or to anything higher than self-gratification is one that is dangerously fragile.”

In order to learn once again how to live together, because that is what this is all about, we can fortunately still count on the first institution where the common good is lived out, which is also the last holistic institution we still know, the family. Against all odds, it remains the indestructible rock on which human beings can rely, never truly conquered by the spirit of the times, constructivism, or individualism. As French journalist Aziliz le Corre writes , “The family is a determinism that, by definition, cannot be broken. It is a matter of nature, even more so than culture. And it remains biological in its essence. Like birth, gender differences, old age and death, it is immutable.”

The family is the ideal place for a culture of normality to be reborn, because it is the school of responsibility and virtue through which we learn that what has real value is what money cannot buy. It is by giving selflessly to our children, parents, siblings, or grandparents that we can truly grasp the meaning of the common good, namely that life has no meaning if it is lived for oneself, in suspicion of what has gone before and what will follow.

According to British philosopher Roger Scruton, conservatism is, above all, the doctrine of love, for what we share, what defines us and what we will leave to those who follow us. It is from this love that we must draw to rebuild civilization, a love widely shared among ordinary people who, sheltered from politics, preserve precious treasures of knowledge, decency and common sense. As long as it exists, civilization will stand firm against the forces that seek to deconstruct it.

And what if Generation Z — that currently nihilistic, pessimistic and aimless cohort — could actually be the unlikely heroes who help rebuild norms and save the West from its current profound crisis?

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Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard is an author and researcher at Cardus. Between 2022 and 2025, he was a speechwriter and strategic planning advisor in the office of the Premier of Québec.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s much disliked visage will soon be passing, by biology or the Constitution, from screens. But it will take a bit for Canadians to ally openly with the United States, whatever the compelling geographic and economic reality .

Yet in their passion to dish on Trump, Canada seems to now align instead with China and the European Union. This shift could hasten Canada’s descent into its own authoritarian future. As a few leftist academics move to Canada to escape Trumpian proto-fascism, let’s look at how Canada’s new friends view free speech.

China’s free-speech efforts are an oxymoron; a permanent one-party police state does not exactly encourage debate. The European Union, for its part, thinks of itself as a bulwark of individual liberty, but it behaves in ways that are “ post-liberal. ” Restrictions on speech deemed to be hateful or, in some cases, simply disrespectful of authorities, has occurred in both Germany and Italy . The EU has ignored popular votes when they favour right-wing populists or seek to limit Brussell’s power.

Today in Europe, free speech is just a mild irritant . More worrisome still are developments in the U.K., the place that brought free speech to this continent. Instead of the Magna Carta, we see a great country becoming ever more authoritarian.

Take this. By some accounts , police in England and Wales made 10,000 arrests in 2024 for “communications offences.” The arrest of comedy writer Graham Linehan at Heathrow airport in 2025 was particularly chilling.

Canada seems to be moving in this same illiberal direction. To be sure, there are the promises of the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms , which guarantee the right of “free expression.” But the Charter also provided a breezeway for censorship by stating that speech is subject to “such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”

This leaves power in the hands of the Prime Minister and Parliament to define “reasonable limits.” The growing Canadian thought police recently enacted the Combating Hate Act . And a bill that would impose strict new speech limits on social media companies is currently working its way through Parliament. As the American free-speech advocate Greg Lukianoff says , Canada’s speech is moving from free to “free … ish.”

This approach is also reflected in the ever more out of control Human Rights Tribunal. Former Chairman David Thomas claims the Tribunal has been almost completely taken over by notions of victimization popular on college campuses, including questioning any aspect of “trans rights,” a particular priority of the cultural left and the professional institutions they have captured. He compared the Tribunal to a “state funded extortion ring” that seeks to force those it attacks to make a deal in order to avoid greater financial and professional harm.

We can see where this is going by recalling the crackdown against the Covid era “ Freedom Convoy ,” with its pattern of arrests and defunding. Canada has long seemed a bastion of tolerance, sexual freedom and democracy, but how does that work when Prime Minister Mark Carney claims that Muslim values and those of his country, a product largely founded on European culture and Christianity, are the same. Perhaps the urbane PM is unaware of the lack of freedoms for women, gays or dissenters in virtually every Muslim country.

Islamism is not the only force pushing authoritarian approaches. Chinese penetration of Canada’s political system also does not seem to bother an elite raised in universities preaching anti-colonial indoctrination . In the last century, American, Canadian, French and British schools worked to promote loyalty to their countries, now they increasingly agitate newcomers against themselves.

Much of the problem, notes Kate Marland, executive director of the Canadian Free Speech Union, lies with Canada’s lack of the U.S. first amendment rights which are very broad. Canada’s Constitution lacks such guarantees which provides a path for government-led censorship.

“In the US,” she notes, “you have a First Amendment, and you don’t have censorship.” In Canada, the priority of preserving “a cohesive society” often takes priority over freedom of speech.

In the U.S., the Constitutional structure has made it difficult to fulfill the Trumpian dream of becoming. A fatter version of Mussolini, Trump faces constitutional constraints including a larger right of center Supreme Court , that ruled against actions of tariffs, birthright citizenship, immigration and federalization of the national guard. All these rulings even a leading leftist academic dubbed “enormously important.”

In addition, Trump’s power is already waning, even among his Congressional minions , particularly as he becomes a lame duck, and may lose one or both houses of Congress. Trump can harrumph all he wants, but the Constitution has proven stronger even his ego.

Of course, Trump seeks to demonize his tormenters but just ends up looking stupid, even by their low standards. More worrisome to basic freedoms may be the rise of the Democrats in America, who, like Liberals in Canada, embrace the idea of becoming more like Europe, including in terms of regulating speech. Then there’s the Democrats’ emerging far-left, now dominated by the Democratic Socialists of America, which embrace a frank Marxist-Leninist worldview, never a good thing for free speech.

Canadians are right to despise Trump, but in rejecting the U.S. model on speech, they are also turning away from the tradition of open debate that has long blessed both of our countries. Josh Dehaas of the Canadian Constitution Foundation notes that the current “anti-American” mood has allowed politicians like Justin Trudeau, and even more so Carney, to push for “more speech regulations” that are more in line with European and potentially even China.

I would be the last to suggest Canadians should embrace everything about the American model, largely based on distrust of government which leaves us more dissatisfied with our democracy than more potty-trained Europeans. But dissent is not always a bad thing, particularly when it checks government power. In this one thing — free speech — America is very much in the right. Sometimes even an ogre has something good to offer.

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Turkey is pursuing an increasingly dangerous bid to reshape the balance of power in the Middle Easter. Under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Ankara has combined support for Islamists, military intervention and economic leverage to expand Turkish influence across the region and beyond, challenging the existing geopolitical order.

Turkey’s dramatic departure from its “zero problems with neighbours” doctrine began around 2011, when the Arab Spring opened a new geopolitical opportunity for Erdogan. Ankara increasingly backed Islamist movements, including Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, then an al-Qaida affiliate led by Ahmed al-Sharaa. Erdogan’s support helped propel al-Sharaa from an al-Qaida commander into Syria’s president, making Turkey one of his most important external backers.

In 2012, while working for CNN in Egypt, I witnessed Erdogan’s arrival in Cairo as he exited the airport, where he was greeted by hundreds of ecstatic Muslim Brotherhood supporters carrying banners and chanting, “Erdogan and the Brotherhood are one hand.” At the time, the question was whether Erdogan was simply courting the Brotherhood, which had just come to power in Egypt, or whether Turkey was embarking on a far more ambitious strategy: using Islamist movements as instruments of Turkish influence and expanding Ankara’s political and strategic reach across the region. The events that followed suggest it was the latter.

After recognizing Libya’s National Transitional Council following Moammar Gadhafi’s ouster in 2011, Erdogan’s government provided it with $300 million in credit and, along with Qatar, backed several Islamist factions in that country’s civil war.

During my reporting in Libya, I met Islamist political figures and fighters who had been funded and trained by Turkish forces, giving me a firsthand view of Ankara’s growing role in the conflict. In 2012, Libya’s Muslim Brotherhood established the Justice and Construction Party, which has been supported by Ankara — illustrating Turkey’s emerging strategy of using Islamist partnerships to expand its regional influence

When Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization in 2013-14, Turkey continued providing political and financial support, hosting Brotherhood-affiliated media and members wanted by Arab governments. This cemented Turkey’s role as a key Brotherhood hub and further strained ties with its Arab neighbours.

A recent Foundation for Defense of Democracies research memo — titled, “Islamist Turkey: A Forward Base for Muslim Brotherhood-Aligned Jihadism” — argues that under Erdogan, Turkey has moved further from its traditional western alignment toward Islamist movements, including the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Since 2011, Hamas has expanded its presence in Turkey, establishing offices and networks that have allowed it to operate from Turkish territory.

Turkey’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood also extends into Syria, where Ankara has backed Brotherhood-linked political and Islamist forces while expanding its strategic footprint. The two countries share a roughly 900-kilometre border, and Turkey’s estimated 49 army bases and more than 100 military sites and observation posts in Syria, backed by over 10,000 troops, give Ankara a powerful platform to project influence into Iraq, Lebanon and the wider region.

Erdogan’s strategy extends beyond Islamist alliances, combining political influence, military power, economic leverage and diplomatic reach. The clearest recent example is the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, a trilateral mutual-defence pact signed by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan on Aug. 7. The agreement establishes a collective-security framework similar to NATO’s Article 5, treating an armed attack on any one member as an attack on all three. Its inaugural committee meeting began in Istanbul on Monday.

I spoke this week with Sinan Ciddi, a senior fellow and Turkey program director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan research institute focused on national security and foreign policy. He believes Erdogan will seek to expand the pact’s membership.

“Turkey’s alliance-building initiatives should not be viewed in isolation. The Mecca Pact is one component of Erdogan’s broader vision of positioning Turkey as a ‘global actor.’ The pact with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan is a significant building block in his effort to co-ordinate the trade, energy and diplomatic interests of Sunni powers. Over time, he will seek to expand its membership,” Ciddi said.

“At the same time, Ankara is building robust bilateral partnerships across Africa while positioning itself to the European Union as a security bulwark against Russia. In the Mediterranean, Turkey is pushing to redefine maritime boundaries to its advantage, in concert with partners such as Libya, raising alarm in Greece, Israel and Cyprus. None of Erdogan’s initiatives is short-term or isolated; they are part of a broader strategy to increase Turkey’s geopolitical visibility and influence.”

Turkey’s relationship with Israel is perhaps best described as a dramatic strategic reversal. The two countries were once close security partners, sharing intelligence and co-operating militarily. Today, relations have reached a historic low, with Ankara and Jerusalem increasingly treating each other as regional rivals. The question is no longer whether their relationship can return to the way it was, but how far this confrontation will go.

Erdogan has increasingly positioned Israel as a strategic adversary. Addressing the Turkish parliament in 2023, he issued an unusually direct warning to Israel, targeting both its leadership and nuclear capabilities: “Hey Israel, you have an atomic bomb, a nuclear bomb. And you are making threats with this. We know this. And your end is near,” he declared , adding, “you’re on your way out.”

Such rhetoric reflects the broader deterioration in Turkish-Israeli relations and Erdogan’s effort to position Turkey as a leading political and strategic counterweight to Israel in the region.

On Aug. 18, Israel sent a direct warning to Turkey by striking the Abu al-Duhur airbase in Idlib, near the Turkish border, as Turkey was reportedly preparing to deploy troops and reactivate the base. The message to Ankara was clear: Israel will not tolerate a Turkish military presence that threatens its strategic interests. The strikes signal a growing contest between Ankara and Jerusalem over who will shape the emerging regional order in Syria.

“Ankara’s rebuttal is that its presence in Syria is lawful because Damascus consents, while Israel’s is not, but Turkey has seldom waited for permission when it entered Syria. It launched three major cross-border operations — Euphrates Shield in 2016, Olive Branch against Afrin in 2018 and Peace Spring across Ras al-Ain and Tell Abyad in 2019 — each justified by Ankara as self-defence against terrorism, each conducted over Damascus’s explicit objection,” said Ciddi.

“It armed and paid Islamist and jihadist militias throughout the war. It still effectively controls swaths of the north and continues paying the salaries of former Syrian National Army factions now folded into the new Syrian military — factions documented as detaining, extorting and abusing civilians.”

Turkey’s expanding military footprint and its growing ties to Islamist and Iran-aligned actors are increasingly bringing Ankara into direct competition with Israel. What was once a largely co-operative relationship has evolved into a broader struggle over influence and security across the Middle East. When Turkey offered troops for a postwar International Stabilization Force in Gaza, Israel rejected the proposal.

During my current reporting from Lebanon, I have seen that Iran-backed Hezbollah militants continue fighting against Israeli forces despite ongoing peace talks, underscoring the importance of UNIFIL as its mandate nears expiration. Erdogan’s bid for a security role in southern Lebanon is therefore likely to face Israeli resistance, as Jerusalem increasingly views a Turkish military presence on its northern border as a strategic threat.

Turkey’s ambitions are bringing Ankara into increasingly direct conflict with Israel. As both sides strengthen their military positions and enforce competing red lines, the risk is no longer merely diplomatic — it’s the possibility of a direct military confrontation between two increasingly assertive regional powers.

National Post

Mohamed Fahmy is an award-winning journalist who has covered the Middle East for numerous outlets, including CNN, Al-Jazeera, the Los Angeles Times and Foreign Policy.

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Things that divide us cannot possibly unite us. That much would seem obvious, but as Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard tells Brian Lilley, society has for decades prioritized hyper-individualism and promoted multiculturalism over communitarianism. And that has been eroding western civilization. Beauregard discusses his new book, “Anti-Civilization: The Collapse of Society and the Case for the Common Good.” He explains how the desocialization of younger generations and the fetishization of immigration, among other things, are leading to a backlash from people who crave a more collective meaning and identity. And surprisingly, it’s generation Z that seems most determined to rescue us from our decline. (Recorded Aug. 19, 2026.)

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Attempts to paint antisemitism as a form of political expression rather than racism is far from a recent phenomenon. The clearest example of where this idea fermented on the world stage was the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa, which was held 25 years ago.

WCAR was billed as a global gathering to combat racism, xenophobia and intolerance. Governments, international organizations and civil society representatives assembled with the stated purpose of building a shared framework against racism in all its forms. There was a sense that history would be made.

I was there to witness it unfold first-hand. I had not travelled to Durban as an advocate or as someone looking to advance Jewish community concerns. In preparation for the conference, I had been commissioned to produce a report for the Government of Canada’s anti-racism secretariat that examined previous reports and recommendations on racism, racial discrimination and related intolerance. In effect, I arrived in Durban expecting conversations about combating racism in all its forms. Instead, what I encountered there was almost the opposite. And therein lies one of the bitter irony of the experience.

At the parallel NGO Forum, where civil society leaders from around the world were meant to give expression to the victims of racism and discrimination, the proceedings were transformed — or more accurately hijacked — into something much uglier. What should have been a universal anti-racism gathering became, in too many instances, an effort to remove Jew-hatred from the world’s anti-racism agenda. The spectacle was marked by manipulation, propaganda and a stunning willingness to excuse hostility toward Jews and dress it up as anti-Zionism or anti-Israel politics.

Jewish participants from across the political spectrum arrived expecting solidarity. Instead, many of us found ourselves asking whether antisemitism still counted as racism. Some participants described being harassed because they were visibly Jewish. Copies of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the notorious antisemitic forgery, were circulated. Posters equated Israel with Nazi Germany. Leaflets and slogans blurred, sometimes deliberately, any distinction between criticism of Israeli government policy and hostility toward Jews as a people. Conduct that would have been immediately condemned had it targeted virtually any other minority was tolerated, rationalized or ignored when directed at Jews.

That was the disturbing innovation of Durban. It helped globalize the effort to recast the hatred of Jews as political opinion. The very language of anti-racism was used to launder antisemitic expression. Jews were not denied the right to be protected in theory; rather, they were told that the hostility directed at them was not really hatred at all, but solidarity with the oppressed, anti-colonial activism or resistance to imperialism.

Rest assured that what happened at Durban wasn’t about Israeli government policy. It placed Israel, alone among the nations of the world, at the centre of the racism agenda. It treated Jewish self-determination as singularly suspect. It transformed Jews from a historically persecuted minority into the symbolic embodiment of oppression. Once that shift occurred, antisemitism could be dismissed as merely a political complaint.

At a spontaneous gathering of Jewish conference delegates, Irwin Cotler, who would go on to become Canada’s justice minister, warned against what he called the “partitioning of prejudice.” The phrase has stayed with me since. Racism cannot be opposed selectively. Human rights lose their moral authority when they are applied conditionally. The moment hatred against a particular people is deemed understandable, fashionable or politically useful, the universalism on which anti-racism depends starts to collapse. Durban revealed that collapse in real time.

To be sure, there was a difference between the official governmental conference and the NGO Forum. The final United Nations declaration did not adopt the most extreme language advanced by activists, and thankfully it did acknowledge that antisemitism is a form of intolerance. But history remembers Durban at least as much for what unfolded in the civil society forum as for what appeared in the official diplomatic text. The NGO Forum exposed a fault line that has widened over the past quarter century: antisemitism is increasingly treated as debatable, contextual or somehow less apparent when conveniently associated with criticism of Israel.

That legacy is now visible everywhere. Jews are often required to prove that what they experience as antisemitism is indeed antisemitism. Expressions that would be condemned instantly if directed at other minorities are parsed endlessly when Jews are the target. The same people who insist that minorities must be trusted to define their own experience of racism suddenly demand footnotes, qualifications and geopolitical context when Jews describe hatred directed toward them.

That is one of the enduring legacies of Durban. It showed how easily anti-racism can be inverted when ideology overtakes principle. A movement that begins by defending the vulnerable can end up deciding which vulnerable people are inconvenient. A discourse built to expose hatred can become a vehicle for excusing it. A gathering convened to fight racism can, in the name of fighting racism, make room for one of its oldest forms.

Twenty-five years later, the deeper lesson arising from Durban is that universality is fragile. Anti-racism cannot survive if it becomes selective. Human rights cannot retain their force if some forms of hatred are condemned while others are rationalized because they fit a preferred political narrative.

That is why the irony of my presence in Durban still troubles me. I arrived having just contributed to Canada’s efforts to take stock of how governments and communities had tried to combat discrimination in all its forms. I left having seen how quickly the global language of anti-racism could be manipulated to exclude antisemitism.

Durban’s anniversary should therefore not be treated as a historical footnote. It should be remembered as a warning. When hatred of Jews is rebranded as politics, when antisemitism is carved out of the anti-racism agenda, the result is not justice, it’s the partitioning of prejudice — and it leaves a badly needed anti-racism project morally compromised.

National Post

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