"Britons seem to have given up on assimilating their Muslim population, with many British elites patting themselves on the back for their tolerance and multiculturalism"
About this Quote
A neat little provocation dressed up as sober observation: Chavez frames British multiculturalism not as a policy choice but as a self-congratulatory moral performance. The verb “given up” does heavy lifting. It presumes assimilation was both the default goal and a reasonable one, then casts the present as failure, not evolution. “Seem to have” adds a veneer of cautious empiricism while still landing the indictment.
The subtext is a familiar center-right critique of postwar European liberalism: elites, insulated from consequences, outsource social friction to ordinary neighborhoods and then mistake their own comfort for virtue. “Patting themselves on the back” is the tell. It’s less about Muslims than about the class politics of recognition - who gets to define success, and whose lived experience counts as evidence. The quote also narrows “Muslim population” into a single, coherent bloc, which makes “assimilating” sound like a manageable civic project rather than a complex reality shaped by economics, discrimination, foreign policy, and generational change.
Context matters. In Britain, arguments over “integration” surged around the Rushdie affair, the 2001 northern England riots, and especially the 7/7 bombings, when anxieties about parallel communities and radicalization became a national obsession. Chavez, writing from an American conservative vantage point, imports that debate into a broader warning about Western liberalism’s alleged softness: tolerance becomes not a principle with trade-offs, but a vanity that erodes social cohesion.
What makes the line effective is its moral judo. It doesn’t attack multiculturalism head-on; it attacks the people who feel good about it. That shift turns a policy dispute into a character judgment, and character judgments travel fast.
The subtext is a familiar center-right critique of postwar European liberalism: elites, insulated from consequences, outsource social friction to ordinary neighborhoods and then mistake their own comfort for virtue. “Patting themselves on the back” is the tell. It’s less about Muslims than about the class politics of recognition - who gets to define success, and whose lived experience counts as evidence. The quote also narrows “Muslim population” into a single, coherent bloc, which makes “assimilating” sound like a manageable civic project rather than a complex reality shaped by economics, discrimination, foreign policy, and generational change.
Context matters. In Britain, arguments over “integration” surged around the Rushdie affair, the 2001 northern England riots, and especially the 7/7 bombings, when anxieties about parallel communities and radicalization became a national obsession. Chavez, writing from an American conservative vantage point, imports that debate into a broader warning about Western liberalism’s alleged softness: tolerance becomes not a principle with trade-offs, but a vanity that erodes social cohesion.
What makes the line effective is its moral judo. It doesn’t attack multiculturalism head-on; it attacks the people who feel good about it. That shift turns a policy dispute into a character judgment, and character judgments travel fast.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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