I don’t remember the first time I heard the phrase “ethnocentric,” but I remember the context. I was in some history class and we were studying a primitive South American tribe. They lived essentially the exact same way their ancestors had thousands of years ago. Our teacher told us their civilization was equal to ours, and we should never think that any civilization was superior to any other. Doing so would be “ethnocentric,” which apparently was a belief that our society was superior to others.

The truth is, when we were first admonished about this, I remember thinking something wasn’t quite right about it, but as a kid in school, who was I to argue with the teacher? It was only years later that I would realize that teachers weren’t all-knowing and that that little piece of wisdom was anything but.

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Of course, almost no one uses the phrase ethnocentric anymore. No, it’s been replaced by the ubiquitous and multifunctional moniker “racist.” Different word, but it means basically the same thing: Everything white or western is bad and anything else, whether color or culture, is good.

Whatever the name, the lesson was: Every society is equal.

But is that true? No. While common sense suggests it’s wrong, how does one really know? Who decides? Well, if we left it to academia and Western elites to decide, we’d all be wearing dashikis, praying towards Mecca five times a day, eating out of a communal plate with right hands, and then wiping our posteriors with our left. Not that the elites themselves would be doing any of that, but they would coerce the unwashed masses into following such diverse practices.

As for deciding, look around. Are there millions of people risking their lives every year to migrate illegally to Africa, South America, or South Asia? No. Where do the millions of people seeking to flee conflicts in Syria, Libya, or anywhere else in the Muslim world go? Do they go to any one of the 50-plus Muslim majority nations? Other than passing through Turkey on their way to Greece, the answer is largely no.

Where do those seeking to escape economic malaise throughout much of the southern hemisphere go? Mexico City or Timbuktu? Unlikely. Where do CCP or Hamas or banana republic leaders send their kids to be educated and live? Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Burkina Faso, or Vietnam? No, they send their kids to Paris, London, and New York.

But the history! For example, India has a history going back thousands of years. We’re told that British rule decimated the Indian GDP, taking it from 23% of the world’s GDP in the mid-18th century to less than 4% today. That’s obviously a story of Western civilization destroying a superior civilization, right? Not so much.

While the Brits did bring substantial and sometimes negative changes to the Indian subcontinent, the reality is that India’s share of GDP shrank largely because Western advances expanded world GDP at an extraordinary rate never before seen. To put that in perspective, between 1750 (about the time Britain took control over India) and 1990, the GDP of the entire 3rd world grew by about 15 times.

During that same period, Britain and the developed world grew GDP by 123 times. India didn’t lose its economic powerhouse status because Britain destroyed its economy; it lost its status because the West became an economic juggernaut, powered by the advances of the Industrial Revolution, which built on those of the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, all of which originated in the West.

So, why is it that for half a century, elites have been telling us that Westerners are not allowed to take pride in the advances of their civilizations or celebrate the forces that brought about unprecedented freedom and prosperity?

Because they are spoiled, entitled brats who are ashamed of the prosperity their forebearers created. P.J. O’Rourke perhaps put it best. “At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child—miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.”

Like the children of so many successful entrepreneurs, those boomer elites (the fount of today’s liberalism) found it hard to live up to the achievements of their progenitors. In the century before 1970, Western civilization literally revolutionized the world. Automobiles. Telephony. Radio. Television. Movies. The structure of DNA. Flight. Heart transplants. Microchips. Nuclear power. The electric light bulb. And much more. Westerners even put a man on the moon and brought him back safely!

Since then? Not so much a revolution as changing the curtains. Sure, the PC, the Internet, the iPhone, Netflix, Amazon, and Facebook have affected our lives, but nothing revolutionary on the scale of many of those inventions from the previous century. No time travel. No teleportation. No cure for cancer. Not even roads without potholes!

Thus, America and the West have experienced a half-century of nepo leftists wanting to make their own mark by rebelling against the very ideas that provided the prosperity that sustained them in the first place. And the easiest way of doing that? Celebrating anything and everything that is not part of Western success.

A religion where women are second-class citizens, where rape victims are stoned to death for the crime of being raped, and where freedom of speech and religion are anathema? Absolutely! Nations where Communist dictators kill and imprison political opponents while delivering economic calamity to their citizens? More please. Countries where blood is the coin of the realm, and whoever is the least morally constrained is the tyrant in charge? Nobody’s perfect…but at least they don’t have billionaire capitalists killing the earth with their private jets.

And it’s not just inter-civilizational; it’s intra-civilizational, as well. Here in the United States, we’re told that things like punctuality, hard work, and proper English—things that have been keys to success for generations—are white supremacy, while in Denmark, advertisements are encouraging whites to have kids with non-whites. For half a century, the lesson has been: Western, European, and white are bad while anything and everything else is good.

That was wrong when they called it ethnocentrism, and it’s wrong today when they call it racism. After decades of listening to elites tell us that every civilization is greater than ours, Westerners are finally pushing back as they see their countries and their cultures shredded by hordes of third-world invaders from decidedly inferior cultures. Whether it’s the push for Sharia law, increased crime, or outsized welfare spending, from the United States to Hungary to Italy, patriots are recognizing that their way of life and their cultures are sufficiently elevated that they are worth fighting for.

Finally, citizens of the civilized world are beginning to say “We’re no longer going to let you destroy that which has taken so much blood and toil to build and has produced so much freedom and prosperity. Decades of a cancerous, elite imposed reverse colonization are enough!” We hear a collective “We like the countries our ancestors built, and we’ve decided we’d like to keep them, thank you.”

The only question is, is it too little too late? Only time will tell.

Follow Vince on X at @ImperfectUSA