Powell predicted this distortion, saying early in his remarks, “people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles.” He knew that his clear-eyed and blunt assessment of the threat of multiculturalism was likely to provoke a furious counterattack from the establishment, even though his purpose was to persuade those in power of the urgency of ending the nation’s continued acceleration toward disaster. Powell’s preemptive defense was stated in his first and last sentences: “The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. … To see and not speak would be the great betrayal.”

Between the bookends of these principles, the substance of Powell’s speech was to say that mass immigration, legal as much as illegal, was transforming his society in a manner “to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.” Members of the indigenous population could no longer recognize their country and were being forced out by foreigners whose customs, and sometimes whose hostility, made areas of a beloved land unlivable.

In addition, the socialist government of the day was bringing in race relations legislation that would give foreigners protections that amounted to preferences over the native population. Nor would it any longer be possible to demand levels of conduct and competence once standard in the indigenous culture and places of work.

All this will be recognizable to many Americans today not as the plight of a foreign country thousands of miles away but as a danger that has beset the United States. The U.S. was built by immigration but is nevertheless founded on principles that germinated and flourished not everywhere in the world but specifically in the West. America is not simply a nation of ideas, but of ideas with specific cultural origins, even if lip service suggests they are universally applicable.

Whereas past waves of immigrants largely assimilated to that shared existing American culture, while changing it somewhat as generation succeeded generation, more recent immigrants have often moved in not to become Americans or to adapt to the shared culture, but to scoop up the economic benefits of being in this country while refusing to adopt its ways and being encouraged in this resistance by the America-hating Left.

Alarm over inundation by alien and sometimes hostile foreigners reached a peak during the four years of President Joe Biden, whose open borders policy amounted to a program of undemocratic national dissolution. But just because border security has been restored does not mean the next Democratic administration will not wreck it again. Nor does it end or alleviate damage being done by cynical immigrants who repudiate the ways of the culture in which they now live, reject its claims to respect, and defraud it of billions of dollars of transfer payments or take to the streets to support terrorism.

It is a cardinal error, based on a shallow preference for ideology over reality, to believe that all types of people can be assimilated or that unassimilated people can live together without violent degrees of dissension from each other. But that is the foundational fallacy of multiculturalism, and it is one to which the establishment and its leaders cling tenaciously, and for which they fight dirty.

Prophets of doom, such as Powell, are easily mocked when they are not more condignly punished. Just this week, Amazon delisted The Camp of the Saints, a grim, Malthusian, dystopian novel published in 1973 by the French author Jean Raspail and republished last year by Vauban Books. It depicts Western society’s implosion after a third-world armada steams to the southern shore of France. The West is incapable of defending its culture because of what political philosopher Nathan Pinkoski — full disclosure, he’s my son-in-law — refers to in his introduction as a “nihilism of guilt.” Westerners are “too spiritually weak to appreciate their own distinction and to defend themselves [and] welcome their own destruction under the guise of creating a perfect world cleansed of their past sins.”

Such stuff is difficult reading, which is why Amazon suppressed the book, although it backtracked 24 hours later under viral online pressure. It deemed its content “offensive” — “evil,” “disgraceful,” and “racialist,” anyone? — from which readers needed to be protected, and for suggesting that those who argue that Western civilization is under threat must be silenced.

It is in the nature of long-term threats that they develop slowly, even if final collapse comes suddenly. It is equally in the nature of democratic politics that attention to long-term problems is shirked until sometime never.

SHOULD ALITO STAY OR GO?

Or as Powell said 58 years ago and counting, “such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: At each stage in the onset, there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.”

But the future, as is sometimes said with undue optimism, is upon us.