Why is the West treated differently?

I'm currently reading the first issue of Observer & Review, a new Australian magazine aimed at the intellectual right. I've begun with an essay by Edwin Dyga titled "Prospects for Paleoconservatism". One part of this essay that particularly interested me concerns the inconsistent treatment within modern culture of Western and non-Western identities (p.49). Whereas it is thought wrong to claim that "America's settler class remains the bedrock of its present core culture" this would be "uncontroversial if expressed by an anthropologist describing the cultural primacy of any other foundational people outside the Eurosphere". 

How do we explain the discrepancy? Dyga thinks it is a result of critical theory: 

This inconsistency can only be explained as a function of critical theory, which is subversive when applied to one group but not another.

Critical theory is the attempt to reveal and challenge power structures. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy quotes one of its adherents, Horkheimer, as follows:

"The theory never aims simply at an increase of knowledge as such,” but at “emancipation from slavery” in the broadest sense of eliminating all forms of domination.

Now, this is interesting as I have discussed this issue with others in the Melbourne Traditionalists and the consensus has generally been that the inconsistency reflects a belief in the longstanding trope of the "noble savage". In other words, pre-civilised societies are thought to be egalitarian and non-oppressive, and therefore they are treated by the left as legitimate in a way that civilised societies are not.

Max Horkheimer

However, I think it is possible that these two explanations overlap. This becomes clearer if it is remembered that something like critical theory long predates the Frankfurt School of the mid-twentieth century.

You have to go back to when a Christian worldview dominated the West. In this worldview, man's nature was fallen and therefore human society was inevitably imperfect. We were expelled from an Edenic existence by our own sinful nature. This worldview did not please those who were bent on achieving social utopias. They preferred to believe that the imperfection of human nature was due to the existence of power structures which "enslaved" men. If we could be liberated from these forms of domination, the theory went, then man's nature could be regenerated and we could return to an Edenic existence of innocence, equality and plenty.

The first power structure to be targeted was the ancien régime, the old order governing France before the revolution of 1789. Dennis Diderot, a French revolutionary, is supposed to have declared that "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." 

Dennis Diderot

The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a radical liberal of the early 1800s, wrote poetry about a New Man who would be created once all power structures had been overthrown, leaving only the man who was "king over himself":

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains/ Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man/ Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,/ Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king/ Over himself

Here is Shelley talking about power:

The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys:
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches

Mary Shelley, his wife and the author of Frankenstein, had this to say about her husband's beliefs:

The prominent feature of Shelley's theory of the destiny of the human species was that evil is not inherent in the system of the creation, but an accident that might be expelled...

He followed certain classical authorities in figuring Saturn as the good principle, Jupiter the usurping evil one, and Prometheus as the regenerator, who, unable to bring mankind back to primitive innocence, used knowledge as a weapon to defeat evil...

Percy Shelley's fierce rejection of power structures extended even to God. He thought Milton's Satan a heroic character for rejecting God's rule:

Shelley found in Milton’s Satan a noble characterization of the champion of the oppressed, or mankind, fighting against God, the omnipotent monarch, like his own Prometheus against Jupiter.

And from an article about Percy Shelley's "Utopian desire":

[Shelley] desires to change the world to Eden before the fall of man. His idealism is based on the elimination of all sorts of tyranny and oppression

If we move on to Marx and Engels, we get the following conundrum. After the ancien régime was overthrown, there was not a return to a primitive Eden. Instead, a new power structure emerged in which the bourgeoisie became the dominant social class. Marx came up with the argument that if the working class were to take power, there would be no other class below them to exploit. In other words, there would no longer be a class based power structure. Engels, for his part, popularised a theory of primitive communism which he described this way:

What an admirable constitution this kind organization! No soldiers, gendarmes or policemen, no nobility, no kings or governors, no prefects or judges, no prisons (…) All are equal and free – including women. 

He goes on to claim that it was a "degradation" that ushered in the new civilisation. One critic of this view characterises it as follows: 

Primitive communism...endorses an Edenic image of humanity, one in which modernity has corrupted our natural goodness.

Engels was already at this time complaining about "patriarchy" and advocating for "sexual liberation" and in this he was a visionary as the left has mostly left behind their interest in social class and instead identified race and sex as the basis for power structures in society. What is thought to be standing between humanity and the achievement of equality and freedom is the need to deconstruct whiteness and patriarchy.

Friedrich Engels

Little wonder then that any form of specifically white identity is thought to represent an illegitimate "supremacy" that is based on oppressing the non-white other. 

What I would reiterate is that there is a long history in radical political thought in which primitivism (the noble savage) is identified positively with an Edenic world of freedom and equality, which was degraded by civilisation through the emergence of power structures, which tainted human nature and corrupted and enslaved Man. 

In this sense, critical theory and the noble savage are at least partly intertwined. 

You can see as well how seriously those who follow these ideas will be in their opposition to any form of traditional Western identity and why they might think it "progressive" for these identities to be abolished. 

I would hope as well that Christians might understand how far outside of their own tradition this aspect of modern culture is. The hope that by abolishing whiteness man's nature will be regenerated and there will be ushered in a wholly secular, this worldly version of Eden is not in line with a Christian anthropology.