As Europe’s asylum crisis intensified last month, prominent liberal opinion pages — the London Review of Books , Le Monde , Canada’s Globe and Mail — featured contributions from some of today’s leading thinkers. Slavoj Žižek, Jürgen Habermas, and Peter Singer all offered their analysis of what must be done, and by whom, to relieve the refugee emergency.

These interventions are rich in lessons about how the “responsibility of intellectuals,” to use Chomsky’s formulation, is currently being discharged — or not. Indeed, for all the philosophers’ fame, their contributions impress only by the banality of their prescriptions.

Žižek said that “Europe must reassert its commitment to provide for the dignified treatment of the refugees.” “National sovereignty,” he believes, “will have to be radically redefined and new methods of global co-operation and decision-making devised.” Habermas called on France and Germany “to show Europe has a hard core able to act and to take the initiative.” Singer noted that “affluent countries should be giving much more support to less affluent countries that are supporting large numbers of refugees.”

At no stage does the analysis go beyond what is already uncontroversial for large sections of the Western public. What does distinguish the interventions is the ideological work they do in obscuring the underlying causes and stakes of the refugee crisis. Any genuine attempt to understand the politics of asylum in 2015 has to take into account the role of Western, including European, interventions in the Middle East — and the willing concessions to racist nationalism by mainstream parties throughout Europe.

These considerations are, however, largely absent from the philosophers’ reasoning. Instead, all three thinkers attribute the current crisis of European asylum principally to the supposed racism and backwardness of the public. Only Žižek takes the West’s role in precipitating the flood of refugees seriously — an analysis soon vitiated by his call for “a new kind of international military and economic intervention” that would do the same things that France did in Libya or the US in Iraq, only better. One thinks of the EU’s plan to militarily destroy “smuggler boats.”

In a caricature of intellectual disdain for less developed minds, Singer bemoans “our species’ lamentable xenophobic tendencies” and cites “the surge in popularity of far-right extremist political parties in Europe” as evidence of the irremediable backwardness of its population. He willfully looks past the pro-refugee mobilizations across Europe and the popular alternative they embody: a progressive politics around refugee rights. He even stoops to demeaning asylum seekers, writing of “well-coached migrant[s] seeking a better life in a more affluent country.”

Singer has no patience for open-border advocates, seeing in them unwitting accomplices of the “smugglers.” (That closed borders create the conditions in which “smugglers” thrive is apparently lost on him.) Singer’s solution? The West should pay off less affluent countries to keep out refugees.

Habermas, for his part, believes that European public opinion is shifting in favor of asylum-seekers — but he attributes this not to any deeper solidarity, but to a patient campaign of public education by political elites.

He laments that the “resolute political elite” personified by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande may “fail to face up to the present challenge through discouragement, or through lack of support from their respective media and population — sometimes also because of the petty calculations and spinelessness of political parties in the face of the population’s laziness, selfishness, and lack of a long view.” Where Singer sees the general public as condemned to xenophobia by its DNA, Habermas sees it as unwilling to learn the enlightened lessons of its elite classes.

Žižek weaves these strands of elitism and bigotry together. In a deft nod to a sham egalitarianism, he finds nationalist populism preferable to humanitarian calls for open borders from the “liberal left.” He believes that the West needs to learn how to intervene militarily in a way “that avoids the neocolonial traps of the recent past.”

While “refugees should be assured of their safety . . . it should also be made clear to them that they must accept the destination allocated to them by European authorities, and that they will have to respect the laws and social norms of European states.” “Such rules,” he declares, “privilege the Western European way of life, but that is the price to be paid for European hospitality.”

These sentiments are couched in anti-capitalist rhetoric — Žižek recommends “communism” as the fundamental solution to the crisis. But his radical gloss fails to conceal the reactionary nonsense he is promoting.

It should be obvious to Žižek that the West can’t intervene militarily in a way that avoids the “neocolonial traps of the recent past.” Refugees, for their part, aren’t wayfarers on someone else’s soil, present only under sufferance and, as such, the objects of “hospitality.” Regardless of the customs they bring with them, they should enjoy the same rights as the members of the diverse communities that make up Europe — a pluralism entirely ignored in Žižek’s astonishing reference to a unique “Western European way of life.”

That these distinguished, supposedly progressive academics voice humanitarian trivialities is hardly surprising. What is more interesting is how Singer, Habermas, and Žižek also endorse an elitist vision of politics — the enlightened political class versus a racist and ignorant population — and, while appearing to oppose the xenophobic and anti-migrant positions of the European right, effectively underwrite them.

Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, and Nigel Farage — to say nothing of Nicolas Sarkozy or David Cameron — will find plenty of ideological support in the trio’s declarations about the populace’s xenophobia, the impossibility of open borders, or the voting public’s need to be put under the tutelage of “resolute elites.” It is these chauvinistic and antidemocratic recommendations, and not the liberal banalities in which they are cocooned, that constitute the articles’ most insidious political ingredient.