A. Dirk Moses is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney and senior editor of the Journal of Genocide Research.

The Australian National University's decision to break off negotiations with the Ramsay Centre about introducing an undergraduate program in Western civilization has provoked an avalanche of criticism in the News Corp press.

Not a day has passed since the decision without The Australian carrying articles decrying political correctness in Australian universities - which, according to Liberal backbencher Craig Kelly, are full of academics who "have a hatred of Western civilisation."

Reaching for a familiar culture war trope, Kelly concluded that the "march through the institutions is real," because "a whole lot of leftist academics" dominate higher education to the detriment of Western civilization.

Others have accused universities of "double standards" for taking money from China and Muslim countries for area studies centres, while declining a centre devoted to Western civilization. They do not ask about the terms of such donations, nor do they understand that universities jealously guard their autonomy, upon which their international reputations depend. British and American universities benefit from many externally funded centres; but they control the curriculum and staffing.

The same applies here. The malign suggestions about Chinese and Muslim influence in Australian universities are, frankly, baseless.

It is little wonder that the ANU backed off once it became apparent that the Ramsay Centre sought input into hiring decisions. No university worthy of the name tolerates such interference. In any event, the study of European, North American and Australian societies, cultures, languages and histories dominates most university arts faculties in this nation - which is to say, Western civilization is already central to the curriculum.

How to account for the hysterical discussion? Why would an otherwise level-headed commentator like Greg Sheridan commence his column in The Australian with the extraordinary statement that the ANU's decision "is a pivotal moment in modern Australian history"? Do members of the right-wing commentariat think that Western countries are succumbing to a poisonous cocktail of multiculturalism, Muslim immigration, political correctness and cultural Marxism that dilutes the white population and brainwashes young people at school and university? It seems that, much like Steve Bannon, they do. We are on the precipice of disaster, they seem to believe.

The sense of crisis and doom is unmistakable. But it is not new. A closer examination of the critics reveals a generation of Australian men who were politically socialized in the 1960s and 1970s when the clash between communism and the Roman Catholic Church split the labour movement. The new Democratic Labor Party formed a home for socially conservative Roman Catholics who became active against "the left" at Australian universities. I well remember the apocalyptic sensibility of National Civic Council operatives during the 1980s, locked in an imaginary cosmic battle against the forces of communist evil, although you could count the far-left adherents at the University of Queensland on one hand. For most of us, the threat to democratic institutions was the Bjelke-Petersen government, not a communism that had long been a spent force. In the end, most Queenslanders agreed.

Despite their current sense of gloomy defeat, these Cold Warriors were victorious. The Soviet Union collapsed, students largely abandoned socialism and capitalism triumphed - and how: turbo-charged by deregulation, it drove the globalization that has produced Australia's prosperity to this day. Never before has the country been so wealthy; never has privatization been so hegemonic. Conservatives hold power at the federal level and in many states.

Yet the beleaguered sensibility and the sinking feeling of defeat from their misspent youths endure. The current situation gives reasons. Conservatism in Australia is indeed in crisis. The reputation of its two constitutive institutions - the churches and the banks - have been greatly tarnished by royal commissions, just as another royal commission has failed to discredit the trade union movement. Climate science and the population's growing environmental awareness have also pulled the rug from under yet another pillar of conservatism: extractive industries, especially coal mining, on which the country's wealth depends.

What is more, the post-Cold War dream of globalized prosperity has turned into a nightmare for many people in both Western and non-Western countries. Corporations have relocated manufacturing to the Global South, leading to the deindustrialization of the Global North and production of angry voters susceptible to the scapegoating slogans of right-wing demagogues who blame migrants and refugees for their woes. Although employment opportunities in parts of the Global South have improved as a consequence, the low wages, poor working conditions and lax environmental regulation wreak their own forms of havoc. There is a price to driving down the costs of production. These "s***hole" countries, as Donald Trump calls them, produce the migrants that people like him want to keep out.

Rather than see the global context for the current discontent, political editor at The Australian, Chris Kenny, thinks political correctness is to blame. The obsession with this notion and supposed threat to free speech at Australian universities is noteworthy. The Institute for Public Affairs conducts rather dubious surveys on the subject that echo the dark warnings of Kevin Donnelly at the Australian Catholic University - namely, that feminists and other members of the "cultural left" have seized control of education and shut down debate. The ghastly outcome, he writes, is that students have positive feelings about Indigenous culture, they think migrants should retain some attachment to their cultural traditions and languages, and that girls outperform boys: this "proves how effective the feminist movement has been in taking control of the curriculum."

If these are the indices of political correctness, then the right-wing commentariat has lost touch with the Australian population, the majority of which voted for marriage equality, after all. No wonder they feel defeated. But it is not because cultural Marxists have infiltrated education and the ABC. It is because these institutions faithfully reflect the public's cultural mood and aspirations.

Students are indeed interested in Western civilization, but they have a much more capacious understanding of it, it seems, than the Ramsay Centre. The scientific revolution was an enabling condition for the Industrial Revolution and spread of European empires - for the "rise of the West," if you like - but it is not universities that are questioning science. It is News Corp and mining interests that pour scorn on climate research.

The Enlightenment and its promise of human equality were also central to the Western self-understanding. This ideal ended the West's centuries-long profiting from the slave trade, and undermined the legitimacy of its colonial rule, which persisted into the 1970s when Portugal and Spain finally relinquished their empires. These Roman Catholic, anti-communist, Iberian dictatorships were not unpopular with the mentor of the DLP crowd, the long-time columnist at The Australian, B.A Santamaria. To the horror of conservatives like Joe de Bruyn, the Roman Catholic union leader who sits on the board of the Ramsay Centre, the Enlightenment ideal of equality manifested itself in the marriage equality decision. So who is really opposing Western civilization, properly understood?

If anything undermines Western civilization at Australian universities it is the declining enrolments in the Bachelor of Arts. This is a global trend, but local factors are significant causes. The government's threat of $100,000 degrees frightened students and parents, understandably wary about accumulating debts in economically uncertain times, while Australian business - another bulwark of conservatism - prefers to hire accounting and economic graduates, unlike in the UK and the United States. I have lost count of the number of university Open Day conversations with parents who press me about the career prospects of their 17-year old children. Unconvinced by my pitch about the value of the humanities, they drag off the youth of today from the History/Ancient History and Classics booth over to the Accounting one. Don't blame political correctness for these decisions. Blame the precariousness induced by the globalized economy championed by News Corp and Education Minister Simon Birmingham.

The nostalgia evident in the push for universities to teach Western civilization as the Ramsay Centre conceives it, reveals a yearning for a world of authority that now greying older men associate with the certainties of their youthful church experience. Maybe the program would find a home at an Australian Catholic university, the academic home of Kevin Donnelly, who just had Tony Abbot and Alan Jones launch his new book on political correctness? The links between Ramsay Centre board members like Tony Abbot and Campion College are on the public record, and the Australian Catholic University vice chancellor Greg Craven seems to have signalled his bid to host the Centre in denouncing the ANU's decision as "gutless."

It would be a fitting partnership. The last thing these conservatives want is a scenario like the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, which they regard as a failed experiment after this News Corp and John Howard project to promote the U.S. alliance was colonized by leftist academics who teach cultural studies. In fact, the U.S. Studies Centre does all kinds of serious academic work, including conventional international relations, but that's not really its intended political purpose. The right-wing culture warriors want advocacy, whether for the U.S. alliance or for their myopic view of Western civilization - namely, a racially hierarchical vision of global order in which the British selflessly bequeathed parliamentary democracy and the rule of law to the teeming non-white masses.

Not surprisingly, most academics would, I think, reject this version, not because of a hyped-up political correctness, but because it is historically inaccurate and morally untenable. Such rejection only fuels conservative resentment and paranoia.

In the end, the current "debate" about Western civilization in Australian universities is yet another chapter in the culture war that reactionaries have been waging against the hopeful legacies of the West that they disavow.

A. Dirk Moses is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney. Among other degrees, he received a Master of Arts from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, in 1994.

[Note: This article has been edited to remove a reference to Anders Breivik.]