A Partial Response to Evariste
Over at the wonderful Discarded Lies website, a sort of virtual second home to me, a place whose regulars form the only kind of parliament I'm interested in keeping my good name with, co-proprietor Evariste has posted a very heart-felt piece, asking the sort of fundamental questions that all good people of whatever political stripe should be asking themselves in these dangerous times. I won't quote the whole piece (I encourage you strongly to read it all) but it seems to me that Evariste's main point is here:
This is indeed the main question facing America today. It is a tribute to his insightful style that Evariste has nailed the issue directly, rather than dance around it as most do.
The key to understanding this issue and how it is now playing out before our eyes is to understand the tragic substitution of the central conception of America as a nation and as a polity that was a largely unintended and unanticipated consequence of the Liberal Revolution of 1968, arising from out of the Cold War context.
Okay, so the answer isn't snappy. So sue me. It's clunky and it's complex, but it also happens to be true, to the best of my ability to discern the truth of the matter. I leave it up to you to decide on that point. I compel no one. Yet.
To properly explain my response I would need a book-length affair with academic footnotes and sociological studies, so I won't even try to properly explain it. Instead, I'll just outline what I think is going on here with appeals here and there to facts or phenomena that I move the court to take judicial notice of.
WWI destroyed the self-confidence of the West and introduced into its affairs a deep, and reasonable, fear of the fires of nationalism. The unresolved matters of that horrific war led directly to the next, which further sullied the good name of nationalism. It also had the rather interesting side-effect of leaving the United States as the Last Man Standing.
Now, not just any nation could have fulfilled the role of Last Man Standing, so it's not entirely correct to note it as the whimsical outcome of fortune. Had, say, Belgium emerged from the War relatively unscathed it still would not have been up to the role. But given the US' economic, political and military might, its heritage, its traditions and its international position, the US was the de facto leader of the Western World at the conclusion of the affair.
But it was not the leader of the world. In what was once the Orthodox world, a competitor state, the Soviet Union, made a play for global dominance.
The resulting Cold War is well-known, as is its global reach. The standard operating procedure was a fight for influence among the various peoples of the world, not the least in Europe herself, which required American officials to quickly leave behind the parochial concerns of places like Iowa or Montana for exciting new places like Greece and Viet-nam.
The result was the internationalization of the government of the United States, NSC-68 and the USG's wholesale transformation into an instrument of global responsibility. Not for nothing does the Department of Defense divide, not the U.S., but the entire world into "commands." Or does it not strike you as odd that the U.S. Army should have a command with "responsibility" for Africa or East Asia?
This much, at least, is well-known and unremarkable. I hope to this point it is also relatively uncontroversial.
It was this new out-ward looking, leader-of-the-free-world version USG that stumbled into the 1960's and the Western-world-wide Liberal Revolution. We may talk of Dr. King on this day, or of a struggle for civil rights, but the fact is that this Revolution was universal across the West, a replay of 1848 with better communications and media.
The roots of this sea change in law, politics and morals are well-known and not worth repeating here. What I'm after here is how they fused with the new internationalized USG forged from the fires of the Cold War.
The dominant feature of the Liberal Revolution was to make equality and non-discrimination not a feature of our political life but the organizing principle of political life. Whereas once it was alright for minorities to be minorities and for the majority to be dominant while tolerant, now the state was given all sorts of new powers to go into the institutions of majority dominance and dismantle them.
The USG's internationalized responsibilities began to reflect the internalized values of the Liberal Revolution. That is, as the USG now looked at all of its citizens as exact equals it began to apply that same outlook to its foreign charges as well.
The end result is a world we are all familiar with: one in which there is no issue that the United States is not directly responsible for and for which it must or should have used its powers to ensure the absence of nationalist or racial conflict, i.e. to enforce equality. Thus, even remote racial conflicts, like that of Rwanda, become over time a failure of the United States and not at all the responsibility of Rwandans or, God forbid, the Europeans.
The twin internationalizing pressures of the Cold War and the Liberal Revolution produced, therefore, a transformation in the self-image of America and Americans. Rather than being a specific people with a specific history, we are now an ideal to which anyone can adhere to, a proposition nation that could be filled with anything or assume any responsibility and still be America.
In order for any leader to speak of reversing this and restoring the America-that-was, that leader would have to do two, equally unthinkable things: 1) he would have to renounce American world leadership and put an end to the culture of international dependence it has fostered; and 2) he would have to confront and take issue with all the central assumptions of the Liberal Revolution. And he would have to do this while every institution of any heft-academic, cultural, social and political-have already long-since transformed themselves to hew to the twin revolutions in American affairs of the 50's and 60's.
In short, such a leader would not only have to take on the entire establishment as we know it, he would even lack a readily-accessible rhetoric in which to couch his opposition.
The end result is that the political and social realm is left ceded to those who accept its dominant characteristics while minority malcontents like me might as well be speaking in a dark room at night, alone.
It is my belief (okay, you got me: hope), however, that this situation cannot long endure. The inherent strains in the internationalist mind-set run up against two immovable objects.
The first, is the reality of civilizational conflict in the international realm. As Huntington has demonstrated conclusively, foreign affairs follow a quite predictable civilizational paradigm and any attempt to build bridges is futile. After all this time, East is East and West is (still) West.
The second, is the reality of human nature in the national realm. All these kind words about civil rights, diversity and equality and European-Americans are still quite aware of who they are, who they want their kids in school with and where they are going to live.
In order to damp down the conflicts that the denial of these two immovable objects will continue to throw up, the USG will have to fight ever more ridiculous wars, take on ever more onerous responsibilities, impose ever more regulations on its people, take on ever more tyrannical powers to compel adherence to the dictates of diversity.
This state of affairs cannot last forever.
Inevitably, there will come a crisis and it is at that time that the construction of a rhetoric of alternatives will become possible. Possible, mind you, not inevitable.
Until then, Evariste, we are men without leaders, partisans without a party, countrymen without a country.
And we wait.
So what's a guy like me supposed to do? Keep reading New Sisyphus and VFR and fuming about everything? Why are there no serious leaders with serious thoughts and substance any more? I guess people like me are doomed to a lifetime in political wilderness, railing against a system that doesn't notice and doesn't care. They're buffoons on the left and buffoons on the right, and they're all my enemy because they're the enemy of my country. You know how Ahavat Yisrael is a mitzvah for Jewish people? Love of one's fellow Jews and Israel? Why don't we have any politicians who have Ahavat America and Americans? Isn't it crazy that so many of our politicians were declaring us to be racists and rednecks, who need to be shut up, when we got mad about the illegal immigration amnesty bill they were trying to railroad through? What's so horrible about liking being American and liking America and wanting to preserve it? Why doesn't anyone in power truly love America, Americans, and American ideas? Why are our leaders a bunch of jetsetting citizens of the world who want to rule Mexicans and Somalis instead of Americans? Can we toss them out and get some American leaders instead?
This is indeed the main question facing America today. It is a tribute to his insightful style that Evariste has nailed the issue directly, rather than dance around it as most do.
The key to understanding this issue and how it is now playing out before our eyes is to understand the tragic substitution of the central conception of America as a nation and as a polity that was a largely unintended and unanticipated consequence of the Liberal Revolution of 1968, arising from out of the Cold War context.
Okay, so the answer isn't snappy. So sue me. It's clunky and it's complex, but it also happens to be true, to the best of my ability to discern the truth of the matter. I leave it up to you to decide on that point. I compel no one. Yet.
To properly explain my response I would need a book-length affair with academic footnotes and sociological studies, so I won't even try to properly explain it. Instead, I'll just outline what I think is going on here with appeals here and there to facts or phenomena that I move the court to take judicial notice of.
WWI destroyed the self-confidence of the West and introduced into its affairs a deep, and reasonable, fear of the fires of nationalism. The unresolved matters of that horrific war led directly to the next, which further sullied the good name of nationalism. It also had the rather interesting side-effect of leaving the United States as the Last Man Standing.
Now, not just any nation could have fulfilled the role of Last Man Standing, so it's not entirely correct to note it as the whimsical outcome of fortune. Had, say, Belgium emerged from the War relatively unscathed it still would not have been up to the role. But given the US' economic, political and military might, its heritage, its traditions and its international position, the US was the de facto leader of the Western World at the conclusion of the affair.
But it was not the leader of the world. In what was once the Orthodox world, a competitor state, the Soviet Union, made a play for global dominance.
The resulting Cold War is well-known, as is its global reach. The standard operating procedure was a fight for influence among the various peoples of the world, not the least in Europe herself, which required American officials to quickly leave behind the parochial concerns of places like Iowa or Montana for exciting new places like Greece and Viet-nam.
The result was the internationalization of the government of the United States, NSC-68 and the USG's wholesale transformation into an instrument of global responsibility. Not for nothing does the Department of Defense divide, not the U.S., but the entire world into "commands." Or does it not strike you as odd that the U.S. Army should have a command with "responsibility" for Africa or East Asia?
This much, at least, is well-known and unremarkable. I hope to this point it is also relatively uncontroversial.
It was this new out-ward looking, leader-of-the-free-world version USG that stumbled into the 1960's and the Western-world-wide Liberal Revolution. We may talk of Dr. King on this day, or of a struggle for civil rights, but the fact is that this Revolution was universal across the West, a replay of 1848 with better communications and media.
The roots of this sea change in law, politics and morals are well-known and not worth repeating here. What I'm after here is how they fused with the new internationalized USG forged from the fires of the Cold War.
The dominant feature of the Liberal Revolution was to make equality and non-discrimination not a feature of our political life but the organizing principle of political life. Whereas once it was alright for minorities to be minorities and for the majority to be dominant while tolerant, now the state was given all sorts of new powers to go into the institutions of majority dominance and dismantle them.
The USG's internationalized responsibilities began to reflect the internalized values of the Liberal Revolution. That is, as the USG now looked at all of its citizens as exact equals it began to apply that same outlook to its foreign charges as well.
The end result is a world we are all familiar with: one in which there is no issue that the United States is not directly responsible for and for which it must or should have used its powers to ensure the absence of nationalist or racial conflict, i.e. to enforce equality. Thus, even remote racial conflicts, like that of Rwanda, become over time a failure of the United States and not at all the responsibility of Rwandans or, God forbid, the Europeans.
The twin internationalizing pressures of the Cold War and the Liberal Revolution produced, therefore, a transformation in the self-image of America and Americans. Rather than being a specific people with a specific history, we are now an ideal to which anyone can adhere to, a proposition nation that could be filled with anything or assume any responsibility and still be America.
In order for any leader to speak of reversing this and restoring the America-that-was, that leader would have to do two, equally unthinkable things: 1) he would have to renounce American world leadership and put an end to the culture of international dependence it has fostered; and 2) he would have to confront and take issue with all the central assumptions of the Liberal Revolution. And he would have to do this while every institution of any heft-academic, cultural, social and political-have already long-since transformed themselves to hew to the twin revolutions in American affairs of the 50's and 60's.
In short, such a leader would not only have to take on the entire establishment as we know it, he would even lack a readily-accessible rhetoric in which to couch his opposition.
The end result is that the political and social realm is left ceded to those who accept its dominant characteristics while minority malcontents like me might as well be speaking in a dark room at night, alone.
It is my belief (okay, you got me: hope), however, that this situation cannot long endure. The inherent strains in the internationalist mind-set run up against two immovable objects.
The first, is the reality of civilizational conflict in the international realm. As Huntington has demonstrated conclusively, foreign affairs follow a quite predictable civilizational paradigm and any attempt to build bridges is futile. After all this time, East is East and West is (still) West.
The second, is the reality of human nature in the national realm. All these kind words about civil rights, diversity and equality and European-Americans are still quite aware of who they are, who they want their kids in school with and where they are going to live.
In order to damp down the conflicts that the denial of these two immovable objects will continue to throw up, the USG will have to fight ever more ridiculous wars, take on ever more onerous responsibilities, impose ever more regulations on its people, take on ever more tyrannical powers to compel adherence to the dictates of diversity.
This state of affairs cannot last forever.
Inevitably, there will come a crisis and it is at that time that the construction of a rhetoric of alternatives will become possible. Possible, mind you, not inevitable.
Until then, Evariste, we are men without leaders, partisans without a party, countrymen without a country.
And we wait.
