No True Scotsman
The Neo-Nationalist Danger
Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center, is an opinion columnist for USA Today and a contributing editor at The American Interest.
If
Trump lacks a framework for his policies, an organized movement of
Trump-supporting neo-nationalist intellectuals is happy to supply one.
There
is such a thing as a benign—even a salutary—nationalism. Within the
framework of a liberal democracy, cultivation and celebration of a
common history, traditions, folkways, language, and religion can foster
ties of pride and patriotism and bind a people together for common
purposes.
But there is also such a thing as malignant nationalism,
which easily metastasizes into fascism. Its hallmarks are the
celebration of racial unity, the glorification of authoritarianism, and
the institutionalization of bigotry. In the 1930s, it took root in two
world powers, Germany and Japan. A decade into their nationalist fever,
the two nations attacked the liberal democracies of the West, igniting a
global conflagration. By the end of the war, some 60 million people
were dead and much of civilization lay in ruins. The concept of
nationalism, inextricably tied to the most terrible war in human
history, elicited revulsion among thinking people around the world.
Nationalism, wrote George Orwell in May 1945 just as Germany
surrendered, was the “habit of identifying oneself with a single nation,
placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that
of advancing its interests.”
Today, three quarters of a century
later, the great tide of democracy that was swept in by the Allied
victory in World War II has begun to recede from its high-water mark in
the first decade of this century. Nationalist and populist movements are
renascent in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Major
powers like Russia and China are fanning nationalist sentiment and
harnessing it for their own ends. Is the resurgence we are witnessing of
the benign or the malignant sort? The question arises here in the
United States for an obvious reason: the ascent of Donald Trump.
In
the White House, one finds a revolving door full of self-proclaimed
nationalists who have been advising the President, which includes the
now departed Michael Flynn, Stephen Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, and Michael
Anton, along with the still-serving and highly influential Stephen
Miller and John Bolton. At the grassroots, a bloc of MAGA
voters—approximately 35 percent of the American electorate—follows their
leader unwaveringly. For his part, Trump’s slogan of “America First,”
and his pledge that his “foreign policy will always put the interests of
the American people and American security above all else,” are both
perfectly congruent with Orwell’s definition.
Donald Trump has
proved amply capable of activating atavistic emotions among his
followers, but he is not an orator of note, a war hero, or a thinker,
deficiencies that put in doubt his ability to lead anything more
ambitious than a cult of his own personality. When expounding a doctrine
that has always been inchoate, we have already seen the best he can do,
that is, the best he can do when he is not reading fine words written
by others for his teleprompter:
You know, they have a word—it’s sort of
became old-fashioned—it’s called a “nationalist.” And I say, really,
we’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am? I’m a
nationalist, okay? I’m a nationalist. Nationalist. Nothing wrong. Use
that word. Use that word.
Into the breach have stepped the intellectuals. If Trump lacks a
framework for his policies, they are happy to supply one. One group,
comprised largely of conservative Catholics associated with the journal
First Things, has produced a manifesto titled “
Against the Dead Consensus”
that blasts a conservatism that has only “paid lip service to
traditional values,” decries “tyrannical liberalism” and its globalist
agents, and welcomes the nationalist resurgence:
For those who enjoy the upsides, a borderless world
brings intoxicating new liberties. They can go anywhere, work anywhere.
They can call themselves “citizens” of the world. But the jet-setters’
vision clashes with the human need for a common life. And it has bred
resentments that are only beginning to surface. We embrace the new
nationalism insofar as it stands against the utopian ideal of a
borderless world that, in practice, leads to universal tyranny.
This
is puerile. A number of signers of the declaration recently exercised
their “intoxicating new liberties” to travel by jet on well-publicized
book tours to distant points, including Australia and Chile. “Sail with
us on a remarkable journey to the cosmopolitan elegance of Monte Carlo,”
is how one conservative-nationalist
publication
is advertising its fundraising cruise. Apparently, globalism is so
insidious that even conservative nationalists “go anywhere” and “work
anywhere” these days.
Other more serious efforts are gathering
steam. Under the auspices of a new organization called the Edmund Burke
Foundation, a group of “nationalist conservative” thinkers is scheduled
to assemble in Washington in mid-July with the purpose of bringing
together those who grasp that “the past and future of conservatism are
inextricably tied to the idea of the nation.” The conference features
such speakers as the aforementioned Bolton and Anton, as well as Fox’s
Tucker Carlson. It is to be the “kick off for a protracted effort to
recover and reconsolidate the rich tradition of national conservative
thought as an intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of
purist libertarianism, and in stark opposition to political theories
grounded in race.”
Is this the stirring of a malign nationalism or
something else? The chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation is Yoram
Hazony, an Israeli student of political philosophy, who is the
neo-nationalist movement’s leading theoretician. To obtain a glimpse
into what nationalist thought consists of today, Hazony’s influential
2018 book,
The Virtue of Nationalism, is worth an extended look.
Given the horrors of 20
th-century
history, the case for nationalism carries some heavy burdens. Hazony
begins his effort by attempting to lift them away. The idea that
nationalism provoked two world wars and the Holocaust, he writes, is a
“simplistic narrative, ceaselessly repeated,” with the repetition only
serving to highlight the fact that nationalism has been badly
mischaracterized and misunderstood. Nationalism, to Hazony, is the “best
political order,” a “principled standpoint” rooted in the experience of
the ancient Israelites of escaping from Egypt and building a homeland
of their own. It regards the world as governed best “when nations are
able to chart their own independent course, cultivating their own
traditions and pursuing their own interests without interference.” It
stands in contradistinction to “imperialism,” a political order or
system that seeks to unite mankind, “as much as possible, under a single
political regime.”
Imperialist movements, in Hazony’s
idiosyncratic use of the term, tend to travel under the banner of a
universal creed. He cites Christian anti-Semitism as the most famous
example of the “hatred generated by imperialist or universalist
ideologies,” but others have been little better: Islam, Marxism,
globalism and liberalism “have proved themselves quite capable of
inflaming similarly vicious hatreds against groups that are determined
to resist the universal doctrines they propose.”
The dichotomy
between imperialism and nationalism is the major theme of Hazony’s book.
It is, he writes, “the fault line that has been uncovered at the heart
of Western public life.” One stands on one or the other side of it;
there is no middle ground: “Either you support, in principle, the ideal
of an international government or a regime that imposes its will on
subject nations when its officials regard this as necessary; or you
believe that nations should be free to set their own course in the
absence of such an international government or regime.”
Attempting
to make good on the promise of his book’s title, Hazony identifies a
number of “virtues of nationalism” that make it superior to
“imperialist” political orders. Of these we shall consider the two most
important.
“Individual liberties” is the first of these.
Independent national states are the locus, according to Hazony, of the
tradition of individual rights and freedom. The bonds of mutual loyalty
that one finds in independent nation states permit the ruler and the
strongest factions to limit their own powers, thereby enabling
individual freedom. Only where such mutual loyalty is found can
toleration take root. Dissenting voices can be experienced not only as a
challenge, but also as “advancing the cause of the nation because they
are expressions of free institutions that are the strength and glory of
their nation.”
“Disdain for imperial conquest” is the second.
Because nation-states exist on a limited scale, Hazony reasons, their
rulers “inherit a political tradition that recognizes the boundaries of
the nation and its defensive needs as placing natural limits upon its
extension, and so tend to disdain the idea of conquering foreign
nations.”
Although Nazi Germany is ritually held up as a counter
case with respect to both individual freedom and disdain for imperial
conquest, this, Hazony argues, is a misreading of the past. Despite the
word “national” in the name of the Nazi Party, “Hitler was no advocate
of nationalism,” states Hazony bluntly. Hitler’s model for the Third
Reich, he maintains, was not the nation-state, “which he saw as an
effete contrivance of the English and French,” but rather the First
Reich, the Holy Roman Empire. In effect, Hitler was anti-nationalist and
pro-empire and Nazi Germany was “an imperial state in every sense.”
Germany went to war not for, but against, nationalism, to put an end to
“the principle of the national independence and the self-determination
of peoples once and for all.” By the same token, the Holocaust, the Nazi
extermination of the Jews, was not part of a nationalist project, but
something that “could not have been conceived or attempted outside the
context of Hitler’s effort to revive and perfect long-standing German
aspirations to universal empire.”
In imperial orders as they have
appeared across history, one power typically dominates all the others.
The ruling class and the armed forces are loyal not to the entire
constellation of nations under their dominion but only to “the ruling
nation around which the imperial state is constructed.” For this reason,
“[a]n imperial state cannot be a free state. It is always a despotic
state.” Failing to grasp that imperialism inevitably leads to despotism
was a cardinal sin of those “Western liberals” who, in the aftermath of
World War II, mistakenly pointed to German nationalism as the fuel that
had ignited the global conflagration.
To prevent Germany from
rising again and precipitating yet another world war after having
already precipitated two, these liberals took the profoundly mistaken
step of “dismantl[ing] the system of independent nations that had given
Germany the right to make decisions for itself.” In its place, they
erected a super-state, the European Union, with the objective of
chaining Germany down. This, to Hazony, was a historic blunder,
replacing one despotism with another in the heart of Europe. The West
European nations, writes Hazony, “had not feared the Germans because of
their nationalism, but because of their universalism and imperialism.”
Unwittingly, the proponents of European unity were actually doing
Germany’s bidding: fulfilling a longstanding aspiration by creating a
“renewed ‘German empire.’”
The European Union is one of “two great
imperialist projects” on which Hazony trains his fire. The second is
the “American empire,” in which nations that do not abide by American
interpretations of international law are “coerced into doing so,
principally by means of American military might.”
The
EU in Hazony’s schema is a kind of sub-empire, a “protectorate” of the
American empire with the American President playing “the role of the
emperor in today’s Europe.”The EU in
Hazony’s schema is a kind of sub-empire, a “protectorate” of the
American empire with the American President playing “the role of the
emperor in today’s Europe.” The true nature of these imperial
arrangements has been effectively hidden from the public. Europeans, for
their part, avert their gaze because they “might not relish the
prospect of a renewed German empire,” while Americans look away because
they have often “balked at the idea of an ‘American empire.’”
But
Hazony locates a deeper cause for the “blindness” about the liberal
empires, which can be found in the very nature of liberalism itself.
John Locke’s
Second Treatise of Government—“modernity’s most
famous liberal manifesto”—he argues, is fundamentally flawed, elevating a
false individualism, and a fictitious act of consent to an imaginary
social contract, above the tangible attachments that “bind human beings
into families, tribes, and nations.” With borderlessness exalted by
Locke’s liberalism, transnational empires have become so widely accepted
as to become invisible, the background to ordinary life. Locke’s “dream
world” and “utopian vision” have become “the virtually unquestioned
framework for what an educated person needs to know about the political
world.”
So thoroughly has the doctrine been inculcated into elites
that a veritable army of Lockean liberals has been engaged in a war
against dissenters, with the opponents of liberalism, according to
Hazony, “vanquished one by one.” Their victories have left a “dogmatic
imperialism as the dominant voice within the liberal camp.”
Increasingly, the self-proclaimed partisans of liberty have been
transformed into their antithesis, becoming “among the most powerful
agents fomenting intolerance and hate in the Western world today.”
What are we to make of all this?
Hazony
is obviously correct that some measure of national unity is essential
if individual freedom is to thrive. A country riven by tribal warfare or
factionalism and hatred is not fertile soil for liberty. And Hazony is
also correct that, historically, the growth of individual freedom has
developed within the protective confines of the nation-state. But if
national unity is necessary for liberty, it is hardly sufficient.
To
illustrate this, one need neither theorize nor delve into the past;
empirical observation of the contemporary record alone tells a
convincing story. According to Freedom House’s
2018 global survey,
among the 195 independent nation-states of the world, only 45 percent
are free. Fifty-five percent are either “not free” or only “partly
free.” To be sure, some of the not-free countries are in the grip of
what Hazony would call imperialist domination, like the various
Communist and Islamic countries on the Freedom House list. But for every
truly independent nation-state in which individual freedom thrives,
there are three times as many independent nation-states where strongmen
rule, democratic institutions are weak or absent, the rule of law is
shaky or worse, and civil rights are denied. Interestingly, among the 28
countries that are living under what Hazony calls the “despotism” of
the European Union, Freedom House rates every one of them as free.
Overall, however, the data considerably darken Hazony’s rose-tinted
picture of nation-states as incubators of individual freedom. It is not
the nation-state per se that nurtures individual freedom, as Hazony
would have it, but only a particular type of nation-state: namely,
liberal democracy.
How about “disdain for imperial conquest”? Is that the disposition of the average nation-state, today or in the past?
Hazony devotes an extended segment of his book to the Westphalian treaties of the 17
th
century that, among other things, established a general recognition of
exclusive sovereignty among their signatories, ushering in the modern
international system. Hazony traces this order to biblical precepts and
calls it “the Protestant Construction of the West,” a collection of
independent nation-states all pursuing their own interests, which is his
ideal ordering of the world. Indeed, Hazony waxes rhapsodic about its
character: the “diverse forms of self-government, religion and culture”
it allowed to thrive, the “storm of dormant energies” it unleashed, the
“unique dynamism” it brought to the nations of Europe, the “stunning
degree” of experimentation in government, economics, theology, and
science, and the “significant advances” it produced “in finance,
industry, medicine, philosophy, music and art.”
It sounds like an
idyll. But did this order of independent national states promote
individual liberty and did it disdain conquest? In other words, were
Hazony’s supposed virtues of nationalism in evidence? On the evidence
offered in his own book, the free and independent nation-states of the
era “were constantly resorting to war over territories and trade.” And
despite the Westphalian belief in inviolate sovereignty, and the
supposed “disdain for imperial conquest,” even as they warred with each
other they also avidly engaged in the colonial project of “conquest and
subjugation of foreign peoples” across the globe, all the while
maintaining “unconscionable racialist arrangements and institutions” on
their home territories.
One senses not a minor
contradiction in Hazony’s argument: In the “order of independent states”
that he calls the best regime, the supposed virtues of his preferred
nationalist order are absent, and all the vices of evil imperialism are
present.One senses not a minor
contradiction in Hazony’s argument: In the “order of independent states”
that he calls the best regime, the supposed virtues of his preferred
nationalist order are absent, and all the vices of evil imperialism are
present. Struggling to stuff his theoretical propositions into a
historical box in which they do not fit, the only exit from the
contradiction Hazony can find is that the Protestant Construction
imparted “a form that provided a basis for the eventual remediation of
many of its deficiencies.” But of course, one must ask, was it the form
of independent nation-state that provided for such “eventual
remediation,” or was it the rise and growing acceptance of liberal
democratic ideas and institutions? These are not questions Hazony pauses
to entertain.
The Westphalian peace aside, Nazism would seem to
put Hazony’s vision of a freedom-supporting and largely pacific
nationalism to an even more stringent test.
Of course, it is
incontrovertible that Hitler, as Hazony argues, had grand imperialist
aspirations that included conquest of the world and domination and/or
extermination of all non-“Aryan” races, and was therefore not
“nationalist” as Hazony defines that term. But the social force that
created Nazism, that propelled Hitler to the leadership of the most
powerful country in Europe, and that fostered an idea of German world
domination was indeed nationalism. “People of the same blood should be
in the same REICH. The German people will have no right to engage in a
colonial policy until they shall have brought all their children
together in the one State”—those are Adolf Hitler’s own words. In
denying the obvious, Hazony is proceeding precisely according to the
flawed reasoning of what is known as the No True Scotsman fallacy.
1 Positing
nationalism as “the best political order,” Hazony removes villainous
nationalists from his favored category, letting Nazi “nationalism” off
the hook while the “imperialist” EU is arraigned as a criminally
autocratic regime, fomenting intolerance and spewing hatred.
Today’s EU can indeed be faulted for many things. As George Weigel has summed it up in a jud
icious survey of democracy’s discontents in
National Affairs,
its “bureaucracy is often overbearing, impervious to criticism,
dismissive of traditional national mores, and hostile to religious
conviction in the public square.” But those serious deficiencies are by
no means the entire story of European integration. Weigel reminds us
that
EU funds have rebuilt much of the
infrastructure of the new democracies of central and eastern Europe.
They have helped to recover and restore much of the cultural patrimony
in architecture and art that was severely damaged by six years of war
and 45 years of communist neglect and worse. Moreover, transnational
institutions like NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation
in Europe have preserved the peace after a century in which Europe was
twice on the verge of destroying itself — and taking much of the world
with it, had the second round had a different outcome. So
“transnational” does not always equal “bad.”
But to Hazony, transnational
does always equal bad, an
absolute evil that should never be accepted: “We should not let a
hairbreadth of our freedom be given over to foreign bodies under any
name whatsoever.” To him the EU is a despotism pure and simple and the
historic accomplishments of the EU cited by Weigel do not figure into
his calculations. In crude fashion, he calls the thinking behind
European integration “closer to being a good joke than competent
political analysis.” But it was not “Western liberals” alone who
understood that Nazi Germany had been infected by the nationalist
disease, and it was not those same liberals alone who were the prime
movers behind European integration.
It was none other than the most preeminent conservative of the 20
th
century, Winston Churchill, who in Zurich in September 1946 spoke of
the “frightful nationalistic quarrels, originated by the Teutonic
nations in their rise to power, which we have seen in this 20
th
century, and even in our own lifetime, wreck the peace and mar the
prospects of all mankind.” And it was Churchill who saw a path forward
in European integration:
There is a remedy which, if it were generally and
spontaneously adopted by the great majority of people in many lands,
would as if by a miracle transform the whole scene and would in a few
years make all Europe, or the greater part of it, as free and as happy
as Switzerland is today. What is this sovereign remedy? It is to
recreate the European fabric, or as much of it as we can, and to provide
it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in
freedom.
“We must build a kind of United States of
Europe” is how Churchill concluded. The idea that Churchill sought to
establish an American or German empire on the continent is ridiculous.
We
can only speculate what Europe would look like today if the West had
followed Hazony’s retrospective recommendation to allow post-war Germany
to have “retained the right to make decisions for itself.” Considering
Germany’s habit of igniting devastating world wars, it would have been
an unthinkably foolish gamble for statesmen to take in 1945. We do not
need to speculate about what Europe would be like if the United States
had not spilled blood and treasure to impose the “American world order”
that Hazony insouciantly condemns, an effort that aimed not at
establishing empire but rescuing Europe from Nazi occupation, ensuring
its reconstruction from the devastation of war, and protecting it over
decades from the very real prospect of Soviet aggression.
Sounding
every bit like a Cold War revisionist historian in the mode of William
Appleman Williams, Hazony lambastes the United States for its “hunger to
control other nations” and likens American investment in the defense of
Europe to a kind of resource curse, akin to Saudi “oil gushing from the
ground,” which has had the effect of lulling Europeans into “a
condition of perpetual childhood,” a people blithely and blindly
“smitten with the love of liberal empire.” It is a reflection of the
diseased condition of contemporary conservatism that quite a few
American conservatives have uncritically accepted a work with such a
pronounced anti-American tenor, so dismissive of America’s historic
contribution to the peace of the world, and which denigrates an alliance
of liberal democracies as a form of despotism.
Space does not
permit a full response to Hazony’s cartoon version of John Locke’s
social contract theory. Suffice it to say, both Locke’s political
thought and the larger foundations of liberalism are much richer than
the straw version that Hazony holds up to pull apart. The philosopher
who wrote that God made “man such a Creature, that, in his own Judgment,
it was not good for him to be alone” is not recognizable in Hazony’s
caricature of Locke as the prophet of unbridled individualism. One point
demands further comment here: Hazony’s suggestion that Lockean
liberalism has evolved into a doctrine of intolerance. He complains that
“the scope of legitimate disagreements” has been “progressively
reduced” while the penalties for dissent have grown “more and more
onerous,” and he warns about “[i]ncreasing demands for conformity to a
single universal standard in speech and religion.” With great
indignation, he declares that liberalism has embraced “the worst
features of the medieval Catholic empire upon which it is unwittingly
modeled, including a doctrine of infallibility, as well as a taste for
the inquisition and the index.”
Like Patrick Deneen in his
Why Liberalism Failed?, in drawing this picture of liberal democracy as repressive system, Hazony is borrowing a leaf
from the leftist intellectuals pointed to by Jean-Francois Revel in his
The Totalitarian Temptation for
whom “the faults of free societies are so magnified that freedom
appears to mask a totalitarian reality.” The political correctness about
which Hazony is complaining is a poisonous disease that needs to be—and
can be, and is being—combated. The more important point is that it is
enforced not by officialdom, as in the Spain of the inquisition, but
almost entirely either by social pressure to conform or by private
agents, typically university administrators. The fact of the matter is
that no one is compelling Hazony and his neo-nationalist colleagues to
adhere “to a single universal standard in speech and religion,” let
alone threatening to burn them at the stake. Freedom of speech does not
come with a certificate of exemption from criticism, which appears to be
Hazony’s underlying complaint.
One
of the nationalist principles Hazony emphatically propounds is
“non-interference in the internal affairs of other states.” This, of
course, leaves open the problem of what to do about genocidal dictators
like Hitler, a figure who seems to bedevil Hazony’s analysis at every
turn. As is well known, in the course of the 1930s, as Hitler tightened
the noose around the Jews of Germany, there was a significant number of
Americans who believed passionately in something very much like Hazony’s
principle of non-interference. Like Hazony, they regarded themselves as
nationalists. Some were admirers of Mussolini and Hitler. Most were
proponents of the slogan Trump has resurrected from that era, “America
First.” To these America Firsters, Germany’s persecution of the Jews was
simply the trouble of a wretched people in a faraway land and of no
concern whatsoever to the United States.
Some of Hazony’s nationalist compatriots like
Patrick Buchanan
insist to this day that American intervention in Europe in World War II
was a historic error. Such a stance is evidently an embarrassment to
Hazony, who identifies himself as a “Jewish nationalist, a Zionist, all
my life.”
Confronted with the problem of a Hitler, Hazony jettisons his principle of non-interference and shifts into reverse.Confronted with the problem of a Hitler, Hazony jettisons his principle of non-interference and shifts into reverse.
In some instances, Hazony avers, independent nation-states “have no
choice but to interfere.” Hazony’s rationale for this 180-degree
turnabout is that the crimes Hitler committed against his own people
“were only a prelude to the attempt to destroy all the neighboring
national states and to annex their populations to a universal empire.”
But as Suzanne Schneider asked in a
pointed review in Foreign Policy,
“How is one to know for sure when crimes committed internally are a
prelude to those of outward aggression?” The answer, of course, is that
one cannot know. But even if one could know, what course of action would
Hazony recommend if the internal crimes were
not a prelude to
aggression, as in the wholesale slaughter of the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994
or if Hitler had confined his genocidal ethnic cleansing to within
German borders? Would Hazony, like Buchanan, recommend that the United
States remain a bystander under the banner of America First? The return
of a 1930s-style isolationism is where Hazony’s principles appear to
lead.
Closely related to the problem of ethnic cleansing is the
question of the homogeneity of the nation-state. Although Hazony does
not include it in his enumeration of virtues, in the course of his
argument it emerges that he regards homogeneity as a significant
strength for an independent nation-state. The unwelcome “diversity” that
one finds in empires or other agglomerations of peoples, he writes,
makes them “more difficult to govern, weakening the mutual loyalties
that had held it together, dissipating the attention and resources in
the effort to suppress internal conflicts and violence that had
previously been unknown to it.” For Hazony, what is required for the
establishment of a free state is “a majority nation whose cultural
dominance” is so “overwhelming” that “resistance appears to be futile.”
He approvingly quotes Johann Gottfried Herder, the 18
th-century father of German nationalism, who warns against “the wild mixing of races and nationalities under one scepter.”
The
United States thus poses a special challenge to the nationalist idea,
for ours is a land where there has long been just such “wild mixing of
races and nationalities.” Rooted in the involuntary influx of the slave
trade and the voluntary influx of immigration, our diversity in the 19
th century brought us the bloody strife of a civil war, but in the 20
th
century it contributed to our remarkable success. Yet diversity is
disquieting to Hazony and his fellow neo-nationalists; it is regarded
not a strength but a weakness. Many of America’s nationalist
conservatives, it emerges on inspection, harbor a pronounced strand of
nativism.
To Tucker Carlson, a keynote speaker at the Washington conference, immigration is
something that “makes our own country poor and dirtier and more divided.” Michael Anton
warns
that “a republic that opens its doors to immigrants must choose
carefully whom and how many to accept.” He cautions darkly against
“ongoing mass immigration that. . . .‘fundamentally transforms’ one
American community after the next.” He inveighs against “the ceaseless
importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for,
or experience in liberty.” As for Stephen Bannon, at a rightist rally in
France, he was the most explicit. He
told the crowd,
“Let them call you racist, let them call you xenophobes, let them call
you nativist. Wear it as a badge of honor.” The racialist tenor of such
alarums is as transparent as Donald Trump’s comments about the “very
fine people” among the white supremacists carrying tiki torches as they
marched in Charlottesville.
In the statement announcing the
Washington gathering, nationalist political theories grounded in race
are specifically disavowed. But race, in many contexts, is intrinsic to
the nationalist idea, as, for example, in homogeneous Japan, or in
China, where the majority Han are today brutally suppressing the
minority Uighurs, putting millions into “re-education” camps to suppress
their Muslim faith. In Central Europe a similar dynamic is at work in a
far milder form. Illiberal governments like those of Poland and Hungary
are both striving to make ethnic and religious homogeneity central to
their country’s national identity, seriously discomfiting minority
groups within their populations. To Hazony, the illiberal drift and the
ethnocentrism are just fine. Indeed, he singles out Poland and
Hungary—along with unnamed anti-liberal forces in a number of other
countries—for praise as “holdouts against universal liberalism.” All
they desire is “to defend their own unique cause and perspective.” For
“wishing to chart an independent course that is their own” they will
soon “be hated as the Jews have been hated.”
This is a repugnant
amalgamation of past horrors with present ugliness in the service of a
whitewash. In Hungary, Jews were indeed hated; during World War II,
Hungary’s Arrow Cross and Nazi forces operating in concert murdered some
568,000 of them. Today, Hungary’s avowedly illiberal government under
Viktor Orban’s ruling Fidesz party has been engaged in incursions
against tolerance and a free press and has conducted a thinly veiled
anti-Semitic campaign using the Jewish financier George Soros as a
bogeyman. Hazony takes Orban’s side, hailing Hungary as one of a number
of “dissident” nations gamely standing up to the autocracy that is the
European Union.
The Poland that Hazony is praising for holding out
against universal liberalism has equally bloody hands from World War
II, and evidently also a continuing guilty collective conscience. That
is precisely why its ruling Law and Justice Party recently passed a law,
subsequently repealed in the face of a global outcry, criminalizing
references to the extensive Polish complicity in the mass murder of Jews
during and after World War II. What Hazony calls the Polish’s
government’s “unique cause and perspective” is, in pertinent part,
nothing more than a sub-branch of Holocaust denial. “I cannot defend all
of the particular movements that will arise from [the] desire for
national freedom,” Hazony disingenuously writes, even as he praises
Poland and Hungary for their resistance to the EU and declines to
criticize any aspect of their behavior, save for the insipid
pronouncement that “we will not be enamored with what every nation does
with [its] freedom.”
In actual fact, what every nation does with its freedom cannot be a matter of indifference to Europe and the rest of the world.In actual fact, what every nation does with its freedom cannot be a matter of indifference to Europe and the rest of the world. Marc Plattner, editor of the
Journal of Democracy,
makes a critical point: “The fact that contemporary liberal democracies
do not fear that force will be used against them by their fellow
liberal democracies makes possible a previously unprecedented degree of
integration among them.”
2
The inverse corollary is that if one or more of the EU member states
uses its “freedom” to cease being a liberal democracy—in other words,
uses its freedom to cease being free—the future of integration is the
least of what is at stake. We are enjoying one of the longest bloodless
intervals (with the peripheral case of the Balkan wars aside) in
Europe’s endless history of slaughter. That is not the result of
happenstance and it is certainly not an accomplishment of nationalists
pushing their particularistic agendas. Credit goes overwhelmingly to
European integration and the “universal liberalism” that Hazony,
dispensing with all essential moral and political distinctions, lumps
together with Marxism and Nazism as a potentially “genocidal” ideology
that fuels “the desire for imperial conquest.” This is egregious. An
outlook that regards liberalism, Nazism, and Communism as equally
aggressive movements, equally capable of generating intolerance and
spewing hatred, is both detached from historical reality and morally
reprehensible.
3
The
statement announcing the Washington conference of conservative
nationalists calls for the “revival of the unique national traditions
that
alone have the power to bind a people together and bring
about their flourishing” (emphasis added). This is an unsubtle assertion
that attachment to the ideas adumbrated in our sacred documents, the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, is insufficient to
unite Americans in a common polity. It is a truism that America is not
just an idea but also a place. But Hazony writes disparagingly that “a
love of the founding documents” and of “the ‘American creed’ that they
supposedly contain”
(emphasis added) is now regularly invoked “as a substitute for an
attachment to the American nation itself.” In other words, the fact that
the United States is “supposedly” a creedal nation, founded on a belief
in liberty and self-government, is less significant to our cohesion
than our ties of blood and soil. When Hazony insists that the United
States “is still a nation like all others,” that is precisely what he
has in mind.
As I noted at the outset, in the framework of a
liberal democracy, celebration of a common history, traditions,
folkways, language, and religion can help to foster ties of loyalty and
patriotism and bind a people together. But the philosopher Roger Scruton
is surely right that “we must distinguish national loyalty, which is
the
sine qua non of consensual government in the modern world,
from nationalism, which is a belligerent ideology that looks for a
source of government higher than the routines of settlement and
neighborhood.”
One does not need Hazony’s highly
elaborate yet rickety superstructure to defend national loyalty, be it
of the American or Israeli or any other liberal-democratic kind.One
does not need Hazony’s highly elaborate yet rickety superstructure to
defend national loyalty, be it of the American or Israeli or any other
liberal-democratic kind. But America’s neo-nationalists are after
something else. Those willing to give an intellectual thug like Tucker
Carlson a premier platform and appear on a dais beside him are, if not
trying to ride the populist-nationalist wave, at the very least giving
intellectual respectability to its unsavory side. By no means all but
more than a few of the featured speakers at the Washington gathering are
avid Trump supporters who wrap themselves in lofty words about the
revival of our unique national traditions, while traducing those very
traditions.
For all the high-sounding talk about how nationalism
can “bind a people together and bring about their flourishing,” they say
not a word about the cruelty, the misogyny, the race-baiting, the
overpowering moral stench emanating from the White House. When they are
not busy applauding, they remain scrupulously silent in the face of
policies that wrench children from their parents’ arms at the border and
thrust them into cages, that deport the spouses of men and women
serving in our armed forces, that demonize refugees and immigrants. They
ignore the words that encourage police brutality, mock the disabled,
spread falsehoods about American Muslims cheering by the thousands the
destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11. They wink and nod at the
nepotism, the corruption, the self-dealing, the incitement of violence,
the incessant and compulsive lying, the open invitation to foreign
powers to intervene in U.S. elections. On the mentality of the
nationalist, Orwell is pertinent yet again: “There is no crime,
absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it.”
Even
if it is not yet metastatic, a malignant form of nationalism is being
injected into the American body politic. A set of profoundly illiberal
ideas is being propounded at a moment when the fragility of liberal
democracy has been exposed. We are drawing to the end of a low,
dishonest decade, in which the odor of the 1930s has been filling the
air. One can never know in advance what events await us, but we have
arrived at a juncture in which another terrible chapter of history might
well get written. This is not the hour in which intellectuals should be
tossing matches into the kindling. Yet so they are. It is astonishing
that Hazony’s contention that liberalism promotes “vicious hatred” while
nationalism tends to be benign—a bizarre inversion of the historical
record—has gained currency in some quarters of the Right. The
neo-nationalists who are providing an intellectual cover for Trumpism
and aspiring authoritarians around the world need to be mercilessly
defeated on the battlefield of ideas as if September 1, 1939 were
approaching.
