This is the post where I partially grant that Jonah Goldberg has a good point about something, and then point out that it is fairly inconsistent with certain things he has said in the past. 

My former EM colleague and a future co-blogger, Steve Burton, discussed the recent lefty blog attack on Goldberg’s post related to differences between American and European health care systems in which Goldberg said, more or less, “Culture matters.”  That is, the political traditions of different countries and their relationship to the state in the past will affect how well-suited this or that people will be for different policies.  That seems quite reasonable, and it sounds an awful lot like the sort of thing that antiwar conservatives were saying against the universality of democracy prior to the invasion of Iraq.   

Mr. Burton is correct that the blog left has tended to respond reflexively and mistakenly to what Goldberg said.  Subsequently, there was some engagement in the latest bloggingheads episode with Ezra Klein and Julian Sanchez with the idea that culture was an important factor in considering the viability of European-style socialised health care in this country.

Mr. Burton said that he made this point about culture in his “jokey” style, but I would guess that the Canadians and western Europeans being indicted as the heirs of “throne-kissing swine” and those “with a long history of sucking up to the state and throne” respectively would not get the joke, especially since it was historically the least overtly royalist and conservative elements in these countries that pressed for socialistic policies.  There was and is a kind of conservative and Christian democratic pro-labour socialism, but in most cases those most well-known for their “throne-kissing” were less likely to be in favour of the sort of centralised socialist systems promoted by European social democrats and Canadian labour activists.  (To the extent that some European conservatives embraced parts of the socialist agenda early, it was at least partly to undermine and weaken the appeal of socialist parties.)  The goal of corporatism, both Catholic and non-Catholic, was to find some alternative path that did not unduly privilege the interests of capital or labour, but sought (however clumsily in some cases) to coordinate and balance these interests. 

Nonetheless, the basic point that very homogeneous European societies with some greater tradition of state interventions in economic life would be more amenable to socialised health care makes a lot of sense, especially since European liberalism (or what we would call right or classical liberalism) ceased to be a politically viable alternative in most parts of the Continent over a hundred years ago.  It does seem to be making one of its better comebacks in a place such as Belgium with the Vlaams Belang.  Belgium, of course, has long had a tremendously weak sense of national solidarity and identity, and this is now aggravated by the influx of Muslim immigrants who are politically identifying themselves more and more with the Socialists.  Beyond the traditional religious and ethnic cleavages in Belgium that tend to make “nationwide” social solidarity less attractive to many Belgians, especially the Flemings who wind up footing much of the bill, there is an added division in the society created by mass immigration.  This relates tangentially to some pro-immigration conservative claims that immigration would be less of a burning issue in this country were it not for the welfare state, and it also points to a reason why the progressive left in America might want to try to take restriction of immigration and assimilation more seriously as one of their winning issues (in addition to conservationist, income equality and pro-labour concerns). 

A recent history of Denmark (land of at least some of my ancestors and, apparently, royalist toadies) by Knud Jespersen has made the link between Danish homogeneity and the creation of Danish social democracy very clear and convincing.  It is perhaps not entirely a coincidence that the Danish liberal party, Venstre, under Anders Fogh Rasmussen has done fairly well following the influx of Muslim immigrants into Denmark.  Yet, somewhat ironically, to stave off the challenge of the more specially anti-immigration nationalist party, Dansk Folkeparti, it has adopted some restrictionist legislation.   

Now we come to Goldberg’s older article in which he objected to Maistre-style paleoconservative “junk” “identity politics.”  In his most recent post, he said:

Liberals constantly invoke Sweden as a governmental model without paying much heed to the fact that Sweden’s government succeeds as much as it does because it governs Swedes.

But back in ’02, when writing about where “Pat Buchanan Meets Al Sharpton” (because that’s a respectful way to talk about other conservatives), Goldberg wrote:

More relevant, he [Maistre] thought constitutional democracy was for suckers — in part because it’s based on the idea that humanity is universal.

“Now, there is no such thing as ‘man’ in this world,” de Maistre famously wrote. “I have seen in my life French men, Italian men, Russian men… But as for ‘man,’ I declare that I have never met one in my life; if he exists, it is entirely without my knowledge.”For de Maistre, you couldn’t be just a “man.” You had to be a man of Italy, a man of France, a man of Persia, etc. The new American republic was so much folly, in de Maistre’s eyes, because its Constitution was blind to this unchanging fact of life.  The Declaration’s bold proposition, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” ran completely counter to everything de Maistre believed.

It should go without saying that the Left subscribes precisely to this point of view. Along with nationality, they also emphasize ethnicity, race, and various other identity-politics categories, but the principle is the same. They believe there is an epistemological firewall separating blacks from whites, women from men, Latinas from non-Latinas, etc., etc. De Maistre would have no problem saying “people of color,” because that is largely how he saw the world.

What doesn’t go without saying is that there’s still a sizable segment of the Right that preaches very similar junk: paleoconservatives.

I had first noticed this article when Goldberg had said something to the effect that Maistre would have endorsed the concept of “white logic” (i.e., that there is a system of logic appropriate to white people, and other, entirely different systems appropriate to others).  That is, if you believe that ethnicity and nationality are real and significant, you must be essentialist about it, and you must impute radical difference between all ethnicities.  That this does not follow logically (not even when using “white logic”) should be clear to everyone. 

In support of his bizarre claim, he linked to the article with the Maistre quote above.  In short, he seemed to be saying, if you don’t believe in abstract, ahistorical Man and all that this entails, you inevitably must accept that different groups of people have irreducibly different epistemological frameworks.  I suppose you can take that position (it’s the sort of caricature of Enlightenment rationalism that defenders of the Enlightenment find appalling), but I continue to be perplexed at how someone can take that position and a) call himself a conservative or b) invoke cultural difference as a significant factor in discussing problems of policy.  But never let it be said that I haven’t given Goldberg at least a little credit when he has managed to get something right.