SUSA has a poll from Harrisburg, PA gauging reactions to Obama’s San Francisco remarks.  Most remarkable is that Hispanics were the group most offended by the comments.  47% of Hispanics (admittedly a small portion of the respondents) said they were offended, compared to 40% of whites and 26% of blacks.  In all of the talk about Obama and the “white working class” (a phrase that has started to become a kind of shorthand for the voters who have problems with Obama), the damage to Obama among a lot of other demographic groups is probably being ignored or underestimated.  Conservatives were the most offended of all (53%), but 34% of liberals and 28% of moderates said the same.  50% of all respondents said they disagreed with the comments, and 40% of all found them offensive, so for the most part if the remarks were poorly received they were very poorly received.  Disagreement was predictably greatest among older voters, gun owners, regular church-goers and conservatives, but substantial numbers of every age, ideological and party group disagreed as well, including 37% of liberals and 41% of Democrats.  On the whole, those who say that this will have a long-term negative impact on Obama’s campaign are roughly equal in numbers to those who were offended, but since so many were offended, including many Democrats and independents (33% and 39% respectively), that suggests that there probably will be a long-term negative impact on his campaign.  This seems to matter in a way that the association with Wright has not yet seemed to matter, because it was Obama speaking this time and the mistake could not be blamed on a crazy “uncle.”

Ed Kilgore argues that Obama can’t possibly be a materialist in any way, and I might be willing to credit this, except that Obama’s first line of defense after the controversy erupted was that what he said was something that “everybody” knew to be true and what he actually said lends itself pretty readily to a materialist view of human motivations.  The choice of words is significant.  You “cling” to something as if it were a security blanket, a reassurance that does not, in fact, help you except to distract you from your surroundings.  This is to treat these things as forms of escapism and neurotic obsession.  This is to treat the things to which one “clings” as if they were sedatives or the fix for an addict.  It is to treat normal human responses as if they were pathological.   

In Obama’s defense, Sullivan then said that Obama was making an economic determinist argument while complaining about others who were saying that he was making an economic determinist argument.  It’s worth noting that it is possible to be religious and employ a materialist interpretation of history–indeed, this is at the heart of a lot of liberation theology as well as a lot of bad historiography of ancient and medieval heresy that sought to make Donatists out to be a social protest movement and the non-Chalcedonians into proto-nationalists.  (After all, so the argument went, no one could get so worked up over such technical distinctions–there had to be something real behind them.)  That Obama goes to a church that embraces a strain of liberation theology tends to confirm the impression that he would see economic conditions and religious motivation as closely related.  Indeed, from the perspective of liberation theology it would probably not sound insulting to say that economic distress and alienation cause people to “cling” to their religion, since a significant part of the rationale for liberation theology is to employ the Gospel for the empowerment of marginalised and alienated people.  In that way, there is an instrumentalist view of religion contained in liberation theology. 

However, liberation theology is profoundly wrong about almost everything, and that is part of the problem.  Once we get past general pieties, Obama’s liberal Christianity is significantly different from that of a lot of the voters he’s trying to reach.  Of course, liberation theology is no less, but is in fact more, political than most forms of fundamentalism; fundamentalism may counsel withdrawal from the political realm just as easily as it advocates seeking political power, but liberation theology assumes that the Gospel is meant to be worked out through political change and political action.  If the problems Sullivan has with fundamentalism are its supposed rigidity and its intrusion into the political world, it seems to me he should be just as concerned about the explicit politicisation of the Gospel that liberation theology and the Social Gospel necessarily entail.

Sullivan then said that Obama’s statement was simply clumsy and not specific enough when talking about religion:

I think what Obama probably meant by it is a certain kind of religion, a neurotic, rigid variety that is often – but not always – part of the fundamentalist psyche. Many atheists and fundamentalists believe that there is only one valid form of religion: fundamentalism. And so you can see why they would intrepret Obama’s off-hand remark the way they have – as a denigration of all faith. But those of us in grayer areas and those of us who believe Obama’s own protestations of faith see something more complicated. What we see – and what history has sometimes shown – is that economic, political and cultural frustration can indeed be expressed by the rise a certain kind of religious belief.

Examples would be helpful.  Intense, moralistic and zealous religious revivals are not typically products of “economic, political and cultural frustration.”  A major period of North Indian Islamic revivalism did not occur under the Raj or in post-independence India, but under the Muslim Mughals.  What frustration was Sirhindi expressing?  I suppose if you make the much less sweeping claim that such frustration “can” be expressed in this way, it is a bit more defensible, but I am seriously trying to think of relevant examples and there are not many that come to mind.  Thomas Muentzer’s apocalyptic preaching and the resulting peasants’ revolt that he stoked might be one, but an interpretation of fundamentalism or strict religious revivalism that would treat the aberration of Muentzer as typical is not a very good one.  The Raskol did not come from political frustration, but from resistance to liturgical reform.  If there is any alienation involved in that case, it is the feeling of being alienated from a church hierarchy that the Old Believers held to be in error.  Persecution and alienation followed the rise of Old Belief.  They did not precede it or lead to it.  The rise of Nichiren Buddism, which I suppose most would regard as the least “tolerant” kind of Buddhism (even in relation to other forms of Buddhism), cannot really be explained in this way, either.   

You also don’t need to be a fundamentalist to find what he said to be a denigration of all faith (or at least of all the faithful who live in small town America), since religion is lumped in together with racism and what Obama’s audience would probably call xenophobia in what comes across as a laundry list of the small-minded errors of small-town people.  When Obama says he sympathises with these people, I think he really does, except that his sympathy is one that fundamentally doesn’t take seriously their stated concerns as their real concerns.  The remarks give the impression that Obama thinks when these voters say that mass immigration worries them, they are actually talking about unemployment; when they object to gun control, they are really saying that they want health insurance.  Like the Donatists according to that bad historiography of decades past, they don’t actually care about the things they say they care about–they’re secretly talking about their frustrations with something else. 

Kaus has beenright in likening this to the similarly condescending language about white resentments he used in the Philadelphia speech: some people have legitimate grievances that must be understood fully, while others have concerns that are actually displaced frustration with their economic status and these are being manipulated by wily political operators.  Obama didn’t “cling” to Wright and Trinity because of economic frustrations; he joined, by his own account, in some part because he felt inspired by what he found there and remained out of faithfulness to his church.  In general, I find the assumption that people are drawn to religion, whether it is liberation theology or fundamentalism, for reasons other than the content of the religion, to be the most depressingly condescending part of the entire claim.  That Obama’s defenders think that this what he meant and that he is basically right is just plain depressing. 

Meanwhile, none of Obama’s defenders has been able to explain what exactly Obama proposes to do that is any different from the establishment that has failed the people with whom he allegedly sympathises.  Obama is essentially a free trader, and his protectionist turn during the campaign has been pretty obviously calculated as a vote-winning strategy, so he doesn’t really promise to challenge the free trade orthodoxy that prevails in government.  Part of the frustration, both economic and otherwise, that Americans feel is the government’s failure to address immigration reform and border security.  Obama, of course, is to the left of Clinton and McCain on immigration and offers all the “bitter” people nothing different from the status quo.  That is perhaps the most frustrating thing about what Obama said. 

Update: One other point should be made.  In his latest post on this, Sullivan also wrote:

When the world disappoints or disorients, the appeal of a more absolute and unquestioning faith as a rock in a storm is powerful.

But the wisdom Christian pessimism teaches us that the world will always disappoint and disorient.  That is what the world does.  The world does not become more disorienting in bad economic times.  Also, it seems as if those who are most likely to take an interest in religious and cultural issues as a matter of voting tend to be those who are already relatively better-off and economically secure.

Dan McCarthy and I have beengoingback and forth a bit on the patriotism/nationalism question.  In his latest post at Tory Anarchist, Dan writes:

Most of all, though, I’m agitated by what I think is a dishonest use of language — the idea that patriotism can never be in error and that nationalism must always be a great evil. It seems to me that some truly nice, patriotic people can be driven by their patriotism to support folly. The Iraq War was not made possible just by the deceits of a handful of neocons. It was made possible because ordinary Americans thought that America could do no wrong from noble motives.

I don’t know that I have been claiming that patriotism can never be in error.  It seems to me that a patriot can try to do his duty to his country, but then find himself serving a despicable regime and end up contributing, however indirectly, to the injustices of that regime.  That doesn’t tar his patriotism, but rather seems to point to insufficient patriotism, since there are occasions that might require turning against the regime to fulfill one’s duty to country.  Nationalism doesn’t always have to be a great evil, but on the whole it actually has a rather poor record of advancing the welfare of the nation whose interests it is supposed to serve, to say nothing of the potential for harm to other nations.  Certainly, I think patriots can be in error, since they are not infallible by virtue of their patriotism, and nationalists can do the right thing, but it seems important to distinguish between erring because of an idea and erring in spite of it.   

In fact, Dan and I are probably more in agreement here than our respective arguments to date would suggest.  While I don’t think that there’s anything actually patriotic about believing that “America could do no wrong from noble motives,” since it is the distinguishing feature of patriotism to love one’s country despite recognising its flaws, I would agree that American citizens who have strong patriotic sentiments were attracted to the pro-war argument because the architects and propagandists for the war pushed all the right buttons and portrayed the invasion of Iraq as pre-emptive self-defense.  As I see it, there is nothing inconsistent in saying that patriotism is fundamentally defensive and also saying that those agitating for war manipulated patriotic sentiments by casting a war of aggression as one of self-defense.  It would hardly be the first time in our history that this has happened.  The most culpable parties in such a case are those who deceived the public and promoted the war policy.  That doesn’t excuse all the people who supported the war, even if they did so under false pretenses or on account of misunderstanding, but it significantly qualifies the idea, advanced by some libertarian critics from that Cato debate who want to tar patriotism with all the errors of nationalism and imperialism, that patriotism is to blame for the Iraq war. 

Moreover, the ready conflation that most Americans make between the government and America, and their confusion about the proper object of patriotic devotion, is a product of American nationalist ideas.  If many supporters of the war have held that America could do no wrong, they are already making a nationalist error of thinking that America is that closely identified with the government that rules over it.  I’m sure Dan agrees that regimes and countries are very different things, and that it is a mistake to confuse them.  As I read Dan’s statement quoted above, he is saying that “ordinary Americans” made this mistake, which is not a mistake that can really be laid at the door of patriotism. 

In the end, we are on the same page on securing the borders, protecting national sovereignty and defending the national interest.  We both want to be as precise as possible in language, which is especially important here, but it is also important that our terminology is clear.  I think we’re getting closer to that clarity.

It’s saying that economic distress does often in human history express itself in more rigid forms of religion, more reactionary cultural identification, less tolerance of “the other.” ~Sullivan

As historical analysis, this is basically a lot of bunk.  Religious rigidity has not lessened in oil-rich countries, but has instead found a steady stream of funding; the rise of Hindu fundamentalism has coincided with the new wave of prosperity in India over the last 20 years; Sullivan’s own bogey of so-called “Christianism,” by which he means a very broadly defined Christian fundamentalism, has flourished in an era of vast economic expansion.  These may be reactions against economic dislocation or rapid change to some extent, but if we want to make such sweeping generalisations (usually a bad idea) it is the prosperous, relatively stable periods that are the moments when great religious ferment and severe reformism appear.  The argument that Obama is making, to the extent that it is an argument, is one that possesses the same fallacy as the thesis that modernising societies would gradually become thoroughly secularised and religion would waste away, and it is based in a crude materialist assumption, whether or not you want to call it Marxist, that economic conditions determine culture and religion, when, if anything, the reverse is the case.  The idea that people turn to a more severe and strict religious code in bad economic times is one of the oddest claims I have ever seen, and I’m not sure why anyone has ever believed it.  There are certainly enough counterexamples to make it a very poor example of a recurring pattern.  Essentially all of the Crusades and the Fourth Lateran Council came during a time of tremendous economic growth in Latin Christendom.  More examples could easily be found.  Religious reform movements often arise, to the extent that there are direct relations between economic and religious history of this kind, in response to excesses of material prosperity and the moral corruption that reformers see as the result of excessive wealth.  Savonarola, who does not deserve the bad reputation he has acquired among moderns, was a preacher of moral reform in a wealthy city-state; his calls for repentance did not draw audiences because they were poor and hungry, but because they felt pangs of conscience for being too rich and gluttonous.  It is ironic, to put it mildly, that this part of the same prophetic tradition that Wright’s defenders invoked as justification for his statements seems to have escaped Obama’s notice.   

But Obama wasn’t engaged in historical analysis.  He was giving a fundraising speech to people in San Francisco and talking about voters  in Pennsylvania today, and he was giving an explanation that referred to religion generally and combined it with a host of things that coastal and urban elites (of both parties) find distressing.  This wasn’t an observation that in times of crisis people turn to the certainties and traditions that nourish them spiritually, but a claim that guns, religion, prejudice (the “antipathy to people who are not like them”) and what Obama’s audience would readily call xenophobia are all the expressions of economic anxiety and frustration, things to which people “cling” for lack of any other remedy.  The most hilarious part of the original statement is the bit where he includes “anti-trade sentiment” as one of the forms of “clinging,” when anti-trade sentiment is the most obvious and understandable reaction to economic woes in the Rust Belt.  People do not “cling” to anti-trade sentiment; anti-trade sentiment by itself does nothing.  They think that current trade policy has been bad for industries in their state.  Had he thrown in “isolationism” to the list of things to which people “cling,” he would have had both the Bush trifecta of supposedly dangerous “isms” and the core of the Thomas Frank analysis.

Jim Antle wrote a good article on Jim Webb and the initial paleo enthusiasm, or at least sympathy, for his candidacy in 2006 that has yielded disappointment, as it was bound to do if any of us believed that Webb was going to be anything other than a conventional Democrat on domestic policy.  Ross largely agrees with Jim and has followed up with an interesting post on the constraints placed on Senators today.  Whatever the merits of an Obama-Webb ticket, it would again be derived to a large extent from symbolism and biography politics.  Except perhaps on trade, the two do not represent a balancing of policy views.  The similarity on policy of the two first-term Senators, who are otherwise quite different in most ways, is a function of the ideological sorting and homogeneity within the major parties that Ross mentions.  The ticket would be interesting to pundits because it would provide endless fodder for theorising about racial reconciliation, the New South and the GOP’s alienation of old national security Democrats who went back to the party of their fathers because of Iraq, but I wonder whether it would succeed with the general public. 

Wouldn’t the inclusion of Webb on the ticket be perceived as a rather obvious attempt to offset Obama’s lack of personal military experience by playing the same doomed game of recruiting a veteran to counter the GOP candidate’s national security positions?  Wouldn’t it come across as a kind of reverse tokenism?  In light of the recent controversy, wouldn’t it come across as a grand gesture of condescension rather than a sign of respect?  Incidentally, the disillusionment with Webb, such as it is, is a good example of why paleos should not get their hopes up about national Democratic figures, including Obama.  On this or that issue we may find ourselves in agreement with them, though usually not for the same reasons, but we can expect them to give priority to the interests of their party, which usually guarantees nothing good for our interests. 

Update: Putting Webb on the ticket might help contain the damage from the “elitist” charge being leveled at Obama now, but then again it might reinforce that charge by acknowledging that Obama needs Webb to provide some kind of “populist” credibility.  One of the things that paleos really did like about Webb, and this was certainly true for me, was that he was not a spoiled preppy suburbanite who pretended to be one of the good ol’ boys, as George Allen did, but had a better claim to representing a lot of people in Virginia who would have little in common with someone like Allen.  Allen tried to portray Webb as some of San Francisco, white wine-and-cheese Democrat, and it was so absurd on its face that I began calling for Allen’s downfall.  Incidentally, there might not necessarily be anything wrong if Obama were an elitist, except that he has gone out of his way to define his campaign as a people’s movement and he embraces the establishment’s views on the very policies that so frustrate the people he was referring to in his remarks.  Further, if Obama had overtly made his campaign a vehicle for condescending liberal paternalism, the comments would not be as jarring as they almost have to be to people who think that Obama’s 2004 convention speech was so wonderful.  

I should note that elitism is not in itself necessarily bad or undesirable–it is the nature of the system that an elite perpetuates that determines whether or not it is an insult to be branded an elitist.

Larison was pretty confident that the Wright brouhaha meant the end of Obama before any polling had even been done. ~Jim Henley

Of course, Mr. Henley is also free to critique my posts and claim that I don’t know what I’m talking about.  That’s also something that bloggers do.  But I am quite sure that I said nothing of the kind.  If anything, I have consistently underestimated the importance of the Wright controversy, because I didn’t think it was that new or shocking; I freely admitted that I had been following the Obama campaign more closely than a lot of “ordinary people” and so wasn’t gauging reaction to it very well.  When polling started showing that damage had been done, at least temporarily, I took note of that, but prior to that I made no such bold claims about “the end of Obama.”  I have been tracking state polls that show Obama falling behind McCain all over the country, but that may prove to be temporary.  I have assumed that as Obama became better known to the general electorate, his numbers would decline, and I think the last two months have supported that assumption.  I don’t think anyone could claim that my response to his Philadelphia speech belonged to the “Obama is doomed!” genre; it was, at most, a claim that Obama had some serious potential problems on his hands.  The controversy really was damaging to Obama, but I am having difficulty finding the place where I expressed confidence that Obama was finished.  Of course, it could be that I have no idea what “ordinary people” think, but that doesn’t mean that these remarks aren’t going to be politically damaging.  They would be irrelevant if they did not appear to undermine one of the principal claims of the campaign (i.e., Obama’s supposed respect for opposing views) and confirm previous statements by the candidate about these kinds of questions.

Update: Jim Henley has very kindly acknowledged that I did not make the claim mentioned above.  My thanks to Mr. Henley for the new post.  I have made more than a few errors over the last three and a half years of blogging, so I quite understand how these misunderstandings happen.

So I leave the country for a couple days and Obama takes the opportunity to implode–how’s that for timing?  Actually, I’m not quite sure what everyone is so worked up about, since it is hardly news to those who have followed him that Obama’s “understanding” of other views is an exercise in demonstrating his magnanimity and is not much of an effort to show actual respect to other views.  It is the pose of the self-righteous liberal who is so certain of his views that he feels liberated to reach out and touch the benighted gun-toting lepers.  This is someone who says, “Obviously, you are all terribly wrong, but I am such a good guy that I am going to indulge you in your false notions out of compassion for your suffering.”  The Messiah references have been all wrong–this is Obama as bodhisattva.  “You cling to your delusions, but I am here to teach you a path of liberation from all such attachments.”  Obviously what he said is condescending and insulting, but he says condescending and insulting things all the time.  In his big speech in Philadelphia, he made similar claims, and he has been making this sort of argument for months (don’t scapegoat immigrants–fight the real enemy of evil lobbyists!).

To play devil’s advocate for a moment, here is what I am guessing Obama thought he was doing when he said these things in San Francisco.  Obama thinks of himself as a builder of bridges and someone who brings people with opposing ideas to work together.  Whether this is true or not is beside the point–that is how he sees himself, and that is how he has presented himself throughout the campaign.  For some reason, people have believed him and many have rallied to him to some degree because they believe this.  So when he is addressing a fundraiser in San Francisco, he believes it is his purpose to serve as a kind of tribune or perhaps an ambassador from the voters of Pennsylvania to the latte liberals of the Left Coast.  He sees it as his role to be the mediator between the left and Middle Americans.  The latter’s religion, concern about gun rights, lax border security, illegal immigration and bad trade policy may be incomprehensible to the left except when they are explained in terms of displaced economic grievances: the only reason they can grasp why someone might be concerned about immigration is if it functions as a scapegoat for frustration with tough economic times.  If What’s the Matter with Kansas? typifies the views of many liberals about middle- and working-class voters’ interest in cultural issues, Obama is offering such liberals a theory that will make them more sympathetic (obviously, in a condescending, insulting way) to these voters.  It allows him to maintain all of the policy positions that will get the donors to open their wallets, while confirming (at least in his own mind) his goodwill and generosity of spirit towards those who hold different views, except that explaining away someone’s concerns is not an expression of goodwill and generosity.  Of course, Obama’s blunder here was not just in making a painfully condescending statement, but in assuming the role of the great mediator in the first place.  He catches plenty of flack from the left for expressing sympathy for cultural conservatives’ concerns, even though he has absolutely no intention of taking those concerns seriously, and he receives endless criticism whenever he reverts back to standard liberal explanations for the politics of cultural conservatism.  This balancing act is difficult enough in a nominating contest that he has, for all intents and purposes, all but won, and it will only become more difficult with time.  It seems to me that this is a significant political setback for the general election, and if there is audio or video of this statement it will be used to great effect in the months to come.  Update: Obviously, there is audio of the statement, which is how it came to be known in the first place.  That was an oversight on my part.

P.S.  The most important thing, which I neglected to mention earlier, is that absolutely nothing that Obama proposes to do would alleviate any of the bitterness he sees in the people in Pennsylvania, because he doesn’t actually oppose any of the policies that these voters find so frustrating, but in fact embraces pretty much all of them.

Not surprisingly, that was the word (meaning “thank you”) that I heard about five thousand times during my trip to Taiwan.  It was quite a trip.  The customs official remarked, “That’s a long way to go for a weekend.”  No kidding.  

Xiexie to the commenters who made suggestions about sites to see.  I’m afraid that time limits constrained what I was able to do, so I ended up going to the rather conventional tourist spots that were all fairly close to the hotel, and by the end of the first day I was so tired that there was no question of venturing out to the night market.  I’ll have more to say about the weekend once I’ve had a chance to settle in, and I should have some pictures of my brief tour around Taipei available before too long.  You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a Presbyterian wedding conducted in Chinese.  Well, all right, maybe you have lived, but you have missed out on an experience.

Also, my copy of Maurizio Viroli’s For Love of Country arrived while I was gone, so I hope to draw on that more in the future as I wade back into the patriotism/nationalism question now that Dan has made a very extensive argument against the kind of anti-nationalism claims that I have been making.  It’s a very good article, and it’s probably the best response in defense of nationalism that I have seen in recent years.  My initial response is that I remain unconvinced that there are many virtues in modern, mass nationalism of the kind we have typically seen since 1789, and I am not at all convinced that these outweigh the dangers inherent in it.  The categories “benign nationalism” and “hubristic patriotism” also seem to present certain difficulties, not least of which is that Baltic nationalisms do not appear to the Russian minorities in the Baltic states to be all that benign.  A thoroughly “benign” nationalism would not be targeting the Alexander Nevsky cathedral in Tallinn that many Estonians wish to have removed from its current location, nor would it strike at the monument to the tomb of the unknown soldier from WWII, which provoked the recent cyber-war.  One can understand Estonian problems with monuments that represent the old Soviet era, and one can even understand why a predominantly non-Orthodox people might not be interested in having their capital’s skyline include a Russian Orthodox cathedral that reminds them of Russian domination, but the thing about nationalism is that what begins as an understandable effort to reclaim space for one’s own people quickly turns into an effort to deny that space to another people that already possesses it.  In the ranks of nationalisms, Estonian nationalism surely stands as one of the most harmless of all time, but there is something inherent in the idea of nationalism that makes it into an explosive element in multiethnic states that makes it anything but benign.  The passions it can and has stirred in a place with a nationalism as “benign” as the Estonians’ are evidence of how potent and dangerous it can be to the very system of state sovereignty.  Nationalism not only causes the initial majoritarian move to exclude or marginalise a minority community in some symbolic or practical way, but it also sparks the reaction and solidarity from fellow nationals; this threatens the integrity of existing nation-states and threatens small nation-states most of all in those cases where they have minorities with patrons in a neighbouring state.  Meanwhile, for every “benign” Estonian nationalism, you have many rather different nationalisms, be it Tamil, Albanian, Turkish, Aymara that express themselves in violent or repressive ways.    

Because of the madness of self-determination, the state system is one predominantly made up of nation-states (i.e., states whose boundaries and identity are tied closely to the predominant ethnic group or nationality that resides therein), and ironically it is the anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist experience of many nationalist movements that has given nationalism credit that it does not deserve.  For a latter-day romantic treatment of the brave nationalist evading evil imperial agents, The Horseman on the Roof will serve.  The world where nationalists are the heroes and Metternich and his agents are the villains is not a world that I want to live in.  Nationalists may have gotten out of hand in the 20th century, so the story goes, but the liberal nationalists were a necessary and good step towards progress and away from the bad, old empires, even though the bad, old empires were less bloody and less vindictive than their nationalist successors.  This is not a brief for multinational empires.  Indeed, I would argue that nationalism is even worse for republics than for empires, since nationalism contributes to the expansionist impulses and hegemonist dreams that gradually destroy republican institutions or cause a republic to swell to such a size that it ceases to function as it should.  One of the chief charges against nationalism, namely that it is a force for centralisation and consolidation), and therefore a threat to republicanism and liberty, seems to me to be difficult to refute. 

Fundamentally, Dan is really making a pro-sovereignty argument, and to the extent that he is simply saying that citizens here and in Europe should have stronger attachment to and concern about national sovereignty when it comes to policy I don’t think we have any disagreements.  Dan writes:

The United States should act more like a nation among nations: jealous of her own sovereignty and national borders, respectful of those of other countries. 

Yes, exactly.  In other words, we need more patriotism and less nationalism.  This is not simply an exercise in terminological gamesmanship, where I just happen to prefer calling X “patriotism” because it doesn’t carry the same baggage as “nationalism.”  If I thought that this was what nationalism entailed, I would agree with Dan that “nationalism is what we need now,” but I don’t.  What Dan refers to here is exactly what nationalism does not advance; what Dan wants nationalism will not provide.  Nationalism does not encourage people to be “respectful” of the sovereignty and national borders of other countries.  In most cases, nationalism disregards sovereignty and national borders of other countries while making maximal claims for one’s own, whether out of an expansionist urge or an irredentist vendetta or an assumption of regional hegemony and inherent supremacy.  This is not Dan’s purpose in defending nationalism; he advocates a defensive nationalism, a nationalism that minds its own business.  That would be very good, except that nationalism doesn’t work in either of those ways. 

Dan finds it strange that anyone could identify Mr. Bush, his advisors or the neoconservatives as nationalists, yet this is precisely what they are in their own way.  The nation they idealise and worship in and through the nation-state may be a fantasy–the “nation of immigrants,” the “proposition nation,” Kristol’s “ideological nation”–but they are nationalists who value the nation as an embodiment of abstract principles as they understand them, and they are as surely nationalist in this as Jacobins and later French liberals were when they set out to bring the Revolution to other lands.  True enough, they are not nationalists of a “blood and soil” kind, and make a point of rejecting this nationalism.   While I appreciate that the kinds of immigration, trade and foreign policy views that Dan and I share are frequently identified as nationalist, and he is correct that some members of the anti-imperialist and anti-interventionist traditions in America have framed their arguments in terms of national and (sometimes) racial supremacy and exceptionalism, I think that we find those elements of these traditions to be the least compelling and the least persuasive of the arguments advanced by the Anti-Imperialists and America Firsters.  One of the reasons why I think we find these to be the least compelling parts of the argument is that they are premised on nationalist myths of one kind or another, whether it is the idea of exceptionalism or an alleged freedom from the taint of Old World vices and European colonial impulses.             

I didn’t mean to write so much in my first post after returning, but there it is.

P.S.  I would also like to add that what should matter is not so much whether Orwell’s original essay holds up in its entirety, but whether Lukacs‘ use of the distinction makes sense.  On the problems with nationalism, I am also taking cues from Kuehnelt-Leddihn, the decree of the Council of Constantinople of 1878 against phyletism and, to a lesser degree, Aurel Kolnai.

No, not the Hesse novel.  I’m referring to my upcoming whirlwind trip to Taiwan.  I will have very little time in Taipei, and I have just found out that I will be on the west side of the city, but if anyone knows of something worthwhile to visit that doesn’t take much time I would be glad to know it.  Since I will be in the air for about 17 hours starting tomorrow, and I won’t be back in the country until late Sunday Eunomia is going to be very quiet for a few days after this afternoon.  Until I return, check in at the main blog and Taki’s Magazinefor more commentary and blogging.

P.S.  I will, in fact, be journeying far to the west, but you get the idea.

Update: The wave of cancellations that American decided to let loose on the country this week has forced me to change some of my schedule, but it seems that I will still embark on my crazy trip tomorrow afternoon.  May I just say that the people in charge of American should not be allowed to run a lemonade stand, much less a major airline.