My thanks to Scene colleague Matt Frost for his post on Kateb, Wilkinson and patriotism.  I generally agree with his remarks, and I should have more to say about it in coming days.  Let me note that I agree with something Wilkinson said in the comments to Matt’s post:

But please don’t forget the role of the “national greatness” folks. And please recall how mightily the administration worked, successfully, to attach the war to the popular surge of intense post-9/11 patriotism.

Indeed, I am not likely to forget any of this, but to then blame the outcome on patriotism is rather like blaming oxygen for an arsonist’s crimes.  It is true, but irrelevant, that an arsonist would be unable to commit his crimes without oxygen; it does not therefore follow that oxygen is undesirable or that we would be better off without it.  Patriotism is not “fire,” but it is potentially explosive because it is a strong attachment and one charged with emotional power.  Surely there is some middle ground between arson and explosions on the one hand and suffocation on the other.   

It does not therefore follow that “Without that [patriotism], it [the Iraq war] would not have had political legs.”  Initial opposition to any military missions overseas, almost no matter the reason given for them, is consistently in the minority in America.  One of the reasons for this is the ability of the administration in power to manipulate both patriotism and liberal universalist principles and, when the propagandists are really working overtime, to fuse the two together to make the argument that ours is an “ideological nation” (I. Kristol) that will have to engage in conflicts for the sake of liberal democracy and universalism.  For the Jacksonians who are worried that we are engaged in a lot of touchy-feely internationalism, there are the nationalist manipulations of patriotism and the nationalist zeal for power to get them on board; for the “centrists” and liberal hawks there are invocations of America’s “responsibility” to the world and the importance of defending our “values.”  Liberal hawks who fell for this and have since recanted would now like to pretend that the second part of the message was completely empty and insincere, but the reason why the nationalist argument is so powerful–and consequently so dangerous–is that it can deploy an argument for the crude use of hard power and wrap it in decorative packaging of allegedly high-minded liberal principles. 

To the extent that American nationalism is rooted in an exceptionalism derived from political propositions and is not, as we are reminded so often, a nationalism of a particular ethnicity, nationalism and liberal universalism are inextricably bound up together.  To say that the Iraq war was universalist, rather than nationalist, or nationalist rather than universalist is to fall into a pointless, dead-end argument every bit as futile as the dispute over whether this war of aggression should have been “unilateral” or “multilateral.”  It was both nationalist and universalist (and incidentally it was both unilateral and multilateral at times), because the people who clearly are American nationalists are also some of the loudest proponents of projecting power for the sake of what they believe to be universal values.  Usually at this point someone will say, “Aha!  They are universalists, so they can’t be nationalists!”  But this is mistaken. 

How are they nationalists?  They glorify the progressive narrative of national unification and consolidation; they champion the centralisers and expansionists in American history; they identify the country with the state and see the state as the embodiment of the nation, which makes them react against criticisms of the state with accusations of betrayal; they are usually supportive of national wars because they see them as agents for creating national unity out of disparate elements.  Neoconservatives are among these nationalists.  This may seem controversial or strange to those who are accustomed to thinking of neoconservatives simply as universalists or globalists, but thanks to their definition of the nation–an abstraction defined by its regime and political values–they can be the kind of nationalist who quite seriously identifies the power of his nation-state with what he will inevitably frame as the highest aspirations of mankind.  This is nothing new: liberal nationalists all across Europe and the Americas conceived of their struggles for national liberation and liberalism to be one and the same, and often proclaimed future era of national greatness as a means of spreading liberal revolutionary principles to other parts of the world.  French, British and German liberals have all had more than their share of “national greatness” and mission civilisatrice moments, and they are hardly alone.  The aggressive impulses of nationalism are, of course, dangerous enough on their own, but they are made even more dangerous by the respectability that the fusion with liberal principles seems to lend nationalist causes.     

That is what I find so strange about my WWWTW colleague Steve Burton’s comment in which he said:

A frankly nationalist crusade would not have failed anywhere near so badly.

I’m not sure what the argument behind this is, unless it is that a war fought purely to project American power in the Near East and framed simply in terms of our government smashing another state because it could would have generated less Iraqi resistance or would have won greater international support.  The more relevant question might be: failed to do what?  How would the objectives of a “frankly nationalist crusade” have differed substantially from the war as it was actually fought?  Indeed, without the promise that the war would improve the lot of Iraqis and could be classed, however incredibly, as a liberation there would have been less domestic support and even less foreign support.

Will Wilkinson does get this much right:

The kerfuffle over Barack Obama’s pastor is in large part about whether the man is patriotic enough.

Instead of rejecting this kind of attack or pushing back against it, he then proceeds to applaud Obama for his allegedly “inferior patriotism,” which he takes as a given because Obama does not engage in demonstrative patriotism to the same degree as others (as if flag-pin-wearing has a necessary connection to real love of one’s country).  Referring to Kateb’s reply, he says:

He implies something that I believe to be correct: the proud and enthusiastic patriotism of Americans bears a large measure of responsibility for the immoral and failed war in Iraq. This administration’s war would have been impossible had our mindless love of country not made the public rather too ready.

But nationalism, and jingoistic nationalism at that, isn’t patriotism.  Furthermore, patriotism isn’t mindless.  Indeed, once it becomes mindless it has already degenerated into something else.  At the risk of repeating myself, this is the crucial difference between patriotism and nationalism: patriotism is love of one’s country and defensive, while nationalism is expressed typically through contempt and fear of other nations and a will to power over other nations.  The Iraq war was made possible by a propaganda campaign by the government, the exploitation of public fear and anger, the warmongering of nationalists and the twisting of patriotic sentiment into support for a war of aggression by casting the war dishonestly as one of self-defense.  That the administration succeeded in this is not a measure of mindless love of country, but rather a fairly mindless foreign policy consensus that says that small states on the other side of the planet pose meaningful threats to the United States.  To cede that it is patriotism is mainly to blame for the Iraq war, rather than the government’s abuse and manipulation of patriotism, is to let the government off the hook much too easily.

Kateb also said:

In truth, if strict self-defense were ever at stake, patriotism would be unnecessary: people would not require any inflated passion to defend what was not an inflated purpose.

But if we followed Wilkinson’s recommendation and loved freedom while being faithless to any particular country, we would need to have patriotism to inspire us to defend a country that might not be sufficiently liberal in its regime.  Certainly, if the invader promised to liberate us from the restrictive and oppressive regime that ruled our country, we might be inclined to collaborate with the invader if we “loved freedom” and eschewed patriotism.  Never mind for the moment that the logic of this position is identical to that of neo-imperialists who expect foreigners to abandon their patriotic loyalties to help us overthrow their governments.

Replying earlier this month to his critics, George Kateb continues to miss the point:

If patriotism — devotion to the country and obedience to its state for the wrong reasons — has to exist, it should be defensive in temperament and parsimonious in the expenditure of life, including the lives of its enemies, and not mobilize the energies of self-defense and transmute them into the energies of expansion and imperialism.

But that is exactly what patriotism is: devotion to country(stop talking about the state!) and defensive in nature.  Whatever else he is talking about isn’t patriotism.

But to fully love a woman, or a country, is to love some one particular thing. Now, it is surely better to love a woman than to love her qualities. But when it comes to countries, it is better by far to give your heart to freedom, and to love countries themselves incidentally and faithlessly. ~Will Wilkinson

In other words, if America were to become unfree it would be time to abandon it and move on to greener pastures?  It’s not clear to me how this is a credit to the love of freedom, since it basically entails getting out of town as soon as freedom is seriously restricted.  Instead of staying and fighting for freedom and country, this approach involves leaving your country when the going gets tough.  Then again, you wouldn’t want to be oppressed and limited by community or patriotic loyalty, since that might get in the way of your own success.

Richard emphasizes that one need not be some kind of egoist or a pinched individualist unable to value a common enterprise to think this. ~Will Wilkinson

That’s probably true.  It just happens to be the case that a lot of the people who think this tend to be egoists or pinched individualists unable to value a common enterprise, or more to the point they tend to be people who think that a community is a “common enterprise” rather than a group of people who share some fundamental things in common that they did not choose and that these shared things actually matter.  They don’t tend to believe that community is something that creates obligations to which they never consented and which they cannot rightly cast aside.  It is instead something that oppresses and drags down.  But if communities never served other functions they would cease to exist and no one would keep reproducing them. 

I cannot think of anything worse for meritocracy than to insist that it must be opposed to solidarity and community.  This is actually to reinforce the very worst conceivable kinds of community solidarity (and, yes, there are both healthy and unhealthy kinds of this), according to which merit and accomplishment are the marks of the sell-out and meritocracy is the preserve of the deracinated individual.  In many communities, such a stark opposition will lend support to the most self-defeating rejection of upward mobility by making success appear to be betrayal.  The idea that you could go out into the world, advance by merit and accomplishment and then return home to contribute what you have gained to the people in your community evidently frightens the critics of solidarity.  What is rather oppressive is the assumption that community loyalty must be expressed through discouraging achievement.  This is simply false, but it is a useful caricature of community loyalty and communitarianism that allows the critic to reject these things while claiming that he is protecting meritocracy in the process.  Prof. Fox said it well:

it is not as though being authentic to one’s race or ethnicity or community permanently sets one apart from any system of economic responsibility and success.

Indeed, depending on the culture of the community, solidarity will facilitate the economic responsibility and success of the members of that group and provide opportunities that might not have been available.  One need only consider the experience of Diasporan Armenians around the world as one example of this, or the experience of Chinese in various southeast Asian countries and in the West, or the real, if sometimes stereotyped and exaggerated, “desi connection.”  Community self-help, rather than giving the impression of “each man for himself,” represents a better path to improving conditions in any given community.

Chappell says:

The world is a big place, and we needn’t limit our attention to the little corner of it that we’re born into. 

No, no one is making us do this, but why wouldn’t we be most concerned with bettering our little corner?  More to the point, if “self-chosen communities” have value, as Chappell says, why would anyone interested in encouraging meritocracy not want to encourage people to choose to remain in the communities to which they did not originally consent to belong?  There are unchosen obligations that you can run away from or try to ignore, but there seems to be a problem mainly when people respond to these obligations as if they were onerous tasks.  Why not choose to fulfill those obligations?  Your community and your tradition make you who you are, even if you reject them or move away from them.  Is that what bothers these critics so much?  That their identity is ultimately bound up with things beyond their control?  If so, why not embrace your community and then make the best of it on your terms? 

Then there is this:

We should want as many people as possible to join the creative classes — to vacate the working class and its culture, not hold people there and reinforce it.

Isn’t this simply a roundabout way of saying that “we” want people who tend to have stronger communitarian and solidaristic sentiments to become more like “us,” which is to say to have much weaker sentiments of this kind?  But this is not even to call for embourgeoisement of an earlier kind because, as Prof. Lukacs noted in the April Chronicles, “[w]e now live in a largely classless society.”  He continued:

Hundreds of millions of isolated individuals, men, women, couples unsure of where they belong or should belong, unaware of their neighbors and of the community where they temporarily reside.  These conditions of lonesomeness and impermanence include a breakdown of real communications between people who are otherwise told that they live amid the marvels of the Information Age.

This has, and will have, enormous consequences not only in the arts and in literature but in the very assets of people, including their families and their homes.  Family, house, home–the meaning of each of these words has been leached out from the minds of so many people.  More than 200 years ago, Samuel Johnson was–and remains as almost always–right: “To be happy at home is the end of all human endeavor.”  (Dr. Johnson, too, regretted the lives of people who are “afraid to go home and think.”)  To be happy away from home is now the aim of much American endeavor–surely of the young and, alas, of so many adults, too.  A centripetal tendency–and part and parcel of the disappearance of a once estimable and recognizable middle class. 

Instead of encouraging people to stay at home or return home, those speaking on behalf of meritocracy seem intent on telling people to flee.  There ought to be some way to make it possible to have some reasonable possibility of upward mobility without modern nomadism and rootlessness, but to start we would need to stop resisting the idea that what Prof. Luakcs calls “lonesomeness and impermanence” are actually desirable things.

As I mentioned earlier this week, McCain currently leads Obama 52-41 in Virginia.  There seem to be two different kinds of states this year with respect to Obama’s support among young voters.  In previous posts, I have pointed to the strong resistance to Obama among 18-29 year old voters in certaintraditionally“blue”and “purple” states (in “red” states, young voters may be slightly more supportive than their elders or may be no more opposed than the general electorate).  Meanwhile, I should note once again that in other “blue” and “purple” states, such as Minnesota and New Hampshire, he is overwhelmingly popular in this same age group.  So it is in the case of Virginia, where he wins 18-29 year olds 64-29, but then loses every other age group by twelve points or more.  Currently he trails among independents by 19 points, and still loses 15% of Democrats to McCain.  The “good” news for Obama is that Clinton polls much worse, losing Virginia by 22.  Her numbers, especially her fav ratings, have been collapsing all over the place in the wake of her Tuzla lie.

Powell and Rice, appointed by Bush, are the kind of post-racial figures the US, deep down, longs for. ~Geoff Elliott

The failed and incompetent kind?  Yes, I know what Elliott is saying, but wouldn’t it be better if our so-called “post-racial figures” were, well, not complicit in waging an unjust war and generally making a hash of U.S. foreign policy? 

Are we also supposed to believe that Secretary Rice’s background never comes up?  She bringsitup all the time in the context of making strained analogies with her current foreign policy assignment.  Say what you will about that, but the idea that her background is somehow incidental and unnoticed is a bit hard to take.

Forget about the gift to Obama–Elliot’s column is a gift to bloggers.  Consider these lines:

Indeed, Obama embodies the American dream, and at their core most Americans remain idealistic about what is possible as individuals and as a society. Its expression is found across a diverse political spectrum: from the neo-cons’ grand, if likely flawed [bold mine-DL], vision of a militant promotion of democracy, to lofty liberal ideas finding new form in the US in ventures such as Ashoka, a group that is helping fund “social entrepreneurs” to make changes in the environment, human rights and health, where government bureaucracies have failed.

Their “likely flawed” vision?  Is there still any notion that a “militant promotion of democracy” is anything other than inherently wrong and incredibly dangerous?  Are we seriously supposed to include democratist warmongering and fundraising for social work in the same category, as just two kinds of American idealism?  Isn’t the pairing of armed fanatical utopianism with much more modest social activist work the best way to discredit all kinds of idealism?

Now it takes an especially obtuse reader to conclude from theseposts that I think that the Republicans have even a remote chance of retaking either house of Congress this year.  I said nothing of the kind.  I have been saying for almost a year that Republican chances in House and Senate races were terrible, and nothing I said in these posts contradicts that.  I did say that the Colorado Senate race appears competitve, because it does appear competitive, as does Minnesota at the present time.  But when all is said and done, I assume the GOP will lose five or six seats  in the Senate, regardless of McCain’s possible coattails, but no one credible seriously claims that Kentucky is likely to be one of them.  In the House I have explicitly said that I think that there are at least 40+ seats that could realistically be captured by the Democrats this year, and that seems right.  If NM-02, a pretty reliably Republican seat, is really up for grabs, the Democrats could significantly increase their majority.  As for the rest of the silly criticism in the post, the author might want to be careful what he wishes for.  

In an earlier post, there was a line that was worth reading:

With liberalism defined as the center, the right is the enemy of the left, in other words, the forces which hate the left more than they love liberty.

The concept is sound and echoes something from Lukacs, even if it is not nearly as precise as the distinction between rightist and conservative that Chilton Williamson made in the introduction to The Conservative Bookshelf.  In that definition, and I am paraphrasing very loosely, it was the rightist who defended fundamental principles of liberty, constitutionalism and cultural tradition, while the conservative was carried along with the tide and accommodated himself to whichever status quo existed at any given time. 

Lukacs said of modern American conservatives (the “actually existing conservatives” in question):

Many American conservatives, also, gave ample evidence that they were just conservative enough to hate liberals but not enough to love liberty.

Now we have someone, speaking in the name of Burke and Kirk no less (!), lecturing paleos for failing to love a liberal at least in part because we do actually love liberty.  So we are supposed to support Obama, complete with his PATRIOT Act-renewing, FDR-praising statism, and we are supposed to believe that Obama represents  a “positively Burkean answer to the specter of revolution that was on offer from Ron Paul,” when Paul and Obama have one or possibly two things in common.  Then, if we fail to react as irrationally against the destructive tendencies of the GOP and the movement as many conservatives have reacted against the left, we stand accused of some obsession with Obama’s race, as if there could be no other reason for failing to rally around the nominee of what we have called on more than one occasion the Evil Party.  I have never supported a major party nominee for President, and I am not likely to start this year.  Where did the idea come from that it is strange that most paleos are not going to support someone whose views are diametrically opposed to theirs on almost every issue? 

In my case, Obama’s race has nothing to do with my opposition and criticism.  While I cannot speak for anyone else, there is literally no evidence that any of my colleagues at Taki’s Magazine oppose him for that reason, either.  (Indeed, Dr. Gottfried recently expressed sympathy for Obama on account of the attacks being leveled against him.)  Anyone with a Kirkian appreciation of the permanent things would be able to see numerous reasons why Obama is unacceptable to many paleo and traditional conservatives.  The maddening thing about this ridiculous line of attack is that I think I have given Obama more credit and more of the benefit of the doubt than most people on the right, whether paleo or not, and I have focused my criticism on his own words and his record, rather than trying to impute his associates’ words to him.  In return, I and my colleagues are baselessly tarred as racists (or we are given the disingenuous “I don’t know if X is a racist, but…” treatment).  Unsurprisingly, this does not make me any more likely to support Obama.   

Update: Here are tworesponses.  I see several of his points in these posts, and I accept the apology for misinterpreting my views.  In one of the responses, he says:

This is not to say that a more radical and even revolutionary outcome represented by the Paul campaign would not have been desirable or just, but merely that to support Obama in this context is the Burkean position because it is the position of he who would ideally like to avoid a revolutionary upheaval.

Put this way, I understand the argument better, and it is somewhat similar to James’ “softest landing” argument for Obama.  This is not entirely persuasive, since I don’t see much danger of “revolutionary upheaval,” at least not domestically, and it isn’t clear to me why backing Obama contributes to avoiding such upheaval.

This will have to be one of those occasions when I disagree with Ross, who wrote:

To a war-weary nation, Obama’s cool pragmatism has obvious appeal, but on a fundamental level McCain’s calculus is the right one. America’s responsibility for the current stability and future prospects of Iraq — a poor, tyrannized nation that our policies have plunged into bloody chaos — can’t be waved away by pointing out that we could be spending those billions on ourselves instead.

In the first place, Ross overemphasises the extent to which McCain makes an appeal to national responsibility while portraying Obama as the populist calling for reallocating our wasteful spending abroad to wasteful spending at home.  Obama makes a fairly unassailable point that the war is fundamentally harmful to the U.S. military:

And our obligation to rebuild our military will endure as well. This war has stretched our military to its limits, wearing down troops and equipment as a result of tour after tour after tour of duty.

What is one of the United States government’s first obligations?  To provide for the common defense of this country.  Exhausting or damaging our military capabilities on a war that serves no national interest, and which we are apparently perpetuating out of a misplaced sense of guilt and obligation, is the irresponsible and reckless thing to do from the American perspective.  Our resources are not unlimited, and we all know that we cannot maintain current deployments without some major change either to the size of our military or to the size of the deployment in Iraq.  To govern is to choose, and McCain essentially proposes that we choose obligations to Iraqis over obligations to Americans, which is one of the reasons why he wraps his campaign so tightly in the flag.  That is the basic flaw in McCain’s position that Obama exploits quite well in his speech, even if he often expresses it in terms of increased domestic spending.  To accept the standard that Ross sets up (“America’s responsibility for the current stability and future prospects of Iraq”) is to accept responsibility for Iraq for at least a generation, and theoretically for longer than that (“why not 1,000 years or 10,000?” saith McCain).  That is totally and in all ways unacceptable and, more importantly, completely unjustifiable.   

Lofty talk about responsibility makes it seem as if it is the antiwar side that wants to be selfish, while the pro-war side is being high-minded and noble in its concern for Iraqis (never mind for the moment that this concern for Iraqi welfare is and always has been essentially rhetorical for most war supporters), when it is the refusal to give up control and power over another country that reflects the real spirit of aggrandisement and self-importance.  In many respects, a lot of Iraqis will obviously not be “better off” after an American withdrawal (and a lot of them won’t be “better off” if we stay for a decade), but since each attempt to improve the lot of Iraqis for the last 18 years has resulted in the increased immiseration of Iraqis you might suppose that we would stop trying to “help” them.  Indeed, I’m not sure that the Iraqis will be able to survive another four-year term of our responsible and benevolent assistance.  At one time, invading Iraq was conventionally deemed to be the responsible thing to do, and this was partially justified in the name of the Iraqis who have suffered so terribly as a result.  At what point will we abandon this sense that we have a responsibility for the affairs of another state, especially when attempts to fulfill that responsibility have tended to cause that state tremendous damage?  When do we realise that this obsession with our supposed responsibilities to other nations directly undermines the responsibilities that our government has towards its own citizens?  More practically, if we have not fulfilled our obligations to Iraq by now, when will we have done so?  McCain and his backers have no answers for this, but conjure with words such as responsibility and honour and expect that to be enough.  Unfortunately for McCain, his invocations of honour carry about as much weight as Mr. Bush’s lauding of freedom and democracy.  Honourable nations do not attack others without cause or justification, and they do not occupy other countries for extended periods of time in defiance of the wishes of the population.  Let Iraqis take care of their country, and let us attend to ours.       

P.S.  This section from McCain’s speech is just ludicrous:

Our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan are critical in this respect and cannot be viewed in isolation from our broader strategy.  In the troubled and often dangerous region they occupy, these two nations can either be sources of extremism and instability or they can in time become pillars of stability, tolerance, and democracy.  

Iraq was a pillar of stability and tolerance, relatively speaking, until the invasion and democratisation came and empowered religious extremism and created massive instability.  For McCain, it is as if the last five years haven’t happened and the “freedom agenda” is something other than very dangerous wishful thinking.  As George Will once acerbically noted, the “problem” of stability in the Middle East had been solved by the policies advocated by the likes of McCain.  While we are talking about responsibilities, what of American responsibilities to our regional allies, whose security is undermined by our presence in Iraq?

Another section is not much better:

Success in Iraq and Afghanistan is the establishment of peaceful, stable, prosperous, democratic states that pose no threat to neighbors and contribute to the defeat of terrorists.  It is the triumph of religious tolerance over violent radicalism. 

In other words, success is impossible, particularly when the government forces of Iraq are defending the interests of a group such as ISCI (the terrorist group band of noble freedom fighters formerly known as SCIRI).  If they represent religious tolerance, I am a duck.