Page 31 - American Conservative September/October 2015

tone is no less successful now.
Where Orwell is concerned, however, it’s not real-
ly 1984 but rather his 1945 essay “Notes on National- ism” that gets nearest the tenor of the times and best captures the paradox of ardent democrats sounding like New Soviet Men. Orwell applies the term “na- tionalist” less to jingoes from this or that geopoliti- cal entity and more to a habit of mind whose main identification might be ideological, racial, religious, or based, for instance, on party or class. Whatever the affiliation,
A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist—that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating—but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humili- ations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units...
Given a zero-sum state of mind, every day is an existential crisis, and foes foreign and domestic will always be found who must be vanquished—or, al- most better, perennially
and ceaselessly claiming that America doesn’t work in practice somehow lends credibility to the asser- tion that it could still work in theory.
“Acutely conscious of the disarray into which American culture has fallen,” Andrew Bacevich wrote in 1998, “neoconservatives remain intense- ly nationalistic. (Indeed, neoconservative writers sometimes hint that a glorious crusade in a noble cause might be just the thing to reinvigorate the flagging sense of American identity.)” Five years later, while making sure not to let a good crisis go to waste, we set out with preposterous optimism to democratize the Middle East at sword point, though Bacevich had foreseen that our “idealism and high-mindedness ... may prove to be a singu- larly reckless proposition.”
It is this idealism and high-mindedness that has allowed a nation of self-styled reluctant warriors to be one of the great destabilizers of the past 100 years, guided by a Wilsonian philosophy of trans- formative internationalism that is hostile to balanc- es of power and spheres of influence and dedicated to aggressive advocacy of national self-determi- nation, however defined, except in the numerous cases when―taking the entire world as our own
and definingly opposed lest, for example, you push so hard against the Iron Curtain that one day it falls down and you get up covered in znachki.
We’ve managed to out-Lenin Lenin as the most activist, revo- lutionary force on the planet, one that’s ever anxious to shape world events and often successful in doing so.
Orwell reiterates that
nationalism “may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty.” Dovetailing with this idea of negative nationalism is the seemingly contradictory coupling of explicit, almost fetishis- tic patriotism and reflexive disdain for the Ameri- can government and much of the country’s culture, despite which disdain we’re enjoined to keep un- apologetically in mind how exceptional and indis- pensable we are, how only we—whether by exam- ple or by force—can bring the light of reason to a cussed world. Somehow, although Fox-type patri- ots deem the U.S. incapable of executing domestic postal duties without botching the job, Uncle Sam should be thought competent to superintend tor- tuous political, religious, and tribal complexities abroad. This forms part of an inverted political- emotional calculation whereby the degree to which you denigrate America as it actually exists becomes a measure of how much you love it in the abstract,
sphere of influence―we’ve intervened to reshape others’ determination. It was said of Woodrow Wil- son himself by one of his colleagues that he was full of “high ideals but no principles.” Comparing Wilson’s legacy with that of his fellow champion of universal social renewal, Lenin, the historian John Lukacs, writing for National Review in 1974, noted that on that score “Wilson is overtaking Lenin.”
We’ve managed to out-Lenin Lenin as the most ac- tivist, revolutionary force on the planet, one that’s ever anxious to shape world events and often successful in doing so. Whether that’s something to be glad of, something that will continue to enhance our security and prosperity, is another matter. As the descendants of Lenin could attest, revolutions—homegrown or ex- ported—don’t always follow paths of one’s choosing. The question is then whether the unintended conse- quences of past involvements become a pretext for further involvements, whose consequences spur yet further involvements―permanent revolution.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 31