The Campus and the Hope

Yale University students demonstrate for racial inclusion

“It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.” – Mark Twain

Is it possible to rid America of racism?  To make African-Americans completely and comprehensively included in our national life?  To make them feel completely included?  And if that’s seems an impossible dream, then what about eliminating racism from a college campus?  Is that more modest goal conceivable?  And if it is, what tactics are justified in reaching it?  How should we approach that dream?  What do we owe each other?  Because that’s what the controversies at Yale University and Missouri University and other colleges are really all about.

Consider the Yale Halloween costume controversy.  In previous years some students wore racially and culturally provocative costumes, some even including blackface and redface.  This year, a few days before Halloween, a Yale administrative committee distributed suggestions for avoiding costumes that “disrespect, alienate or ridicule segments of our population based on race, nationality, religious belief or gender expression.”  A few students in Silliman College (the largest Yale dormitory residence) privately complained to their resident administrators, known as “masters”, that the university was trying to control their free expression in the choice of costumes.  Those masters, Nicholas and Ericka Christakis, Yale faculty members, were sympathetic, and Ericka subsequently sent out an email of her own, urging students to be less sensitive about Halloween costumes, to ignore or rationally engage with those wearing costumes they found offensive.  She argued that there is value in breaking these kinds of social taboos, and denied it was her job to enforce them. 

But a sizeable number of students strongly disagreed.  A large group confronted Nicholas in the campus yard and demanded he repudiate his wife’s position.  When he refused, on the grounds that a college should provide an open “intellectual space”, a few of the students became belligerent, quite upset that these administrators were refusing to enforce their program of racial inclusion.  To them, Ericka’s email condoned behavior that made them feel excluded, second-class, lesser members of their community.  One unhappy student’s letter to the school paper (since removed) reprimanded the masters for subordinating the real pain of that exclusion to the merely abstract principle of free speech; in her memorable line, “I don’t want to debate. I want to talk about my pain.”

The students are arguing, in effect, that their residence is a home, and the job of the administrators is to make sure it’s a “safe space” where no one feels excluded.  But an administrator is not a parent, a student is not a child, and – most importantly – a college is not a home.  The purpose of a college is to increase and transmit human knowledge and wisdom, and censorship and coercion are its deadly enemies.  If a college is not an open intellectual space then it has undermined its own reason for being.  But really, how have we come to the point where this needs to be said?

Some students, it seems, want much more than just to talk about their pain.  They angrily demand that official institutional power be employed to control Halloween costumes and opinions about costumes, and that dissenting administrators and students be punished.  The students of Amherst College have gone so far as to explicitly state they “do not tolerate” certain dissenting opinions on racial issues.  They’ve demanded that their college suppress those opinions through official proclamation, and that it force stubbornly dissident students to “go through the Disciplinary Process” and “attend extensive training for racial and cultural competency.”  They even demand that the college try to suppress alumni dissent!  Official orthodoxy promulgated, maintained and enforced through firings, denunciations and re-education; behold the new dispensation.  They do not tolerate!

Sadly, the world is full of the intolerable: poverty, disease, war, economic exploitation, sexism, and yes, of course, racism.  The eradication of racism – in the world, in America, on a college campus, in a single dorm – is a goal to be devoutly hoped for, and ardently fought for.  But that ardor must be tempered by practicality, by recognition of reality.  Indeed, part of the radical black analysis of modern America is that it is essentially racist.  Ta-Nehisi Coates, probably today’s pre-eminent African-American intellectual, has written that, “in America, the notion that black people are lacking in virtue is ambient.”  Last year Coates and liberal writer Jonathan Chait argued back and forth on the causes of black poverty, with Coates explicitly arguing that there was little or no hope of ending racism in America.  Damnably, American racism does seem incurable!  It pollutes our cultural bloodstream like alcohol, distorting our perceptions, impairing our judgment, quickening our anger, and eroding our trust.  We drank it so long ago, but it wreaks its havoc even now, and we never sober up.

And it’s not that the students have forgotten their racial pessimism.  Indeed, it only heightens their desire to see racism ended!  The pathologies of their movement – over-sensitivity, incivility, intolerance – flow from the intense desire to make the pain stop while knowing that it cannot stop.  If the pain can intrude into even the leftish-liberal-controlled college campus, then there is no respite, no haven, no safe space.  For years, liberal college administrators have – somewhat disingenuously – told black students that not only could they have such a safe space, they had a right to it.  Then Ericka Christakis – somewhat disingenuously – told them to stop wanting it.  And that reminded them it isn’t really achievable.  Thus, anger.  It is the profound and earnest disappointment that the impossible has not arrived that explains why this movement has come so far off its hinges.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 50’s an 60’s had definite, objective goals in mind: the end of legal segregation, the restoration of political rights, equal treatment in public places.  To a large extent those procedural goals were reached; thankfully, they were reachable.  But the fight for substantive equality foundered, partly because changing minds and culture is much harder than changing laws, and much more subtle.  But the understanding that minds cannot be changed by force is the bedrock of the historical liberal project, and the comprehensive inclusion the students desire requires a degree of control over thought, expression and action that is itself intolerable.  Painfully, American racial pessimism is a perfectly defensible position, but it’s one that should remind anti-racists to tread more lightly, not more heavily.

As a white man – who, despite my best attempts, ultimately knows so little of lived black experience – it’s easy for me to urge caution and prudence in the fight against racism.  But part of what’s gone wrong with the racial inclusion movement is its insistence that the content of an opinion is not as relevant as the background of the person holding it.  In this view, the pain of racial exclusion cannot truly be understood or appreciated except by those who have lived it; therefore, the analysis and actions of those victims should not be questioned. But this is a reasonable premise taken to an unreasonable conclusion.  Even though whites can’t fully understand the black experience they can still make genuine contributions to the racial conversation; they can still make cogent judgments about the state of race relations.  It is possible for a black person to be mistaken about race.

But leftist thought has been heavily influenced by post-modernism, particularly by the doctrine that there are no universal truths, only limited, parochial, and self-serving ones.  Truth with a capital “T” is merely an instrument for settling arguments in favor of the powerful.  That is, discourse which fails to account for cultural presumptions in favor of traditionally dominant groups only appears to give minority arguments their due, in reality it merely perpetuates the domination.  The post-modernist solution is to allow each group its own unimpeachable narrative; since there is no honest objective truth, let all the subjective truths flourish, none with a greater claim on our credence than any other.

Once again, this is a healthy idea taken to an unhealthy extreme.  Being white, male, heterosexual, etc. obviously can make one oblivious to the concerns of those who are not, and that distortion must be guarded against, partly by appealing to minority subjective experience.  But that doesn’t negate the need for objective analysis as well.  It’s reasonable to worry whether black students feel unsafe, but it’s just as reasonable to consider if they’re justified in feeling so.  It’s possible to feel unsafe and simply be mistaken.  We should be more open to minority views on what is or isn’t offensive, but we should also consider whether those arguments are in themselves convincing.  Being a victim of racial injustice obviously can give one special insight into the nature of that injustice, but it does not exempt one’s arguments from fair scrutiny.

But many liberal whites, in effect, believe otherwise.  At root, the post-modern elevation of previously marginalized groups is an attempt to spread social power to those groups.  In other words, this is ultimately about white guilt.  Liberals work so hard to appreciate the staggering horror of America’s racial sins, and rightly so; but they’re so afraid of blaming the victim that they bend over backwards to avoid condemning any black sins.  So liberals earnestly sacrifice their intellectual independence on the altar of racial atonement, hoping as fervently as their black allies that the American soul can be washed clean.  They make themselves scapegoats, vessels for America’s bad conscience on race.  Post-modern rejection of objective judgment simply provides the perfect alibi for rejecting one’s own judgment in deference to the greater racial good.  And it inoculates white liberals against the creeping suspicion that any bits of racism are still lurking within their own souls.  After all, isn’t every American at least a little racist?  Clearly, their hearts are in the right place; their greatest wish is to end racism.  But this post-modern extremism is really disguised penance, white liberal ritual for purifying their own dirty white souls.

There is no longer any white racial politics that’s actually reasonable and constructive; it consists of either masochistic self-denunciation or angry denial.  By the latter, of course, I mean conservatives, the term of art for that group that finds the reality of American guilt too painful to accept.  If white liberals hold that blacks can do no wrong, white conservatives hold that racism is only a quaint historical artifact, an unfortunate detour on the noble road to American greatness, an unimportant detail of our past best forgotten lest it stir up racial problems we’ve happily solved.  In effect, both liberal and conservative whites concede the enormity of American racial criminality and both consequently suffer crippling racial shame, which they’re frantic to escape.  Liberals do so by purging their own souls and projecting all sin onto conservatives, who in turn protect themselves from the tiniest possibility of racial introspection by generously wrapping themselves in the American flag.  The point, of course, is that both are left pure.

But as liberal guilt forgives the worst black transgressions, conservative guilt can’t forgive the smallest.  This is the real danger, that the bullying mob on the left may be met by the vengeful mob on the right; worse, a vengeful mob in the guise of a repressive state.  Blacks are a minority after all, and a mobilized angry white majority can do far more damage than the racial radicals are doing now.  And nothing can bring forth latent conservative impulses in otherwise reasonable people as quickly as an angry black crowd.  Conservative over-reaction to the present campus excess is visibly boiling up.  Even a generally calm-headed conservative like Rod Dreher is eager for a reckoning, oblivious to the danger that it could all-to-easily become violent.  And there’s a lot of unreconstructed hate out there on the farther right; it’s not even that far.  We’re not sobering up; we’re becoming more drunk.

That’s why I urge caution; but by the same token I don’t remotely urge complacency.  We’re all obligated as Americans to resist and overcome racial exclusion.  But the current leftist program is much more likely to cause more damage.  Real progress can happen only if we respect differing opinions and the people who hold them; if we stop dismissing all opposing views as bad faith; if we consider thought and action on the basis of its content and not just the color of its author; if we remember the terrible fallibility of all people, ourselves and our opponents alike; and if we squarely face both the necessity and the impossibly of our fight.  American racism will probably never be eradicated.  It is a sobering thought.  But it is sobriety which we most need at this moment.  There are no safe spaces, nor should we work so hard to procure any.  We can make our country better, we can make our colleges better, we can make ourselves better.  But we can’t do so by silencing, or denouncing, or purifying, or demonizing.  Four hundred years of racial bitterness must be fought, but not with more bitterness.  It must be fought inside each one of us, freely, candidly, and with humility and charity.  The safe spaces that need to be nurtured are those inside our own heads.  And we do that by renouncing false hope, and embracing the real thing. 

The Socialist Who Saved Liberalism

“I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.”  – William Morris

Bernie Sanders says he’s a socialist, but he’s not.  It’s true that the misapplication of political labels is a venerable tradition in American politics – consider the Puritan Social Darwinists who call themselves conservatives, the multiculturalist particularists who call themselves liberals, the Old Rightist Neo-Confederates who call themselves libertarians.  But let’s not add to that confusion.  Sanders’ program advocates using activist government to rebuild infrastructure; raise the minimum wage; make college free; increase regulations on Wall Street; institute single payer healthcare; make taxes more progressive; empower unions and worker co-ops.  He rails against “the casino capitalist process by which so few have so much and so many have so little”, and hopes for “a society where all people do well, not just a handful of billionaires” and a “government that represents all of us, not just the wealthiest people in the country.”  That is, present-day capitalism has come off the leash; it isn’t working for most working people and the excess concentration of wealth corrupts democracy.  His analysis is spot-on and his program is full of good practical ideas, but is this socialism?

The essential doctrine of socialism is that capitalism is irredeemably exploitive in that it forces workers to sell their labor to produce goods whose value is stolen by the investors who control that production.  Individualist liberal theory – like that of John Locke and Adam Smith – is used to justify capitalism, but it’s just an alibi excusing the concentration of economic and political power (which is really just economic power) in capitalist hands.  This view reached its most sophisticated and influential theoretical exposition, of course, in the work of 19^th century political philosopher Karl Marx.

Classical Marxism holds that the essential contradiction of capitalism – that production is broadly socialized, but profit goes to a small ruling class – would inevitably lead to its downfall, once workers realized their objective condition and their true class interests.  Most early socialists organized workers in the hopes of increasing their economic power, either through explicitly pro-labor electoral politics, or trade unions, or both.  But the ultimate goal was a society where communal control of production – via unions or worker cooperatives or the state – spelled the end of capitalism and its system of forced, alienated and exploited labor.

But then, in early 20^th century Russia the young intellectual firebrand, Vladimir Lenin, created a new version of socialism.  According to Lenin and his followers, the working class would never achieve true class-consciousness on its own; only a small vanguard party of intellectuals in possession of true theory could work the magic needed to replace capitalist hell with socialist heaven.  The workers would be herded and directed and controlled, all in their own true interests.  Once in power, of course, Marxism-Leninism became horribly totalitarian: the leaders controlled the party, which controlled the state, which controlled everything and everyone else.  This is classic Communism, as espoused and practiced by Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Ho, Che, Castro, Kim Il-Sung, etc.  Hardly workers paradise.

As the original Democratic Socialism was confronted on its left by Communism, a new ideology, Social Democracy, arose on its immediate right.  Social Democracy is still socialist in analysis – it considers capitalism fundamentally exploitive – but it has a much more moderate and pragmatic program.  Informed by both the failure of capitalism to self-destruct – despite war, depression and decades of socialist agitation – and the failure of socialism to become established other than in its nightmarish Leninist form, social democrats accepted capitalism as a social reality, but tried to bring about socialist ends within the capitalist system.  After coming to power in northern Europe, they heavily regulated capitalism, redistributed its bounty, and provided a safety net for its downtrodden.  That is, they established the welfare state.  But since this is socialism that has made its peace with capitalism (even if only programmatically) it’s no longer really socialism.  Real socialists – Communists and Democratic Socialists – consider capitalism organically incapable of justice, and so view Social Democracy as a sellout and a sham.  To Social Democrats, socialism is a nice idea that has proven historically impossible.

These are the three main groupings of socialist-inspired thought (there’s also Anarchism, which is socialist ends through thoroughly libertarian means).  Clearly Bernie Sanders is neither a Communist nor a Democratic Socialist, since there’s nothing in his rhetoric or his program indicating he yearns to end capitalism, merely regulate it and redistribute its riches a little more equitably.  So is he a social democrat?  Should we label anyone who supports a welfare state (as opposed to the actual socialist destruction of capitalism) as a social democrat?

Lyndon Johnson, also not a socialist.

No.  Consider American liberals and the welfare state they created.  Franklin Roosevelt and the New Dealers used the federal government to promote labor unions; regulate banking and finance and labor markets; provide economic relief to the poor, the elderly, farmers, and workers.  In his 1944 State of the Union address, FDR proposed his “Economic Bill of Rights”, which would have (if not blocked by a conservative Congress) guaranteed to every American a good job, a decent home, healthcare, old-age security, a good education, etc.  Harry Truman pushed for increased unemployment and Social Security benefits, full employment, increased worker safety protections, universal healthcare, public housing, public works, aid to veterans.  Lyndon Johnson ended racial segregation and provided medical care for seniors and the very poor.  And in the first real expansion of the welfare state since LBJ, Obama finally instituted (near) universal healthcare.  This all sounds a lot like social democracy.

But it’s not; it’s modern liberalism.  Both social democracy and modern liberalism support a robust welfare state, but for very different reasons.  Classical liberalism, as defined and expressed by thinkers like Locke, Smith and John Stuart Mill, held that individuals and their rights are logically and morally prior to society.  So no one has any natural claim of authority over anyone else and political power is legitimate only when individuals consent to it.  Classical liberal theory arose during the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th centuries, as the creaking feudal structure was replaced by the free market, nationalism, individual rights and representative democracy; all of these being instituted to allow individuals greater control over their own lives.  By the end of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries full-spectrum classical liberalism had become the established way of life in most advanced Western countries.

But once dominant its downsides became apparent.  Specifically, capitalism was generating enormous wealth, but that wealth was mostly going to the capitalists, not the workers, who were forced to work in terrible conditions for meager pay.  Also, capitalist economy went through dramatic boom-and-bust cycles, causing widespread hardship and social instability.  Socialism arose to explain these symptoms as manifestations of capitalism’s fundamental irrationality.  But liberalism’s critique of capitalism is based upon support for individual freedom and democracy and the desire for social stability.  That is, the completely free market leaves most workers with very little bargaining power, it constricts their options and their lives, it concentrates too much power in the hands of the rich, it corrupts the democratic process, and it opens the door to dangerous radical change.

Thus liberals tried to rescue workers from economic bondage, and save capitalism – their invention! – from its own excesses.  Hence, the liberal welfare state (which is generally a little milder than the social democratic version).  This new liberalism – using the state for the prudential amelioration of capitalism in order to increase individual freedom – was quite different from classical liberalism; it’s been called welfare state liberalism, welfarism, progressivism, social liberalism, modern liberalism.  That is, through a sort of convergent evolution, some socialists moved right and some liberals moved left and they met in the welfare state middle.  Their programs became very similar, but their respective ideological motivations remained unchanged, and therefore quite divergent.  Social democrats still considered capitalism exploitive at its heart; modern liberals still supported it in theory while wishing only to mitigate its most pernicious assaults on freedom and democracy.  But both gave up their utopian dreams – of pure socialist justice, and pure capitalist freedom, respectively – and accepted the good and bad in capitalism, once tamed by the welfare state.  To social democrats welfare-state capitalism is the least bad economic system that’s practically possible; to modern liberals it’s an improved version of an imperfect but essentially beneficial system.  A social democrat is a socialist who knows socialism is impossible; a modern liberal is liberal who knows that capitalism must be made better.

This is why it’s not fair to call Sanders a socialist; he’s clearly a fairly typical welfare state liberal, in the historically popular mold of the great 20^th century New Deal liberals.  So why does he call himself a socialist?  Because liberalism has changed so much since Lyndon Johnson.  The success of modern conservatism and its electoral dominance, particularly since the rise of Ronald Reagan, subdued liberals.  Many, such as Bill Clinton and Al Gore, became New Democrats, largely giving up the liberal critique of capitalism and promoting privatization and deregulation.  In technical terms they became neo-liberals, trying to achieve welfare-state ends through private means.  They partnered with conservatives to expand free trade, end the federal guarantee of social assistance to poor families, and deregulate banking and investment.  Old-fashioned welfare state liberalism lost its political leaders to conservative polices, its white working class constituency to racially charged right-wing populism, and its intellectual and cultural elite to libertine, cosmopolitan multiculturalism.

That is, post 60’s liberalism became much less focused on economic struggles and much more focused on issues of cultural emancipation: social equality for racial minorities, women, gays, etc.  This was partly the influence of countercultural movements like the hippies, feminists, black nationalists, etc., and also the influence of the New Left, that baby boomer, student movement against conformity, white supremacy and militarism.  New Leftists started the 60’s as reformist liberals hoping to cure then-dominant technocratic liberalism of its bureaucratic and paternalistic excesses, and create a racially healed, individually fulfilling and humane liberalism.  As liberalism was the conscience of capitalism, they aimed to be the conscience of liberalism.  But as that fateful decade proceeded and they felt the stinging disappointment of liberalism’s failure to end racial injustice and Cold War extremism, they came to see liberalism as the enemy of its putative humanitarian goals.  They became convinced that America was fundamentally compromised by racism, militarism and capitalism.  Most of them became social democrats; but many moved farther left, in fits and starts; some slid all the way to Communism; a small number even embraced Communism’s farther extremes, idealizing horrible tyrants like Mao, Kim and Hoxha.  Thus modern welfare-state liberalism lost its intellectual support to both its right and its left, though it still commanded a large, orphaned constituency among actual working people.

When he was a socialist, sort of.

Bernie Sanders is a child of the New Left.  Born in 1941, he’s a little bit older than the typical baby-boom New Leftist, but he was very much part of the counterculture, the sexual revolution, the anti-war movement, and the ideological opposition to capitalism.  That is, he once was an actual socialist, albeit something of a libertarian hippie one.  But as he became involved in electoral politics – mayor of the very liberal city of Burlington, Vermont, then independent Congressman from Vermont, and now Senator – his natural personal pragmatism moved him on both economic and cultural issues further to the right, that is, toward the old welfare-state liberal center.  As the rise of Reaganism moved welfare-state liberals over to neo-liberalism, it moved Bernie from vague socialism over to welfare-state liberalism. He was a New Leftist who came to understand the necessity of defending the welfare state against the conservative and neo-liberal onslaught of the last 40 years.  Now he’s a liberal who calls himself a socialist, but mostly because respectable establishment liberals as a whole abandoned real liberalism decades ago.  And that nicely explains why the primary defender of real liberalism is such an eccentric.

It has fallen to a New Leftist to rescue liberalism.  That someone came out of that starkly anti-liberal tradition to save liberalism is an irony too exquisite, but the justice is poetic, and the lesson is clear.  Just as socialism was an overreaction to the flaws of capitalism, New Leftist abandonment of the traditional welfare state was an overreaction to the compromises and half-broken promises of 20^th century liberalism.  Socialism was never a real possibility in America – thank God! – and it still isn’t – thank God!  Even if Sanders were elected and somehow managed to institute his entire program, and even if the entire world came to call it socialism, it would still really just be modern liberalism, the most popular, successful, broadly prosperous, and humanitarian ideology since feudalism went sloughing off to its happy demise.  Bernie, welcome home.

Iraqi Reality and Conservative Denial

Jeb Bush cannot escape his brother's record

When Jeb Bush was asked on Fox News whether he would have ordered the invasion of Iraq knowing what we know now, he fumbled badly, but he crystallized a new conservative consensus on the issue.  That consensus consists of two points.  First, the intelligence available at the time was unmistakable that Saddam had an active WMD program and had ties to al Qaeda.  Second, the Bush administration’s acceptance of that faulty intelligence and its decision to invade was an honest mistake, a mistake that any reasonable person would have made given that intelligence.  The inescapable conclusion (though some still try to escape it) is that we should not have invaded, that the momentous cost did not cover the dubious benefit.  Other than pathological denialists, everyone now accepts that conclusion, and there’s a definite satisfaction in such a broad acceptance of a truth that had for so long been so strenuously denied.  This is big: movement conservatives now admit the war was wrong.

But despite conservative progress on this issue, there’s still a long way to go.  That is, the two points of the conservative consensus are simply false; they’re evasions, alibis that allow conservatives to concede the undeniable folly of the war without conceding that Bush and his advisors were the source of the folly.  But they were.  They deliberately pushed the country into war and misrepresented the facts to do so, and most conservatives were complicit in that dishonesty.  And if Bush was merely misled – instead of wrong or foolish or dishonest – then why weren’t we all misled?  Many people, most of them liberals, understood the weakness of the case against Saddam at the time, and tried desperately to stop the war before it began.  The new conservative consensus concedes those people were right, but it provides no explanation why.  More importantly, given that the wrongness, foolishness and dishonesty of the war were all too apparent at the time, why did anyone support the war?

Consider the different categories of supporters.  The naïve: those who trusted the president, as Americans generally do on questions of war and peace.  The cowed: those afraid to appear weak on defense issues.  The vengeful: those whose rage at the humiliation of 9/11 had not been assuaged by the war in Afghanistan.  The bullies: those eager to throw around American weight, to prove we’re still the big boys.  The obsessed: neo-conservatives and their ideological companions, who had been fixated on the destruction of Saddam since the First Iraq War of 1991.

But why were neo-cons, and conservatives in general, so obsessed with Saddam, so eager to go to war that they ignored the facts?  Many neo-cons had been making the case for years that America needed to reassert herself militarily, that American might, resolutely asserted, could help pacify a chaotic world.  And, more importantly, it would bring America back to those martial virtues – self-sacrifice, fortitude, resolve, assurance – that had made her great.

Those virtues had been undermined by the self-doubt and timidity that had overcome us after the failure of Vietnam.  Yes, Vietnam.  Other than the relatively minor Iraq war of ’91, we had not kicked ass in any serious way since the fall of Saigon.  Before Vietnam, almost no American doubted the manifest truths of American exceptionalism, that America and Americans were morally superior to other countries, that our military actions are always justified and always motivated by pure benevolence, that we were always victorious because we were good and God was on our side.  It’s all quite foolish, of course, but it’s not easy to give up the fairy tales of childhood, even our national childhood.

But conservatives are determined to never give them up.  And 9/11 afforded them the perfect opportunity to reassert them.  Our enemies were purely evil, our massacred countrymen were entirely innocent, and the barbaric and vicious attack on our homeland filled us with righteous wrath; the dead called out for justice and our wounded pride called out for vindication.  But, the subsequent destruction of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that had protected and nurtured al Qaeda did not satisfy that wrath.  Why not?  Maybe it was because it didn’t include American troops marching into a defeated enemy capital and instituting honest American administration.  Nothing can compete with the sight of American boys confidently parading through the rubble of Tokyo and Berlin.  So Saddam could be the new Hitler and Baghdad the new Berlin.

A president looking tough

But somehow, inexplicably, it all went wrong.  The natives refused to be pacified.  They broke out in savage fighting, among themselves, and against those honest American boys.   Conservatives hadn’t buried Vietnam, they’d exhumed it.  Vietnam had been a study in hubris, but Iraq was a study in denial, the determined refusal to accept the lessons of Vietnam.  And long after the successful invasion turned into a failed counter-insurgency, conservatives refused to accept that a complex reality had defeated their simple dreams.  But now – thank God! – they’ve arrived at a way to think about the war that preserves their American mythology.  You see, it wasn’t just Bush who was misled by the intelligence.  The new consensus doesn’t just exonerate Bush, it exonerates America.  So much rests upon that thin reed of “faulty” intelligence!

And really, it exonerates conservatism.  Or rather, it’s a failed attempt to exonerate it.  Because, at bottom, the conservative instincts of unreflective assurance and belligerence – shared by elite neo-cons and grassroots conservatives – were the real source of the Iraq disaster.  Bush’s faults are the faults of conservatism itself: the elevation of action over reflection, brazenness over wisdom, toughness over prudence, appearing tough over being tough.  These are the faults of wounded adolescent pride, and they are the faults of American excess.  The real question that needs to be asked of presidential candidates and of anyone with any influence over American foreign policy is not, “What would you have done if you had know then what we know now?”, nor even “Why did you support the war at the time?”  The real question is “Do you share those foolish instincts and honor that discredited mythology?”  Because anyone who does, or surrounds himself with advisers who do, should be mistrusted and rebuked, and disqualified from high office.

Patriotism Unraveled

Military equipment left behind by the Iraqi Army as they fled from ISIS

No one is a better representative of old-time right-wing populism than Pat Buchanan, and no one understands better than an old-time right-wing populist why men are willing to fight and die in war.  When Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter bitterly complained that the city of Ramadi had fallen to vicious ISIS jihadis because the Iraqi Army lacked the “will to fight”, Buchanan jumped up with the explanation:

Why do these rebels seem willing to fight for what we see as antiquated beliefs, but all too often our friends do not fight? Perhaps the answer is found in Thomas Babington Macaulay: “And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his gods?”

Tribe and faith. Those are the causes for which Middle Eastern men will fight. Sunni and Shiite fundamentalists will die for the faith. Persians and Arabs will fight to defend their lands, as will Kurds and Turks.

People who’s primary loyalty is Sunni or Shiite will fight to promote or protect their faith, and people who’s primary loyalty is to their nation (Persians, Kurds, etc.) will fight to promote or protect their nation.  These are natural, visceral motivations; a society, or a gang, or a hunter-gatherer tribe, or a band of chimpanzees – each takes what it wants and keeps what it takes.  As a fundamentalist himself, Buchanan may wrestle with the facts of biological evolution, but he well understands the animal nature of man.

But do liberals?  Pat doesn’t think liberalism can really motivate anyone, or at least anyone in the Middle East:

But who among the tribes of the Middle East will fight and die for the secular American values of democracy, diversity, pluralism, sexual freedom, and marriage equality?

Rod Dreher takes the argument to its logical next step (his italics):

The more unsettling question is coming our way may well be: But who among the tribes of the United States will fight and die for the secular American values of democracy, diversity, pluralism, sexual freedom, and marriage equality?

Would anyone fight for modern liberalism, for the cult of individual expression, for the impoverished post-modern liberation from all commitment?  The question answers itself.  But what about the other side of modern liberalism, the social justice warriors brimming with idealistic commitments to racial and gender equality, etc.?  Those are wholly admirable and laudable ideals, but could that ideological commitment motivate the sacrifice and devotion that are required for an ideology’s survival in an eminently hostile world?  Consider that the objective of the social justice warriors is a world in which everyone, regardless of race, gender, etc., is openly admitted to that aforementioned empty freedom, that emaciated emancipation.  Of course, fighting for freedom is a cliché, but a misleading one.  Fighting for freedom typically means fighting to remove some outside domination over one’s group; it’s about collective freedom, not individual license. And freedom per se, freedom devoid of content or purpose, is just not something worth dying for. 

Is it conceivable that a society composed of only social justice warriors would take up arms to defend itself against military incursion by religious fundamentalists or Ayn Rand supporters or any other similarly retrograde group?  Barely.  But would they defend America if it were under attack?  How can we suppose that when it’s not clear that they would defend their own hypothetical Social Justice Utopia?  And they tend to be some version of pacifist.  And they generally consider national allegiance to be old-fashioned, foolish and destructive.  Some of them are skeptical that America is a place worth saving.  But some are not.

Fascists and communists in the inter-war years were also quite certain the liberal democrats would prove feckless when push came to shove, that they would not have the courage or determination to resist the totalitarian onslaught.  They were a little right at first – Chamberlain at Munich, 1938 – and very wrong later – Hitler in the Bunker, 1945.  So, hasn’t liberalism proven itself?  No, the liberalism that defeated fascism was a very different liberalism than the modern kind; or more precisely, it wasn’t just liberalism.  It’s true that the American leaders and American military men and women were fighting for liberal values like freedom and equality, but they were also fighting for their homeland and their people.  They fought because they loved their country, and a country is much more than just its political principles.  The British fought for their empire, the French fought to repel the Nazis, as did most of Europe.  Even the Soviets fought for Mother Russia.  Buchanan’s truth wins again. Liberalism alone without pre-liberal, pre-modern commitments of blood and soil is incapable of eliciting the devotion and sacrifice needed to withstand the invader’s onslaught.

Even now, most of the men and women in the American military are true patriots (and those who needed a career or a simply a steady job).  And patriots in America today are more likely to be conservative (sometimes excessively so).  So, if we can’t rely on liberals to fight for America, we always have conservatives to fall back on, right?

Well, maybe.  Rod Dreher, conservative but thoughtful Christian, worries that America, in becoming more liberal, more sexually liberated, is becoming hostile to traditional Christianity.  And he’s not happy at the thought of his own children fighting overseas for an America that no longer solidly represents him and his values:

And I don’t want them killing or dying to replace the very real evils of traditional societies with the evils of our own civilization — especially when our civilization, in law and custom, is in the process of turning on people of my religion, and seeing us as the enemy within. Put bluntly, I don’t want my children to risk death — their own or somebody else’s — for the secular American values of democracy, diversity, pluralism, sexual freedom, and marriage equality, especially when the most important American value — freedom of religion — is going into eclipse.

Dreher contends, not entirely without reason, that opposition to gay marriage (and other aspects of the sexual revolution) has evoked social condemnation of traditionalist Christians as homophobes and bigots.  He is, in effect, saying that traditionalists have become something of a persecuted minority in their own country, and it’s not fair to ask them to fight for a country that doesn’t treat them fairly.  That is, Christians now are a little like blacks were in the bad old days.  When Muhammed Ali refused to fight in Vietnam for a country that denied his equality at home he explained, “No Vietcong ever called me n----r.”  Dreher is saying, “No jihadi ever called me homophobe.”  Apparently, both he and Ali knew who their real enemies were.

Who's he talking to?

To be sure, Dreher’s hesitation to fight for America only applies to overseas missions; he would be only too eager to defend America herself from attack.  And it’s not clear how much Dreher’s pessimism regarding anti-Christian persecution is felt among the wider conservative Christian population.  But conservatives are becoming more and more aware that the America they thought they owned is slipping away from them.  What will happen when conservatives as a whole conclude that defending America is for them a losing proposition?  Will both sides disdain America as belonging to the other?  Is every version of American patriotism unraveling?

If it does come to pass that conservatives, in effect, opt out of American identity – as liberals have already substantially done – then almost no one will willingly fight for America in a foreign land.  Would our expeditionary forces then be only mercenary?  But there can be no doubt – can there? – that if America were being invaded almost every American would come to her rescue.  And we know that conservatives will.  That is, conservatives, being conservatives, will always love the land and their piece of it, and always be willing to fight and die for it.  Even if they no longer feel compelled by America as a whole, they will always be compelled by some version of Buchanan’s ties of tribe and faith.  That is their strength and their failing.

Modern liberals make truly admirable political and social and intellectual leaders, but terrible soldiers.  Just as conservatism un-moderated by liberal notions of individualism and equality slips too easily into parochialism and intolerance, liberalism unmoored from national affection and commitment slips too easily into cosmopolitan affectation and universalist uselessness.  We need each other.  And more to the point, America would be much better off under an intelligent synthesis of both world-views, alloyed with good amounts of pragmatism and conciliation.  Conservatives need to understand that America is more than a vessel and instrument of static conservatism.  It’s a growing, changing, evolving, living thing.  And liberals need to bring their idealism back down to earth.   They could think globally and act nationally, but only if the nation actually means something to them.  And all that really means is recognizing that they are Americans, essentially and irrevocably.  Liberalism is as much an organic outgrowth of American history as is conservatism.  We are all heirs of our common history.  But that history has hope of continuing only if we’re all willing to accept that inheritance, and the responsibilities it brings, and each other.