An excellent point. The Court repudiated the propositionalists Utopia — just not in the way which points toward sanity.

It is remarkable how long people can go on as if nothing noteable has happened, when in fact a revolution has been made not merely within the forms of society, but within the words.

The consistent pursuit of liberal individual rights _must_ lead to leftist group rights. In the name of eliminating discrimination, and on the assumption that all people are basically the same beneath their differences, members of formerly excluded groups are admitted. But in admitting them the host society is not, as it imagines, admitting pure interchangeable individuals; it is admitting people from cultures and ethnicities that are very different from its own, even profoundly incompatible. Once the people of those distinct groups have been admitted in any numbers, and being very much aware of their own distinctiveness, they will inevitably seek rights and protections for themselves as a distinct group.

Thus liberals, denying differences between themselves and other peoples, remove all discriminations against people who are, in fact, substantively different. After admitting those people into their society and their institutions, the liberals suddenly realize that vast differences now exist within their society that had never been there before. But, since non-discrimination is their only principle, they cannot abandon the non-discriminatory imperative. So instead they redirect it, AWAY from the pure universal individual (who is now realized to be myth), and TOWARD the substantive cultural and racial differences of the group to which that individual belongs. Non-discriminatory acceptance of individuals in the name of their assumed sameness, becomes non-discrimatory acceptance of groups in the name of their unassimilable differences.

Thus the ideology of individual procedural equality turns into the ideology of group equality of results.

Mr. Auster,

By following your logic about Liberalism, then I would imagine that the assimilative forces in society which serve to re-shape minority cultures into ones in line with the majority are the natural counters to Liberalism. So what are these forces in our society, and what do you think we can we do to strengthen them?

There is not some button we can press to release assimilative forces (just as there is not some button that the neoconservatives can press to release the “forces of democratization” in the Muslim world). As I wrote in my article “What is European America?”, before any such curative process can begin, there must first be a majority culture that exists and asserts itself AS the majority culture. That would require that liberalism cease to be the absolute ruler of society, as it is now, and that traditional, non-liberal values—such as nationhood, religion, traditional morality, civilizational identity, local self-government, and so on—assume their rightful place in the order of society.

Also, we must realize that if such a majority culture had existed, it would never have admitted so many unassimilable people in the first place. So the first order of business for a renewed majority culture would be to stop letting in more unssimilables and to tell the ones already here that this country has a majority culture and does not intend to allow it to be destroyed. Such a simple statement of self-existence—which has been shamefully missing in the West since at least the mid-20th century—would transform majority-minority relations for the better and help restore sanity in a world that has gone mad.

This is a very interesting post, and their proposed solutions to the underlying problems will tell us much about how proposition nation (PN) neoconservatives really see the United States. The question, from their point of view (not mine: I do not believe the United States is, or should be, a PN, even if one could define and maintain such a thing) is what kind of PN should America be? Should it be the individual-rights-above-all PN, which would require limits on immigration to preserve; or the open-door, universal PN constantly renewed by unlimited immigration, which would require government discrimination in favor of immigrants to hold the thing together? My guess is that they will pledge their allegiance to the latter while pretending that the former still exists.

The first thing to remember about neocons is that they are not conservative. Faced with a tradition that gets in the way of any universal proposition they wish to apply, they will purge the tradition every time. Neocons are liberals. Perhaps they are soft liberals compared to Democrat-style hard liberals, but liberals nonetheless. Perhaps they do not hate everything about traditional America as hard liberals do, but not hating something does not automatically lead to a willingness to defend it.

In a social welfare state that grants preferences to groups on racial bases while allowing tens of millions of foreigners of preferred races to move in, the tension between individual rights and group entitlements is irreconcilable. We are nearing the point (for anyone who is awake, long past it) at which one can no longer pretend that individual liberty is the basis of the American polity. This summer the ruling elite made clear, through its legislature of convenience, the U.S. Supreme Court, that preferential entitlements for favored groups are the organizing principle of the American establishment. The Michigan cases establish that non-whites are preferred, the Lawrence case that homosexuals are to be cosseted. Neocons have decried those rulings, but their complaints have a pro forma air - they will soon accommodate themselves to the new order and find ways to pretend it is good. When traditionalists point out the obvious, neocons will rebut with lame claims about how much freer we still are than those enervated socialists in Old Europe. The Hegelian Mambo at work.

Neocons have lost the individual rights fight, so the PN they misconstrued the Declaration of Independence as establishing is off the table, likely for good. What of the other PN - the melting-pot, Nation Of Immigrants PN? Neocons, as triumphalist liberals, need to believe that America is a uniquely virtuous nation conferring benefits on the world that no mere country ever could. The Nation Of Immigrants fits the bill nicely, and has great personal resonance for neocons (as for any liberals) of immigrant stock. The establishment is unanimous in paying homage to The Nation Of Immigrants, and neocons are thoroughly establishment. The real fault line in America is between traditionalist conservatives who have social and cultural objections to mass immigration on one hand, and hard liberals and soft liberals (neocons) who favor it as they boldly go along toward Wattenberg’s First Universal Nation on the other. Few neocons appear to have much concrete attachment to America’s real history or actual founding, beyond quoting the Declaration of Independence out of context and venerating Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. (That should not surprise: they are liberals, after all.) As for the assimilability question raised in these posts, I doubt most neocons are really any more interested in assimilating immigrants to an American norm than hard liberals are. In The Nation Of Immigrants what is the norm, anyway?

I must disagree with Mr. Auster. There is an American majority culture. It is more diffuse than the majority culture of, say, France (pre-Moslem) and Japan, but it exists and not so long ago Americans knew what it was and were generally comfortable with it. Its British and Christian essentials had been leavened by immigrant influences, but the core remained strong because earlier immigrants were largely compatible and their immigration was not relentless and unceasing, as is today’s. There was a tacit understanding that immigrants would, within reason, conform or go home.

For reasons that take up more space than we have, America’s ruling elite has abandoned any idea that part of their role is to defend their country’s culture and traditions. I would argue that has been true of most of the American elite since the New Deal, if not before, but their estrangement from the country they rule has accelerated beyond measure since the 1960s. The neocons, for all their America the Empire flag-waving, are a subset of that estranged elite, far more at home in the urban establishment of New York and Washington than among ordinary Americans.

Race, too, is critical. Like all liberals, neocons have an aching need to feel good about themselves. Being especially nice to minorities is the American liberal’s favorite way of feeling good about himself. The neocons will adapt to, even revel in, the racial-preference regime; their favorite politician is GW Bush, who works to entrench “diversity” and mass immigration as assiduously as a Democrat. How long will it be before NR is defending it? HRS

One point in Mr. Sutherland’s comment is striking to me, because I just recently had the same thought myself. It’s that in the wake of Grutter, the conservatives will pretty much drop any pretense of their former ideology (individual-rights conservatism), though they will probably still use the word conservative. They will start to sound like David Horowitz or Dinesh D’Souza, lauding tolerance and inclusion and multiculturalism and a diversity of moral values as the hallmarks of America. The difference between a “conservative” and a liberal will then be that a conservative will celebrate America for these things, while a liberal will still bitterly complain that America has much further to go before these ideals are realized.

See pp. 34-35 of my booklet, Erasing America, where I discuss the three stages by which conservatism devolves. Re-reading that passage now in the aftermath of Grutter, I realize that it was predictive of what has happened.

Stage one: Conservative define America as individual rights, plus common language and culture, and a bit of historical knowledge.

Stage two: They stop saying that America is defined by its language and culture. They define America as individual rights plus the inclusion of foreign cultures, which they now celebrate instead of expecting them to assimilate to a common culture. The transition to stage two was Bush’s speech in Miami in August 2000 which I’ve often discussed.

Stage three: “The next step is to say that America is not defined even by individual freedom and equality, but simply by its openness to other cultures—even cultures, like Islam, that have no respect for individual freedom and equality. This last stage was delineated in the aftermath of the 9-11 attack, when Americans for the first time clearly saw Muslims’ profound enmity and total incompatibility with our country, and simultaneously pretended, in the interests of ‘peace’ and ‘tolerance,’ not to see it. The result has been the acceptance of radically anti-individual, radically anti-Western religions and cultures in our country; indeed, the more alien and dangerous they are, the more they are assured of our special protection and nonjudgmental concern.”

So, in any case, this is my answer to the question I had been asking since Grutter was issued: Will the conservatives become dissidents to this new post-Grutter regime, or will they give up their individual-rights ideology, and thus cease being “conservatives”? I think the answer will turn out to be the latter.

Also, I wanted to add, I never heard before the distinction Mr. Sutherland makes between two types of Proposition Nation: the individual-rights kind, and the “Nation of Immigrants” kind. That’s very useful.

Mr. Auster’s three stages of decline capture the trajectory well - I’ll have to read the essay!

My distinction between the two types of PN came to me as I was trying to imagine not only how neoconservatives (soft liberals) will find a way to declare victory in the wake of the summer’s catastrophes, but what Cause they would laud next. Liberals need a Cause, so the neocons must have one, and nothing so pedestrian as the defense of a real, particular country can provide the universalist thrill that is needed to keep liberals feeling important. Our foreign policy mission civilisatrice gives them a jolt, but true liberals need more. Actually, the neocons’ willingness to boss around the rest of the world for its own good is well served by the notion of the United States as The Nation Of Immigrants: who better to order the world than the one nation that is the world?

The only people for whom there appears to be no place in the American world-nation are contrarian Americans. Remember the Wattenberg dictum, to which most neocons (especially the alien ones such as Max Boot and David Frum, probably d’Souza and Ponnuru as well) subscribe: the world is full of Americans, most just haven’t made their way to America yet. And its corollary: that born Americans who do not uncritically hold the Proposition (whatever it is) are not truly American and are less worthy to live here than foreigners who do. It is nation as project, not place and people.

Liberals understand labels, if nothing else. Think “pro-choice” for abortionist, “undocumented immigrant” for illegal alien, “homophobe” for anyone with reservations about homosexuality, “heterosexual” for normal people. The neocon strain of liberal is not about to give up the conservative moniker, which is useful camouflage. Some may even believe they are conservative, although of what is a good question.

These neocons’ world-nation would be neither the world nor a nation, but ultimately nothing. The neocon soft liberals have set our feet in that path just as surely as the Democrat hard liberals. As others have said better than I, liberalism leads to self-annihilation. HRS