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Are the neocons converting?
David Gelernter writing in The Weekly Standard says that since 1918, the world has been divided into three principal parties: (1) the terrorists/totalitarians (Germany from 1918 to 1945, the USSR from 1945 to 1991, and the Islamists from 1991 to the present); (2) the pacifists/appeasers (Britain in the ’30s, Europe in the ’80s and today); and the mystic nationalists, among whom he includes his hero Ronald Reagan. While he fails to develop his thesis satisfactorily, it does have a ring of truth. But what is this “mystic nationalism” business doing in the neocon Weekly Standard? Gelernter describes it this way:
Mystic nationalism is a tradition nobly represented in the 20th century by such statesmen as Winston Churchill and David Ben-Gurion. Reagan would have recognized himself in a passage by the poet Rupert Brooke, killed at age 28 in the First World War. “He was immensely surprised,” Brooke wrote in 1914 about an unnamed friend, “to perceive that the actual earth of England held for him…a quality which, if he’d ever been sentimental enough to use the word, he’d have called ‘holiness.’”Holiness of the earth? Are my eyes fooling me? Are the neocons actually opening themselves to the normal, traditional understanding that they have denied all these decades as they sought to universalize America out of existence, that a country is a concrete entity and not just a set of ideas? Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 13, 2004 12:29 AM | Send Comments
This is an interesting change. I should like to see Mr. Gelertner expand upon the concept of “mystic nationalism”. I find it hard to believe that a Torie like Churchill and a Socialist Zionist like Ben-Gurion would have the same ideas on nationalism. David Gelerntner has penned a fine tribute to President Reagan. I find the term “mystic nationalist” particularly apt in Reagan’s case. I believe that Reagan loved America -the real flesh and bood and earth America - deeply. He was a true patriot. I thnk Churchill loved England in much the same way. Ben-Gurion was indeed a socialist, but I doubt he would have assented to allowing Arab Muslims to become the majority population of Israel. He was loyal to the real Israel - not some abstract proposition which is all too often the case for those who write at the Weekly Standard when they speak of America. I take issue with Gelertner’s placement of Roosevelt, described as the “all-conquering statesman-politico” into the visionary group along with Reagan and Churchill. Roosevelt was far too cosy with the terrorist/totalitarians ruling Russia from 1918 - 1991 (not from 1945 to 1991). Stalin’s crimes were as horrendous as those of Hitler, a fact which Roosevelt utterly refused to face. A better categorization would be that of pacifist/appeaser forced by circumstances to act otherwise. Yet another example of the unprincipled exception. Nvertheless, Gelertner’s division of the world into three basic forces since 1918 is fairly accurate. All three have been present since then, with different ones dominating the scene at various times. My only question would be: Aren’t “pacifism” (which I think is an inadequate description of what we refer to as liberalism - the pacifism being merely a front for the real agenda) really two sides of the same nihilistic coin? Posted by: Carl on June 13, 2004 3:59 AMAnother sign of change: Samuel Huntington’s new book, “Who Are We?”. Huntington sees our uniqueness as proceeding from our culture, rooted in our particular historic circumstances, i.e., the Anglo Saxon tradition of England and Colonial America. This is a long way from the “proposition nation” ideology. Posted by: thucydides on June 13, 2004 10:08 AM[Correction to my post above - last sentence] Aren’t “pacifism” and terrorism/totalitarianism (which I think is an inadequate description of what we refer to as liberalism - the pacifism being merely a front for an agenda which ultimately totalitarian) really two sides of the same nihilistic coin? Some questions for Mr. Gelernter if I may. (1) If we are fighting Islamic terrorists, why do we allow large-scale Islamic immigration into the United States? (2) How do we retain a sense of “Mystic Nationalism” while displacing the people who created the United States of America as we know it? (3) Why are the writers at the Weekly Standard oblivious to the dangers of the American Southwest becoming in essence a different country? Posted by: David on June 13, 2004 2:05 PMDavid Gelertner is not a neocon; in his memoir Drawing Life: Surviving the Unibomber, he describes Pat Buchanan as the contemporary political figure most similar to him. Yet he is regularly published in The Weekly Standard and Commentary. I’m not really sure why. Posted by: Agricola on June 15, 2004 3:09 PMOne thing we have to be careful about is distinguishing what politicians feel and think as individuals and what they consider is acceptable as public policy. Churchill probably was a natural conservative with the normal instincts toward his own people and country. But his political beliefs did not allow this to be consistently reflected in the policies he implemented when in power. This is most obvious in cabinet decisions when he was Prime Minister. Some cabinet members put a great deal of effort into raising the issue of Asian and Caribbean immigration into Britain. These cabinet members knew that something fundamental was at stake and that the existing policy would transform Britian into a multi-racial society. Churchill as Prime Minister blocked their efforts to have the issue considered in cabinet. His natural conservatism was not sufficient to offset his political liberalism. It is possible to admire aspects of Churchill the man, but often it is formal political beliefs which count the most. Posted by: Mark Richardson on June 16, 2004 8:42 AMMr. Richardson has recently begun his own weblog. http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/ Posted by: Joshua on June 21, 2004 12:54 AM |