Why neocons have no will to defend our civilization

In response to my recent comments on Mark Steyn’s surrender to the Islamization of the Western world, VFR reader and traditionalist essayist Paul Cella wrote to me:

How can a guy like Mark Steyn be so stupid? “Demographically unavoidable”? Does he imagine that Europe has never seen dark days before? Where would our civilization be if St. Augustine, witnessing the decay of Rome, had thrown up his arms in defeat, the triumph of a renewed paganism being “demographically unavoidable”? Has Islam never threatened Europe before? This kind of thing is so demoralizing. And the ideological commitment to Democracy over all else strikes me as near pathological. Thanks for bringing this despair to our attention.

To which I replied:

> Does he imagine that Europe has never seen dark days before? Where would our civilization be if St. Augustine, witnessing the decay of Rome, had thrown up his arms in defeat, the triumph of a renewed paganism being “demographically unavoidable”?

Your remark pinpoints another thing about neocons. They have no historical grounding in or identification with our civilization. The tremendous drama of our civilization over the centuries means nothing to them, since the only thing that is real to them is the modern secular and democratic principles of the civilization, not its historical substance. The idea of fighting to save our civilization, exemplified by Charles Martel for example, is therefore alien to them. They can only conceive of such a fight in ideological terms, that is, in terms of assimilating our (ideological) enemies to our ideology and converting the world to democracy.

When I say that we’re in the apocalpyse of liberalism, that means, in part, that we’re in a crisis that liberalism cannot meet. Since neoconservatism is a species of liberalism, we’re also in the apocalypse of neoconservatism.

PC:

Very well said. The neoconservatives are rootless, and for them ideology is a substitute for patriotism. When you speak of a crisis that liberalism cannot meet, I think you really have pinpointed the problem. Liberalism is trussed, disarmed, emasculated. It can hardly even enter the conversation. It has nothing to say about this oldest of struggles between Christendom and her greatest historical adversary.

LA:

This leads to another point. The ideological manner in which the neoconservatives seek to defend our civilization is related to the ideological manner in which they have waged the war. It’s been said previously that our approach to the war on terror and the reconstruction of Iraq is ideological, that is, we (meaning Bush and his supporters) believe that by constructing a new form of government, we will have won the war on terrorists. We’re not dealing with the actual reality of defeating our enemies. We’re just dealing with setting up our preferred ideology, which has become an ideological substitute for defeating our enemies. That’s why, even as the situation on the ground keeps getting worse, we think things are getting better, because we’re moving toward elections.

This same ideological bent explains our (as it turned out) catastrophically flawed approach to the initial military invasion. We aimed at toppling the regime. We did not (as we did in World War II) aim at the defeat of the enemy society as a society. That’s why we went into Iraq with such small numbers and with such a light touch. We didn’t think we had to gain control over the whole country. We thought we just had to topple the regime at the top and throw out all the people that subscribed to its Ba’athist ideology, and then the Iraqi people would more or less spontaneously gravitate toward a new type of regime based on a different ideology.

This was a neoconservative war, perhaps the first in history.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 20, 2004 10:22 AM | Send