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Those Churchillian neocons
Victor Hanson’s speech at this year’s Claremont Institute Winston Churchill dinner is a long lament about the awful awful left and its hatred of and failure to defend our civilization, which Hanson defines as Enlightenment plus the Christian sense of goodness. At the core of the speech, though hardly developed adequately, one can discern the elements of a coherent diagnosis of the problem: Western elites have lost belief in God and the good, and therefore they have lost belief in the goodness of their own civilization, and therefore they either tear down their own civilization for not reaching some impossible liberal standard of perfection (as Hanson’s discusses in the case of America), or they cowardly yield to Muslim fanatics who threaten and murder Europeans (as he discusses in the case of Europe). Yet, as I’ve pointed out many times with regard to last year’s Churchill dinner speaker, Mark Steyn, while Hanson goes on and on about Europe’s surrender to the jihadist Muslims in Europe, he does not give the slightest hint of what the Europeans ought to do about the jihadist menace, once they get over their fear of Muslims and recover their moral and civilizational confidence. Neocons live in a world of phrases, they think that if people have the right beliefs, concrete reality will automatically change in response to those beliefs, without human beings actually having to perform any messy acts to make reality change, like closing the borders to Muslim immigrants and shutting down jihad-supporting mosques. Neocons talk endlessly about bravery and patriotism, but they expect other people to stand up and take the really dangerous positions that must be taken, such as calling for an end of Muslim immigration. Jeff in England the other day had a humorous analogy for the way Islam critics such as Victor Hanson and Melanie Phillips deal with the Muslim challenge: their impassioned yet inconsequential warnings about the horrible dangers of radical Islam, he said, are all foreplay, no sex.
Or, as I’ve put it, so serious, yet so unserious. Email entry |