Paleocon accepts hyper-neocon view of America as the real America

In the July 2 issue of The American Conservative Paul Gottfried reviews David Gelernter’s book, Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion. (The review is not online). On June 26 I wrote to Professor Gottfried:

Paul,

I’m shocked by your review of Gelernter’s book. You’re not even challenging his ultra-wacky idea that Americanism is a Judeo-Christian religion. Instead of rejecting it as an ideological distortion of America, you’re saying that Gelernter’s hyper-messianic view of America runs deep in America, and that it is indeed the true America, and that it will continue to be the true America, no matter what, and you just sit back and watch this ruin come to your country, almost with a sense of satisfaction.

So the upshot is that you’ve turned off on America completely. You’ve accepted that the freaky neocon view of America, “Hyper-Bushianism” as I’ve called it, really is America, leaving our side no basis on which to resist it. That’s really great Paul.

I would think that a paleoconservative would have a more incisive critique of this kind of false neocon thinking. Instead, as suggested by your review, the paleocons have decided that America is the neocon thing that the paleocons hate. And so the paleocons have opted out of America, just as I’ve been saying for years.

Anti-Semites hate America because they see America as the Jew-dominated country par excellence. In the same way, paleocons hate America because they see it as the neocon-dominated country par excellence.

By contrast with your surrender to Gelernter’s hideous view of America, see my responses to his article on which the book is based, here and here.

Paul Gottfried to LA:

Larry, I’m sorry that you are shocked but I do believe Gelernter’s garbled distortion of Protestant Christianity is alive and well in the U.S. The neocons, in contrast to our marginalized side, have a large Christian (rather than Jewish) following, and if you saw my piece on Evangelicals and Giuliani in the June 4 issue of TAC, you would gain some idea of how deeply ingrained and widespread this nonsense about world democracy is among still professing Christians. I am not giving up on the U.S. by pointing this out. I am only calling attention to a problem that our side faces and will have to deal with—if we are to get anywhere. Obviously the successes enjoyed by the neocons have something to do with the resonance of their message. Paul

LA to PG:

That’s not true Paul. You weren’t just saying that this is a strong belief. You were accepting that Gelernter’s house-of-mirrors version of America IS America. You’ve left your readers with no basis on which to oppose it. You have surrendered America to the Hyper-Bushians, and you have left conservatives nothing to fight for.

You confirm my criticism of paleocons, which is they don’t believe in America anymore (because they see it as neocon-dominated), and have dropped out of it.

Paleoconservatism has become simply synonymous with anti-Americanism.

On July 3 Paul Gottfried wrote to me in response to my article, “Goldberg: It’s ok to object to immigrants based on their origin”:

Larry, I agree with your comments about Goldberg as always. <

The problem with your reaction to my review of Gelernter is not that we disagree on principles but that we perceive the core WASP population of this country very differently. Despite my reverence for their religious and cultural traditions, I suspect that by now most WASPs who consider themselves “conservatives” think like Bush about democracy, reaching out to minorities, and wanting to overcome the remnants of the white Christian prejudiced past. The majority of Evangelicals, from all of the statistics I’ve seen, support the social liberal Giuliani for president, because he is seen as “good on human rights” and standing up for democracy. Some of these people can be won back to rationality but we can only start this process by recognizing the extent of the damage that has already been done. Neocon rhetoric is not alien to such Protestants. Bill Kristol and Sean Hannity are saying what these people already believe. And if some of the Evangelicals were opposed to W’s amnesty bill, they’ll then turn around and support Giuliani or McCain, both of whom are even worse than W on the question of immigration from Latin America. Paul

LA to PG:

“Some of these people can be won back to rationality but we can only start this process by recognizing the extent of the damage that has already been done.”

But, Paul, that’s not what you did in your review of Gelernter. Your review didn’t say, “America was a sane country, and then it adopted some ideas that made it insane, but we can return to sanity.” What you said was that the most extreme wacky universalist ideas—ultra wacky, Gelernter-level wacky—have always been the accepted or dominant American ideas. So what is there to go back to, according to you? Your article leaves nothing positive about America, no norm that can be appealed to or restored. It was entirely negative. I’m sure Thomas Fleming or John Rao would have loved it.

LA followup to PG, July 8:

Paul, you had referred me to your article in the June 4 TAC on Giuliani and the evangelicals. I’ve just read it, and I agree with it entirely. However, it does not support your argument in your review of Gelernter that I have been criticizing.

In your article on the evangelicals you point out that for many of them, spreading democracy has become more important than traditional social and moral concerns. I think this is sadly true. But my criticism of your Gelernter review was that you made it seem as if the crazy Gelernter idea of America has been the dominant view of America from time immemorial. You failed to show how contrary the Gelernter idea is to a true understanding of America. Indeed, one sensed an eagerness on your part to conclude, “yes, this is what America has always been and must be in the future.” The fact that evangelicals have RECENTLY moved in this neocon direction does not support your argument that Protestant America has HISTORICALLY believed in the neocon view.

Also, you failed to mention James Dobson and other evangelical leaders who have said that they would never support Giuliani.

Tom S. writes:

It’s ironic—the paleos screamed, and I mean SCREAMED, bloody murder a few years ago when David Frum accused them of being Anti-American, and now Paul Gottfried comes along and casually confirms it. I mean, if implying that America was flawed from the beginning isn’t “Anti-American” what is?

This drift of the paleos towards anti-Americanism is even becoming apparent to some of their number. Paleocon ( I don’t think that he would be insulted by me calling him this) Jerry Pournelle, the famous science fiction author and polymath, who opposed both Gulf Wars, has bemoaned the fact that many paleos have accepted the leftist position on the Vietnam War (imperialism, crusader state, unwinnable, etc) and are rapidly coming around to the leftist view of the Cold War, and that the pages of “The American Conservative” now feature many leftist authors. How long will it be before the more rational of the paleos does a split of its own? Neo-Paleo-Separationist-Libertaricons, anyone?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 08, 2007 02:30 PM | Send