Three conservative heroes with feet of clay

In a surprisingly eloquent, insightful, and moving review in the May 21 issue of The American Conservative, Peter Hitchens wonders whether John O’Sullivan’s celebratory book, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World, is not too celebratory. Below are excerpts, followed by my comments.

… I think there is a sort of presumption in the idea that God is particularly interested in liberating people from Communism, let alone from the rule of Jimmy Carter or of the British Labor Party. His kingdom is not of this world, as Christ unambiguously said. Go to Poland now, and you will find that the church and the Christian faith are, if anything, weaker than they were under the heel of the Communists. I might add that Poland, though freed from the iron manacles of Moscow, is now instead wrapped up in the sticky marshmallow bonds of the European Union, a despotic, secretive, and lawless empire with the strong potential to get much worse than it already is…. I really wouldn’t like to speculate on what God might have wanted to happen, but if He was hoping for the current arrangements, I should be very much surprised.

So I cannot quite share John O’Sullivan’s awe at these things, even though I once did, and even though I should like to. As I read, and enjoyed, his fond recollections of Margaret Thatcher’s resolve and Ronald Reagan’s humorous squashing of liberal idiocy, I kept thinking, “Yes, so it was, but why in that case have we ended up as we are?”

* * *

But above all [O’Sullivan] is silent on the complete failure by these two supposed conservatives to grasp that the Marxist enemy had shifted his ground. As the missiles and tanks withdrew or went to the scrap yard, the enemies of freedom and faith fanned out into the schools, the TV studios, the publishing houses, the judges’ benches, the newspaper offices, and the academy. Liberated from the charge of disloyalty because their cause could no longer be identified with a hostile foreign power, they had never been so free to subvert our open societies…. What did Prime Minister Thatcher and President Reagan do for the institution of marriage, rigor in education, adult authority, or the idea that people are responsible for their own actions? Far too little.

What did they do for the idea of national sovereignty without which no proper conservative positions can be defended? Well, Reagan was less to blame in this matter, but Thatcher repeatedly compromised with the European Union’s aggrandizement, which is actually one of the major instances of real great-power aggression in our age. She began the betrayal—now almost complete—of Britain’s own people in Northern Ireland, and even became involved in the campaign for liberal intervention in Yugoslavia, a foreign-policy impulse that led directly to the Iraq fiasco.

* * *

The world has certainly changed since 1980, and to begin with, it seemed to be changing for the better. But can we now be so sure of that? It is too soon for such confident eulogies as this.

The answer to Hitchens’s sad question, “why have we ended up as we are?”, is that the conservatism of these three historic figures was deeply inadequate. The missing key, as Hitchens rightly points out, is nationality: “the idea of national sovereignty without which no proper conservative positions can be defended.” A profound truth, superbly stated. Without the concrete being of an actual country and of actual countries, there can be no conservative values, any more than a man without a body can have conservative values. Yes, Mrs. Thatcher bravely liberated the market from state controls; but she did nothing—nothing—to turn back the Third-Worldization and Islamization of Britain through immigration. Yes, she was fired for resisting the EU; but up to that point she had gone along with the EU every step of the way. Yes, Reagan revived America’s political, military, and moral strength; but early in his presidency he dismissed the idea of immigration reductions and instead poetically celebrated the mass diverse immigration that was introducing unassimilable elements into America that made it impossible for the country to maintain intact its distinct historic identity. The result was multiculturalism, which Reagan’s conservative followers a few years later began to lament and denounce, while never noticing that the main cause of the multiculturalism that they rued was the indiscriminate immigration that they worshipped. And yes, Pope John Paul II, as I’ve written elsewhere at length, was a great figure, especially in his 1979 trip to Poland when he helped re-awaken the Polish nation as a spiritual and historic essence that could stand against Communism; but, his beloved Poland aside, the pope turned out to be a deluded neocon, pushing his icky and quintessentially liberal idea of the “human person” as the central organizing value of existence, a transcendent entity outside the historical context of any actual culture or nation, while, as the practical expression of his cult of the human person, he fanatically promoted open borders—literal open borders—as a religious obligation on the nations of the West.

Without the actual body and self of an existing, coherent, and stable society, there is no entity that can maintain conservative values, or, indeed, any values. Hitchens, to his great credit, understands this. O’Sullivan’s three heroes, tragically and to their everlasting discredit, did not. Nor, it appears, does O’Sullivan himself, even though O’Sullivan also saw the moment of his greatness flicker, when, as editor of National Review in the early 1990s, he was pushing the National Question into mainstream conservative consciousness. But even then O’Sullivan’s understanding was flawed. He repeatedly emphasized, in speeches and conversation, his belief that race is not a legitimate value and is irrelevant to national identity. He said on several occasions that if America became all black, it would change nothing essential about America, since blacks are as American as whites.

If, in the end, despite the notable talents—and, in the case of Reagan, the genuine greatness—of these three figures, their historic victories against leftism and Communism have turned to ashes in the mouth, it is because their conservatism was too shallow, too callow, too … neo.

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Tom S. writes:

Even though I much prefer Peter Hitchens to his egregious Marxist brother, he does share some characteristics with him, especially an inability to see the forest for the trees, and overstatement. Christianity is far stronger today in most of the world than it was in the 1960s and 1970s, in Africa, in Latin America, in China, and indeed in Russia, and if it has declined somewhat in Europe, well, that is hardly Ronald Reagan’s fault. To imply that God might have preferred a Communist Poland, because Christianity was stronger then (there is of course no evidence for this) is actually repulsive, and while the EU is a nasty, dictatorial, and overbearing organization, it has not (so far) been responsible for the deaths of twenty million people, or threatened the world with nuclear destruction. If we could trade our problems today for the return of the Communist death cult, responsible for the deaths of one-hundred million people, would we really do it? I certainly wouldn’t.

Hitchens is right about the national question (as are you), and the relative neglect of it by the “Big Three.” But all that this demonstrates is how blind even the greatest statemen can be to threats that do not fit within their worldview. What problems are we ignoring today, that history will castigate us for? Will historians write, “In the early portion of of the 21st Century, Western statesmen were utterly focused on the threat of Islamism, all the while ignoring the rising threat of _____”? It seems possible.

The “Big Three” had a certain set of problems to deal with in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and on the whole they dealt with them well. If they were flawed and falliable, and did not usher in the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, well, this should come as no surprise to a Christian. Let us correct what we see as the flaws in their conservatism (as you point out, there were plenty), and focus on our tasks. I only hope that we do as well as they in meeting the challenges of our time.

LA replies:

Such reasoning would lead to the automatic excusing of all mistakes and failures by leaders, since, after all, everyone makes mistakes. This is just relativistic thinking. The facts of mass diverse immigration and its effects on the host society were known in both countries in the 1980s. The issue was brought before Reagan early in his presidency, it was known to be a big, consequential issue, and out of a combination of mental laziness and not wanting to challenge liberal shibboleths he punted. Thatcher and Reagan accepted, approved, and continued their respective nations’ suicidal immigration policies. They are as responsible for those choices and policies as they are for everything else they did. If leaders cannot be blamed for their bad decisions, they can’t be praised for their good decisions. Is that the kind of world Tom wants?

Tom S. replies:

Yes, I agree that Reagan, Thatcher, and JPII screwed up on immigration, and they certainly should be criticized for it. But my point was, that this does not mean that they were not great leaders. Also, Hitchens seems to be implying that our victory in the Cold War was meaningless, because we still have problems today. This does not seem to be a very Christian attitude, since in this world, we will always have problems. I believe that, like so many other paleos, Hitchens is letting his opposition to the Iraq War skew his perception of current events. I also note that, while he is very critical of Reagan and Thatcher, he lets JPII “off the hook” because he opposed the Iraq War. Given JPII’s views on immigration, is this “fair and balanced” (to coin a term)?

In short, I agree with you, but not Hitchens…

LA replies:

Yes, you’re definitely right that Hitchens went too far in seeming to deny the rightness and greatness of stopping Communism and I’m glad you brought this out.

And yes, other paleos and war opponents on the right have done the same thing. They are such children, intellectually. It all comes down to some reactive emotionalism, not thought. Because they’re angry at what the U.S. government is doing now, they transfer that anger to the Cold War, to World War II, and end up opposing and denying the value of everything our country ever did. It is (as a Swedish conservative writer once said) the rage at a “lost filiation,” a fury at a father figure who has failed them, in this case their country. And in this their psychology is identical to that of the left.

P. Hitchens is not not nearly as bad as many on the anti-war right in this regard, but he does share somewhat in this reactive-type mentality, as you rightly point out, which is one reason I’ve never thought a great deal of him. But I did feel that in this article he touched quite movingly on the tragedy that has transpired in the West.

What Churchill said of the closing days of World War II could be said of the West’s pyrrhic victory in the Cold War: “I walked through cheering crowds, with an aching heart.”

Tom S. replies:

Thanks. Also, don’t get me wrong—Hitchens is dead right about the failures of the “Big Three” on the national question, and that too many conservatives treat them as a Holy Trinity beyond criticism, especially Reagan (even Hitchens is only willing to criticize two out of three). But Hitchens is reading back his disillusionment with Iraq into history, which is a liberal mentality. Also, his remarks on Iran are just plain wrong. No one is “building Iran up into a threat” except the Iranians, and Washington, Brussels and Tel Aviv are all in denial, hoping that it will all go away. Hitchens’s belief that there is a secret cabal out there (probably Hebrew) lusting for a war of aggression against Iran is absurd.

LA replies:

Interestingly, he didn’t say, “threat,” he said, “global threat”:

“I am by no means sure that, had they survived in office into the current era, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan would have been able to resist the rush to attack Saddam Hussein or the current attempt to inflate Iran into a global threat.”

Now, I suppose one could say that since Iran only threatens the Mideast and Israel in particular, it’s not literally a global threat. I mean, Iran is not developing the ability to destroy Seattle or Mexico City, so in that sense it’s not a “global” threat. But that is to play with words, and Hitchens’s use of the word “global” in this context is mischievous. An insane sharia regime, that believes in an imminent Shi’ite apocalypse, developing nuclear weapons which it has repeatedly stated in the plainest terms that it will use to destroy Israel, is not just a threat to Israel, but to the world. Imagine a nuclear armed Iran. Even if it didn’t launch its nukes against Israel or against some Sunni country, it would use the threat of the nuclear destruction of Israel and of other countries to blackmail Europe into complete surrender. That’s not a global threat?

Hitchens’s bland denial of the objective danger posed by Iran exemplifies the reactive, disastrously unsound thinking that characterizes the anti-war right. With rare exceptions, they have been worse then useless since September 2001.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 04, 2007 11:50 PM | Send