The establishment conservatives’ indifference to the looming EU superstate

Alex K. writes:

You expressed wonder at the fact that mainstream conservative publications do not seem to be opposing Europe’s “steady march toward a quasi-totalitarian superstate subsuming the ancient states of Europe.”

I know I’ve read some articles in the mainstream conservative press about the impending EUSSR, but even those few (about which I’m afraid I cannot remember much offhand) were either purely informative or informative-tinged-with-Schadenfreude. As I said, they were few and far between and didn’t leave a vivid impression on me.

For the most part the establicons are all paler versions of Mark Steyn: when they even acknowledge what’s happening to Europe, they mainly just mock it for its decline, and congratulate themselves that it isn’t happening here and never will because … well, because we’re so conservative. And that’s when they acknowledge it at all. They usually only discuss Europe in terms of denouncing it for getting in America’s way.

By paler Steyns, I mean that Steyn talks a lot about Europe’s existential problem, mainly the demographic stuff of course, but also about the elite imposition of the superstate, but he mainly does it (a) to laugh at them, and (b) to warn Americans that we’re going to have to liberalize the Islamic world, since it is shortly going to include Europe. But we’ve covered all that lunacy before! Most establicons follow the Steyn model, they just broach the subject much less often and their Schadenfreude isn’t so overtly jokey.

In fact, this may be a major reason Steyn is so revered among the mainstream cons, and why they praise him to the stars but never actually grapple with his demographic points themselves. They’re basically uninterested in the rest of the West except when it’s backing us (yay Howard! yay Sarkozy!) or when it’s getting up in our grill (most of the time). Whereas Steyn, international man of commentary that he is, regularly likes to string together little items from around the world into the cosmopolitan confections of his columns. So to them he looks like a global visionary. And they’re too uninterested to follow up on the issues he raises themselves. And there’s no reason they feel they should have to do that, because, for all his focus on Europe, he just says what they’re saying: laugh at the dying Europeans (that’s what they get for giving us grief), and rejoice that it can’t happen here. So the only implication for us is that we must liberalize Muslims. Which we wanted to do anyway, since we’re going to keep letting them in here. Where they will assimilate anyway, because assimilation always happens with American immigration. Okay, at this point I can only assume that they’ve stopped thinking altogether. So while they laud Steyn for his dazzling worldliness, he really just reinforces their lack of concern for the Old World, since all his commentary on it amounts to the same disdain.

Finally, I think your connection between the conservatives’ indifference to the growth of the EU superstate and their support for the internationalist McCain is important. No, they’re not in favor of the socialist totalitarianism that is rising in Europe. But they are in favor of globalizing markets. So if they have to accommodate the expansion of the EUSSR’s centralized power in order to get Turkey into the EU, they’ll take it. They can deal with any mental or moral imbalance this causes by occasionally clucking their tongues lightly about the EU’s socialism or by just seeing-no-evil altogether. Similarly, they’re not in favor of McCain’s liberalism. But they are in favor of Iraq Forever. So if they have to accommodate McCain’s leftism and internationalism in order to stay the course in Iraq, they will do so. Again, they’ve so far seemed to deal with this by either going easy on McCain’s leftism or even (as with his foreign policy speech last week) seeing and hearing no evil at all.

There are some divisions among the conservatives: NR was of course vaguely against McCain for a while, in contrast to the enthusiastic support (if not Giuliani-level support) of the Weekly Standard types. But they’re sure not making a big deal anymore about whatever it is they once briefly objected to. What they can all agree on is the need to ignore McCain’s awfulness or at most treat it like some minor policy disagreements, overshadowed by the big issue of liberalizing the world. Likewise: Does NR want the borderless market-world quite as much as the Wall Street Journal does? No, but they’re obviously not going to make a big deal about it opposing it. Do they support Turkey’s accession to the EU, the way the full-throated globalists do? Well, some of them do, and the others aren’t fighting hard against it. What they can all agree on is the need to ignore the death of Europe or at most treat it as an unimportant, if amusing, development, just something that happens to civilizations that don’t progress the right way.

- end of initial entry -

Jonathan S. writes:

I’m a regular visitor to your website and enjoy your writings there, in particular the exchanges you have with your readers.

Regarding Alex K.’s recent comments about the indifference on the part of establishment conservatives to the looming EU superstate, he asserts that Mark Steyn warns Americans that they’re “going to have to liberalize the Islamic world.”

Can Alex please direct your readers to a piece of Steyn’s writings in which he says that?

LA replies:

It was I who brought that out, in my many articles about Steyn. Steyn has repeatedly and absurdly stated that Europe must “assimilate” Muslims and “destroy the ideology of radical Islam” even as Europe is accepting the Islamic takeover of Europe.

I can’t immediately put my finger on all the references, but here is a start.

See my article, “Mark Steyn’s dishonest article on the European crisis.” At the end of my article, I quote him saying:

“What do you leave behind?” asked Tony Blair. There will only be very few and very old ethnic Germans and French and Italians by the midpoint of this century. What will they leave behind? Territories that happen to bear their names and keep up some of the old buildings? Or will the dying European races understand that the only legacy that matters is whether the peoples who will live in those lands after them are reconciled to pluralist, liberal democracy? It’s the demography, stupid. And, if they can’t muster the will to change course, then “what do you leave behind?” is the only question that matters.

See my discussion of the above passsage in my article.

And here is an earlier article where Steyn says that even as Islam is taking over the world, we must liberalize Islam:

Steyn articulates global neocon nightmare

Not exactly on the same point, but see also Steyn sees fatal threat of Moslem immigration, but ….

This is an e-mail I wrote to Steyn in 2003 about his saying we should “cherish the absurdities” as we allow ourselves to be taken over by Islam…

Paul Gottfried writes:

I totally agree with your critique of the establishmentcons and their indifference to the moral and political collapse of Europe as a Christian civilization that was once composed of nation states. But the main reason for this indifference, I suspect, is that neocon-controlled newspapers and magazines treat European nation states, except possibly for England, as candidates for a fascist takeover. The WSJ has presented the Vlaams Belang as a front for old Nazi-sympathizers and has been tearing into the anti-immigration parties across Europe as dangerous nativist organizations.The dominant “conservative” mindset in the U.S. and Canada is a leftist, internationalist one.

LA replies:

What Mr. Gottfried has said backs up the nightmare scenario, previously discusssed at VFR, that in the event of a popular European uprising against the evil EU, the U.S. would use its NATO forces in Europe to put down the revolt.

LA wrote to Alex K.

I’m posting this in its own entry. This is a valuable contribution to our understanding. I’m sending it to someone abroad who had asked me to write about how the Republican candidates stood on the EU. I told him there was nothing to say about that, as the EU is not on the radar screen of U.S. politics. What you’ve said here puts the whole issue in perspective.

But I never saw this expression before: “it’s getting up in our grill.”

Alex K. replies:

It means to get in one’s face (grill = teeth/mouth), bother, antagonize. Probably its debut appearance on a traditionalist website…

Mencius Moldbug writes:

What Americans of all political stripes need to realize is that the EU is an American client state. Its relationship to Washington is not exactly the same as the Warsaw Pact’s relationship to Moscow, but the comparison is surely close enough for government work.

Washington acquired its puppets in the usual way: military conquest. If you compare pre-1940 European politics to post-1960 European politics, the only surviving figures and factions are those which were the most slavishly pro-British and pro-American, preferably the latter. The last gasp of the old Europe was at Suez in ‘56.

As I argued here, so-called “anti-Americanism” in Europe is better described as ultra-Americanism. The complaint is always that America is not living up to America’s own values, which of course are the values of Harvard circa 1945. Making noise in this whiny, pathetic fashion is the only way for Europeans to affect affairs in Washington. It certainly has nothing in common with pre-1914 European anti-Americanism, which was an attitude of aristocratic contempt tempered with well-motivated fear.

It’s interesting to wonder what would happen in Europe if the U.S. adopted my preferred posture of no foreign policy (NFP), and withdrew its occupation forces. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the events of 1989 were repeated, albeit in a less Slavic style. There is no right-wing politics in Europe today because there is no viable path to a sustainable non-progressive state. If the nations of Europe were genuinely independent, and interacted peacefully under the classical jus gentiumprinciples of neutrality, noninterference and mutual respect, this would become untrue. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day the EU regime is as vilified as Vichy, Franco and Mussolini are today—it has certainly done more than enough to earn it.

Also, the absolute go-to site for accurate anti-EU information is Richard North and Helen Szamuely’s EU Referendum. North and Szamuely are invaluable rara avii: anti-government activists with a deep professional knowledge of the enemy. I don’t know of any U.S. equivalent.

LA replies:

Yes, America after World War II imposed liberalism on Europe, and yes, Europe took the liberalism farther, into the left-liberalism and anti-Americanism we see on the American left. And yes, we still have NATO troops in Europe. But to conclude from these facts that Europe is an American “puppet” and “client state” is fallacious reasoning and untrue on the face of it. It’s so exaggerated that it undercuts the valid parts of Mr. Moldbug’s comment.

Mr. Moldbug mentions the Suez crisis as the end of the Old Europe. What he fails to mention is that it was the end of the European-American alliance. Having been slapped down by the U.S. in Suez, France decided to form its own network of alliances with the Muslim world, to offset the American influence. This was the beginning of Eurabia.

Adela Gereth writes:

Like Alex K., I’ve found that most conservative articles this side of the Atlantic rarely mention the EU superstate and when they do, it’s a surprisingly off-hand assessment-and-dismissal of it, combined with the usual short-sighted self-congratulatory note because it can’t happen here.

The neocons seem willing to accept pretty much any cultural change so long as the market is still viable, evidently failing to see that culture and market are interdependent. Meanwhile, the left gloats at how the white traditionalist West is fast disappearing, evidently failing to realize latter-day liberalism is a hothouse plant that can survive in conditions only the West can provide.

Alex K. writes:

In answer to Jonathan S.: Steyn’s most direct statement on what to do about Islam is at the end of his book. He gives only three options: submit, kill them all, reform it. He of course goes with option three but then incredibly modifies it to say that we can’t reform it, we can only improve the conditions for the reform to happen. So really he should have said we have three options: submit, kill them all, create conditions that increase the likelihood of our getting a colossal historical break. But if he worded it accurately, he’d see how absurd it is and then he’d actually have to break from the mainstream consensus.

And by reform he means make liberal: free, tolerant, able to cohabit the globe with non-Muslims.

To add to what Paul Gottfried said: remember LGF and its orbit going nuts over the anti-immigration groups? And then there was Ralph Peters assuring us that Europe will take Steyn’s option two. Steyn himself has repeatedly predicted what he calls the “man on the horse” scenario in parts of Europe when things get bad enough. He never says that this could be prevented by restricting immigration before that point comes. And so the fascist leader scenario can be taken by his fans and colleagues to be the same thing as any kind of immigration restriction.

(I realize Steyn took a certain Peters column as criticism of him, but he answered it by saying that he agreed with Peters that Europe would turn to fascism as a response to its Islamization)

One more thing: As Steyn’s three options are the only ones accepted by the mainstream Right, the commenters on sites like LGF regularly flip out every time the latest piece of evidence that option three can’t work rolls in. They start hinting at embracing option two or openly wailing about how awful the Muslims are being for making option two necessary by their refusal to make option three work. Since the actual bloggers and punditariat shut down option four—Separatism—as being Nazilike and/or unworkable, their followers never even consider it. Yet, whatever you think of it, surely it’s worth trying to avoid option two? The followers should at least be allowed to wail that it’s time to try option four, but that’s so shut out of consideration that they are reduced to wailing about the genuinely monstrous option two. The bloggers punditariat meanwhile just keep pretending that option three is workable.

LA replies:

Year after year, we’re stuck in the same mental binds. I’ve been writing for years about how the mainstream right’s rejection of separationism means that the only alternative they have to an impossible reform of Islam is the genocide of Muslims. But my argument has had no impact. My ideas don’t reach a large enough audience. But for them to reach a large audience, mainstream publications would have to be willing to offer separationism as an option. But since no mainstream publication will offer separationsism as an option, the mainstream right is still left with no alernative but genocide.

Only the principled rejection of liberalism as our ruling ideology can save us.

Laura G. writes:

Regarding our indifference to an EU superstate, and our superior self-congratulations that nothing similar is in the offing for us, I hate to point it out, but we seem to be as far along as the Europeans on the very same road. I wonder how many of VFR’s well-informed readers can describe the nature and progress of the North American Superhighway and its ramifications. Few, I expect, and for the very good reason that there is a gaping void around any and all discussion (left, right, and center) of the North American Superhighway and (I gather) subsequent North American Union. As far as I can tell, these agreements are cloaked in some sort of treaty arrangement, successfully bypassing any need for our Representatives to even know what is afoot, much less have a voice in it. I would have warm and fuzzy feelings about them if any of our nation’s elected representatives were making public and loud noises to the effect that the American public needs information, but no such thing is happening. It appears to me that it is likely that the same sort of abandonment of national sovereignty that is attacking the innards of Europe is also eating ours. Has anyone noticed? Do we care? Are we really in a superior position compared with Europe?

LA replies:

I agree. I have found it difficult to get a clear view of what the Security and Prosperity Partnership is all about, what it consists of, how much has already been legally agreed to, how much is future hopes. Or I get a view of it, and it slips away. The very name, “Security and Prosperity Partnership,” by its abstractness and emptiness of meaning, tends to make my brain go into an unfocused state. And I think that’s part of the purpose. Since these transnational agreements are aimed at wresting control of a country from itself and its people, at destroying real historical entities and replacing them by wholly artificial entities, their keynote is a vagueness which makes it difficult to understand what’s going on.

Also, the agreements are long and complex and hard for media to summarize even if wanted to. Indispensable to self-government and liberty is that the principles of government be understood. I suppose one could do an entire study of modern politics from the point of view of how government has become harder and harder to understand.

LA writes:

Correction: I realize I misunderstood Jonathan S.’s question. I thought he was asking specifically about Steyn’s hyper-bizarro idea of liberalizing the Muslims AS they were taking over the world. But in fact he was just asking about the general idea of liberalizing the Muslims. I’m surprised that there would even be a question about that. As a neocon, Steyn of course supports efforts to democratize, modernize, liberalize Islam to drain the swamp of extremism and so on.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 30, 2008 09:40 AM | Send