Was the Spectator ever a conservative magazine?
I just got the
Spectator in my Inbox, and here’s the snippet of the lead article:
Russia’s aggression in Georgia is a portent of perils to come
Philip Bobbitt says that the crisis reflects Russia’s determination to remain an old-fashioned nation state, dominating its region. Intellectual imagination will be needed to thwart that ambition: a recognition that the post-Cold War world needs new global institutions.
An old-fashioned nation-state! Oh, how repulsive. How non-U. We sophisticates can’t have
that. So we’ll have to construct yet new global institutions (as though we don’t already have enough of them) to suppress this disgusting thing.
Doesn’t this support the point several commenters have made, that the real concern of the Bush admnistration and its allies regarding the Russia-Georgia conflict is not any real threat that Russia poses, but the fact that Russia is resisting America’s democratic-universalist hegemony?
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Gintas writes:
You write:
Doesn’t this support the point several commenters have made, that the real concern of the Bush administration and its allies regarding the Russia-Georgia conflict is not any real threat that Russia poses, but the fact that Russia is resisting America’s democratic-universalist hegemony?
It has to be, territorial integrity of nations does not interest Bush. I saw someone quip that if Bush were the president of Georgia he’d be offering the Russians amnesty.
Jeff Martin (“Maximos”) of What’s Wrong with the World writes:
It is disquieting that the comparatively inconsequential threat of a Russia attempting to reassert its great-power status, even as America’s unipolar moment passes, prompts many conservatives to embrace the very post-national/international institutions of which they ought to be skeptical. The entire process suggests that an exaggerated estimate of external threats functions to acclimate conservatives to the very institutions, processes, and policies that are extirpating the remnants of traditional identities and institutions that conservatives must uphold, on pain of ceasing to be conservatives. Perversely, as Paul Gottfried notes in his exceptional essay today at Taki’s, this renders the West all the more vulnerable to the threat that actually exists, namely, the threat of Islamic cultural infiltration.
I posted yesterday an entry sketching the geopolitical strategies of Zbigniew Brzezinski, all of which aim at precisely this neutering and incorporation of Russia into post-national European institutions, that may be pertinent to the Spectator entry:
There is also a paragraph in an earlier post which may be apropos:
“The American conception of BGH [benevolent global hegemony], which envisions the United States at the head of an interlocking array of forms of global administration, economic, financial, military, political, diplomatic, is to foreign affairs what high liberalism, of the Rawlsian-procedural neutrality, is to domestic politics generally. Both theoretical architectures presuppose that they constitute a neutral administrative framework, a non-ideological, non-comprehensive political, economic, and cultural space within which differences between “comprehensive doctrines” and national identities are mediated and ultimately transcended. Hence, the American foreign policy establishment often finds the persistence of national identities, or religious and cultural identities, inclusive of those which find expression in great-power, sphere-of-influence politics, difficult to comprehend, or, at least, to accept. America’s mandarins imagine that such loyalties, when articulated as over against a liberal/cosmopolitan/globalist outlook, are exercises in atavistic obstructionism, precisely because they do not perceive, or claim not to perceive, why anyone would regard neutral administration as a threat. Bearers of those historic identities, for their part, perceive in the proceduralist architecture a relativization of their commitments, which, moreover, masks the substantive commitments of the proceduralists themselves. The threat of liberalism to traditional religious and cultural identities domestically is formally identical to the threat of globalization and BGH to national identities and aspirations geopolitically; moreover, BGH and globalization are the expressions, in foreign affairs, of liberalism—a liberationist doctrine warring against traditional identities, yet often obfuscating this reality, in essence “forcing the world to be free,” as liberalism defines freedom.”
I never imagined the day would come—that self-professed conservatives would curse the nation-state.
Philip M. writes from England:
The Spectator: “Philip Bobbitt says that the crisis reflects Russia’s determination to remain an old-fashioned nation state, dominating its region. Intellectual imagination will be needed to thwart that ambition: a recognition that the post-Cold War world needs new global institutions.”
Which is more threatening, a nation-state throwing its weight around its own backyard, or unelected “global institutions” throwing their weight around the whole world?
For me, the most ironic moment in this whole saga was when George Bush said that Russia’s actions could “destabilise the region.” I only wish he could have ended his address by saying, “And if you’ll excuse me. I must get back to my wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
At least nation states like Russia have the benefit of acting in predictable and explicable ways, and can be channeled down particular pathways. The same cannot be said of the global state as it veers from wars in Iraq to Kosovo and Afghanistan.
Ralph P writes:
The tone of the Spectator article immediately reminded me of an item I saw in Newsmax today, “Zogby: ‘First Globals’ Are Redefining America.”
Between the two items there emerges the image of a vapid, narcissistic, materialistic bunch of children now occupying the highest and most responsible positions of society. This really is turning out to be the apex and final consummation of Western suicide. Zogby’s complete lack of any philosophical grounding in reality can be summed up by his laughable take on the nature of conservatism: “Conservatism is not going to go away. This is just a forward march, and an adjustment to a new set of realities. Conservatism has always done that, just as liberals have,” which echoes McCain’s daughter on how her father is going to remake the Republican party. Of course he doesn’t see the contradiction, just as the Spectator crowd ignores the real perils of the Georgia conflict and only see what they view as a danger, the reawakening of nationalism. (They’re like Carol Swain: We have to stop immigration because whitey will start acting as a group again).
Add in two other recent news items, the accelerated relative decline of whites in America and the nauseating triumphalism of the Chinese Olympic propaganda campaign, and thing are really starting to look bleak. But you are right when you say that this by nature is self-limiting. We will all suffer in ways hard to fathom because of our negligence and fecklessness. The “First Globals” are in for a real and probably terminal education when they finally get to open the curtains to the Holy of Holies of their philosophy. (many already have, as in the recent murders of Eloi in Guatemala and elsewhere). Where there they will find that the rest of the tribal world didn’t share The Vision and would now be in power to impose themselves without even token hindrance. I can’t help but to permit myself a bit of Schadenfreude, which I regret, and I hate to quote a rock song, but this line seems appropriate:
What a surprise!
A terminal look of shock in your eyes.
Now things are really what they seem.
No, this is no bad dream!
—“Sheep,” from Pink Floyd’s Animals.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 15, 2008 01:47 PM | Send