Arch neocon Novak attacks neocon ideology (though he calls it “leftism”)

Unbelievable. Last July, Michael Novak, the most ideological neocon of all, a writer whose treatment of every subject reads as though it were generated by Neocon Central Committee, criticized candidate Barack Obama for having an abstract view of America.

The Novak post was discovered by the blogger Hermes, who quotes Novak’s criticisms of Obama’s Berlin speech:

Real patriotism, [Obama] clarified, is loving the ideals of a country and dissenting from policies not in line with those ideals.

Here Obama points to a huge divide between left-wingers and ordinary Americans. Ordinary Americans do not love a mere “ideal” out in never-never land. They love the land, the soil, the mountains, the plains, the history, the bloody battles, the mistakes, the rises and falls, the real human history of an altogether human people, the particular, imperfect people of the United States.

Hermes comments:

This is the same Michael Novak who wrote a long, blustering article called “Global Liberty” saying that Western nations must spread the universal ideals of democracy and capitalism across the globe, who wrote a book called Universal Hunger for Liberty arguing among other things that the concept of liberty has deep roots within Islam, who has in fact made an entire career of pumping out inane, vacuous books and articles (any time I attempt to read anything by Novak I become so frustrated by the sheer emptiness of his prose that I promptly give up) arguing that all people the world over have an innate longing for liberty and that we must spread democracy and capitalism everywhere so that this longing in everyone can be fulfilled. But now that Barack Obama is promoting globalism, suddenly the great thing about us is that we love our land, soil, mountains, plains, and history.

Truly unbelievable. Is Novak at all aware that he’s attacking the very rhetoric that he has employed for the last quarter century?

Here’s another thing. Novak said:

Here Obama points to a huge divide between left-wingers and ordinary Americans. Ordinary Americans do not love a mere “ideal” out in never-never land.

Now, who is that divide between? It’s between “left-wingers and ordinary Americans.” Who is missing from this picture? Neocons. Novak can’t say that neocons “love … the history, the bloody battles, the mistakes, the rises and falls, the real human history of an altogether human people, the particular, imperfect people of the United States.” He can’t say that, because the neocons have always declared as their credo that what defines America is not history, is not a particular people, but an Idea, an Idea that transcends all history and all particularity, an Idea that America must share with the whole human race by spreading it to all other countries, and by allowing the inhabitants of all other countries to immigrate to America.

The only interest that neocons have ever shown in America’s physical landscape is that it must be open to all foreigners who want to come and live in it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 21, 2009 03:57 PM | Send