RUTHFULLY YOURS

I am grateful to R.R. Reno, Walter Russell Mead, and Peter Berkowitz for their careful comments on my essay, “Nationalism and the Future of Western Freedom.” Here I offer some thoughts relating to their most salient points. http://mosaicmagazine.com/response/2016/09/in-defense-of-our-national-and-religious-traditions/

The fundamental question in political philosophy is the choice between an order of independent national states and one seeking to bring all nations under a single international regime. These are perhaps not the only options—the biblical book of Judges, for example, examines the possibility of a life without any central government at all, “each doing what is right in his own eyes.” But if we accept the biblical conclusion that, in large numbers, men cannot live without a government to rule them, then a choice must be made: either free nations or empire.

In his response to my essay, Walter Russell Mead emphasizes that neither order can be the answer to the human condition. “Both have important capacities. Both are subject to terrible temptations,” he writes. “The real task of politics and statecraft is to determine what—in a particular situation, in a particular circumstance, at a particular time—is the right blend.”

I agree with Mead that real-world circumstances are messy things, and that what may be desirable as a matter of general principle can prove ruinous in practice. For instance, one need only read Michael Doran’s excellent new book, Ike’s Gamble, for a detailed indictment of President Eisenhower’s misguided support for Arab nationalism and self-determination in the Middle East. This was a policy that helped to demolish the British empire and end Winston Churchill’s career, only to give rise to the pan-Arab dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser—who repaid America’s kindness by taking Egypt into the Soviet imperial orbit. Examples of this sort make it clear that, in practice, a blind support of national self-determination against empire may be self-defeating.

This having been said, however, I cannot accept Mead’s conclusion that since both nationalism and empire have their flaws, we have no choice but to strike an ad-hoc balance between them. Monarchical and republican forms of government each have their characteristic flaws as well; nevertheless, we recognize that republican government is preferable in principle, and believe this remains the case even if circumstances force us to compromise and accept one-man rule in a given time and place.

Similarly, we must choose whether it is better to live in a world in which power is distributed among many different, competing nations than in one in which power is concentrated in the hands of a single international regime. There should be no doubt as to which better serves the cause of human freedom, which is truly possible only where power is distributed so that persons encumbered or persecuted under one government may seek relief and support from another. Nor is there any doubt that such an order of national states is as difficult to maintain internationally as is republican government domestically. Like republican government, it too must be vigilantly and constantly defended or else it will slip from our grasp.

On this point, I believe R. R. Reno and Peter Berkowitz are largely in agreement with me, even as each also raises important issues concerning the particulars of my case.

Berkowitz, for his part, questions my emphasis on the Protestant character of the order of national states, and my grounding of this order in an intellectual tradition built upon the teachings of the Hebrew Bible (or “Old Testament”). Without denying the biblical basis of modern nationalism, Berkowitz fears that for contemporary men and women the Bible will be controversial, lacking in authority, and theoretically insufficient to the task of defending the principles of a free national state. Better, he writes, to build a broad-tent conservative coalition around the liberal tradition descended from such modern philosophers as John Locke.

Before turning to questions of tactics, it is necessary to ask whether such a liberal interpretation of history accords with what actually happened The truth is that the modern world was overwhelmingly a construct of Protestant Christianity (albeit with important contributions, as Reno points out, from medieval Catholicism). “The American Constitution has many intellectual fathers,” Irving Kristol wrote, “but only one spiritual mother. That mother is Protestant religion. . . . The [American] Revolution . . . had been conceived out of the wedding of the Protestant ethos with American circumstances.”

Why should Kristol, a Jew, dwell on this point? Why not simply say that while Western freedoms were originally of Protestant and biblical provenance, the liberties we enjoy today have long since been detached from those parochial origins? One reason to remain alert to the Protestant character of modern freedom is this: for 400 years, the Western institution of the national state and many of its familiar rights and liberties flourished principally and reliably in Protestant nations: Britain, the Netherlands, the United States, and elsewhere. By contrast, non-Protestant countries like Mexico and Nigeria that attempted to import versions of the American constitution failed miserably.

The Sunday New York Times for September 18 carried a story by Eric Lichtblau about a “study” by “researchers” at the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at the San Bernardino campus of California State University, purporting to show that “hate crimes against US Muslims are not just “on the rise” but have “soared to their highest levels since the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.” While the FBI’s hate-crime statistics are not going to be released until November, data from this center, which is compiled from police reports, suggest that “hate crimes” against Muslims have risen 78% in one year. Some “scholars” of the subject believe that the anti-Muslim animus cannot be linked to the attacks all over the place, in Europe and America, by Muslim terrorists, nor to the attacks carried out in the Middle East – in Syria, Iraq, and Libya – by members of the Islamic State, nor to the aggressive, often criminal, behavior, of so many Muslim migrants in Europe, with the constant stream of news about gang rapes, mob violence, property crimes large and small. No, it’s all the fault of some remarks of Donald Trump about the need to keep out, or at least vet more thoroughly, Muslim migrants. It’s not what Muslims do, it’s not what anyone can read in the Qur’an and Hadith, it’s what people like Trump say that supposedly explains the rise in these “hate crimes” against Muslims.

The Times article never mentions the scandal surrounding reports of “hate crimes” against Muslims, which is that more than a few such reports have later turned out to be false. And even were we to accept at face value every one of those claimed to be an anti-Muslim “hate crime,” for 2015 it amounts to 260, that is, five a week, less than one a day, in a country with 325 million people. Does this really constitute a “soaring” rate? And the evidence suggests that we have a right to be doubtful about some of those counted as “hate crimes.”

Here are a few examples: a fire supposedly set at a Texas Islamic Center in February 2015 turned out to have been set near the mosque, by a homeless man, Quba Ferguson, just trying to keep warm. In New Jersey, a Muslim man, Kashif Parvaiz, exploited the willingness of people to believe that there is murderous and rampant Islamophobia, claiming that an anti-Muslim killer had shot his wife in front of their son, screaming “terrorist” as he did so. It turned out that the man’s mistress was the killer, put up to it by him so he could rid himself of his wife and marry her. Nothing “anti-Islamic” about it.

Qur’ans were burned at an Islamic Center, and the Center’s imam, calling for restrictions on “free speech” (meaning anti-Islam speech), was joined by the media, all in a frenzied state about this supposed “hate crime.” Eventually it turned out that the book-burner was one Ali Hassan Al-Assadi, a Muslim angry with people at the local mosques, who said he burned the Qur’ans in retribution.

Want more? There’s the University of Texas Muslimah who claimed that “a gunman followed her to the campus and threatened her.” She finally admitted to making up the whole story.

Or yet another story of mosque vandalism, this time in Fresno where, after CAIR went wild with claims of yet another “hate crimes,” it turned out to have been prompted by a private grievance by one Asiuf Mohammad Khan against a Muslim woman and her family.

Google away, and you’ll find many more examples of crimes first reported as anti-Muslim “hate crimes” that turn out to have been the work of Muslims, or of non-Muslims whose motive had nothing to do with Islam.

And sometimes the original false story of a “hate crime” refuses to die, and for many becomes the accepted version of what happened, even if the investigators long ago concluded otherwise.

During the last days of the Ancien Régime, French Queen Marie Antoinette frolicked in a fake rural village not far from the Versailles Palace—the Hameau de la Reine (“the Queen’s hamlet”). “Peasant” farmers and herdsmen were imported to interact, albeit carefully, with the royal retinue in an idyllic amusement park. The Queen would sometimes dress up as a milkmaid and with her royal train do a few chores on the “farm” to emulate the romanticized masses, but in safe, apartheid seclusion from them.

The French Revolution was already on the horizon and true peasants were shortly to march on Versailles, but the Queen had no desire to visit the real French countryside to learn of the crushing poverty of those who actually milked cows and herded sheep for a living. It is hard to know what motivated the queen to visit the Hameau—was it simply to relax in her own convenient and sanitized Arcadia, or was it some sort of pathetic attempt to better understand the daily lives of the increasing restive French masses?

The American coastal royalty does not build fake farms outside of its estates. But these elites, too, can grow just as bored with their privileged lives as Marie Antoinette did. Instead of hanging out with milk maids in ornamental villages, our progressive elites, at the same safe distance from the peasantry, prefer to show their solidarity with the dispossessed through angry rhetoric.

Take the case of Colin Kaepernick, the back-up quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers who makes $19 million a year (or about $20,000 per minute of regular season play). He has been cited by National Football League officials in the past for his use of the N-word, yet he refuses to stand for the pregame singing of the national anthem because he believes that his country is racist and does not warrant his respect. His stunt gained a lot of publicity and he now sees himself as a man of the revolutionary barricades. A number of other NFL athletes, as well as those in other sports, have likewise refused to stand for the national anthem to express solidarity with what they see as modern versions of the oppressed peasantry. But Kaepernick and his peers make more in one month than many Americans make in an entire lifetime. Still, for these members of the twenty-first-century Versailles crowd, the easiest way of understanding the lives of the underclass is expressing empathy for them for no more than a minute or two.

Lately, the entire Clinton clan has created a sort of Hameau de la Reine of the mind. Chelsea Clinton, for example, is married to hedge-fund operator Marc Mezvinsky (whose suspect Greek fund just went broke), and she once made over $600,000 for her part-time job as an NBC correspondent. She serves in a prominent role and is on the board of the non-profit billion-dollar Clinton Foundation, which has been cited for donating an inordinately small amount of its annual budget (often less than 15 percent) to charity work, while providing free jet travel for the Clinton family and offering sinecures for Clinton political operatives in between various Clinton campaigns. Explaining why she works at the Clinton Foundation and for other non-profits, Chelsea confessed, in Marie Antoinette style, that “I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t.” She cared enough, though, to purchase a $10.5 million Manhattan apartment not long ago rather than, say, rent a flat in the Bronx.