Maybe I’m wrong, but my working assumption is that whatever it is we thought we had during the Obama years is dead. Liberals are going through the stages of grief, most now either in denial or anger. Someone like Corey Booker exemplifies the anger stage, and I sympathize, but that doesn’t mean his outburst on the Senate floor last week changes the fundamental reality. The bottom line is that Democrats are powerless to do anything because the American people chose MAGA Republicans, whether they understood the implications or not. That’s how democracy works, even if it means the end of democracy as we’ve known it. I checked in with Rachel Maddow last night to see where she’s at, and she recognizes that we are no longer what we once were, but thinks that we can get it back. Maybe, but I doubt it. We’ve crossed over into something new, and there’s no going back; there’s only moving through it and hopefully toward something better.
Maybe it was easier for me to go through my stages of grief more quickly because I didn’t love the old thing that much to begin with. But that doesn’t mean I don’t mourn its passing, and it doesn’t mean that I accept what’s replacing it, or that I’ve given up. Rather I see myself as looking forward to and working for what comes next after we all learn that this experiment in Nationalism is foolishness on stilts. But Nationalism is what all the cool kids want for now, so we’re all going to have to learn the hard way how foolish it is. And so for that reason I think it’s important to understand why Nationalism is so attractive to so many people and why the kind of Nationalism that these guys are talking about makes no sense in the 21st Century.
That’s why the Hazony-Klein conversation I wrote about in my last post was so interesting to me. Hazony represents the near future, and Klein is somewhere between denial and anger about that. That’s the subtext of their conversation. Hazony knows his side has won and commands the field. He understands that Obama Liberalism is dead, and he’s gently, patiently trying to nudge Klein to understand the hard reality that Klein feels he must resist.
But Hazony’s ideas about nationalism are just wrong for reasons I pointed out in my last post. But he’s interestingly wrong, so I started reading his The Virtue of Nationalism over the weekend, and it confirms much of what I thought. It’s as if he’s writing in the 1950s, and he’s trying to extrapolate from his experience as an Israeli nationalist what nationalism should be for everybody else. He’s an intelligent guy, but his reading of history is very, very selective, and it’s as if all the tumult and disruption of late capitalism has contributed absolutely nothing to the crisis we’re undergoing—it’s all the neo-Marxists’ fault.
Here’s where I come down: Nationalism as an ideology is attractive because it gets some things right; it’s dangerous, like all forms of idolatry, because of what it leaves out. On the other hand, cosmopolitan globalism, Hazony’s nemesis, is as an attractive ideology because it gets some things right; it’s dangerous, like all forms of idolatry, because of what it leaves out. The problem does not lie in the truth that each ideology points to, but in the assertion that you have to choose one or the other. If one is right, the other cannot be. That’s what Hazony says, and it’s the key to understanding what makes him a little cuckoo. It’s what all fanatics believe.
This is the human condition, oscillating from one form of idolatry to the next. Hegel and Marx’s dialectical reading of history derives from this insight; they were just wrong about how they thought dialectic would, in reallity, play out. Why were they wrong? Well, it’s not that they didn’t get a lot right, it’s what they left out. That’s just the human condition. We’re in a state of seeing some things very clearly, but blind to so much more. That’s not a reason to surrender to a epistemological skepticism but rather to celebrate what we do know, to consolidate our gains, and move forward into the unknown. That’s what makes the human project interesting and exciting—that there is so much more to know.
So I’m going to put MacIntyre, Taylor, and Hart aside for a bit and take a dive into the Isaiah Berlin’s essays about Hamann and Herder—maybe a little Vico. I think MacIntyre, Taylor, and Hart are our best guides into a healthy future in the long term. Hamann and Herder are the best guides to help us understand where we’re going in the unhealthy short term.
That’s not a knock on Hamann and Herder. They are both original, important thinkers. I spoke about both in the Cathedral lectures as among the first voices who sought to counterbalance the extremes of Enlightenment rationalist universalism. Hazony is drinking from the same anti-Enlightenment well as H&H, and that’s what makes him interesting, at least to me. So it’s important to understand what’s right and not right about what Hazony—as well as guys like Vance and Bannon—is glugging down. And that requires understanding something of the Romantic roots of nationalism in central Europe, and that shines a light on why Hungary seems to be its epicenter.
So if there’s something important in Hamann and Herder that has to be grappled with, so is there in the universalism that was so important for the Enlightenment thinkers. Both are important, and the hypothesis for this book, if I ever write it, is that both have to be integrated if we are to have the Good Society. That work of integration cannot be accomplished within the constraints of the Enlightenment/anti-Enlightenment dynamic, i.e., the Scopes-Trial dynamic. It needs to draw from resources outside of it, and the classical tradition provides that, or so I want to argue.
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