Nationalism

For the last thirty years, the Republican Party has been a battleground between two competing ideologies. One of these is fundamentally liberal, although it is packaged and sold under a variety of brand names: “compassionate conservatism,” neoconservatism, classical liberalism, and — most misleadingly — Reagan conservatism. The other ideology is a rejection of modern liberalism and the post-Cold War elite consensus in American politics. It is skeptical of free trade, large-scale immigration and US involvement in foreign conflicts. Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump are the primary representatives of this view, which is often called populist or nationalist. The two sides are not evenly matched.

Orlando, Florida   Cockburn just got back from the second annual National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida. The ballroom of the Orlando Hilton can hold more than a thousand people. A little snowbird tells Cockburn that Yoram Hazony, the event's organizer, was in panic mode in the days before the summit. Not enough people had paid for the $315 ticket or $2,500 VIP pass. It seems even DC politicos had better things to do on Halloween than listen to Josh Hawley scream about porn. Cockburn hears that every right-wing organization in attendance received emails from Hazony begging them to help ship out more people. In the end, the official turnout was 700 attendees — though a hundred of them were the ladies and gentlemen of the press, and most of them were on a freebie.

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. For most of the past 200 years, the left, whether revolutionary or liberal, derived power and popularity from being on the side of freedom. If you resented the economic, social and political privileges enjoyed by hereditary aristocrats and landowners, you were on the left. If you chafed against the restraints imposed on what you could read, write, say, think or do by established churches or majoritarian cultural Christianity, you had reason to support one left-wing movement or another — philosophes and Jacobins in the 18th century, liberals in the 19th century, the American Civil Liberties Union in the 20th.

John Bolton has left the White House and those of us who desire some modicum of peace in this world can breathe a sigh of relief. Bolton was appointed to serve as Donald Trump’s third national security adviser barely a year and a half ago, succeeding H.R. McMaster. It was always a strange choice: Trump’s foreign policy is premised largely on hard-nosed (and often hard-of-luck) deal brokering, while Bolton’s preferred method is to bomb other countries. This is the man who has no regrets about the calamitous occupation of Iraq, who wanted to assassinate Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, who seemed to advocate for the use of nuclear weapons against Iran, and who lamented that we didn’t destroy the Syrian regime all the way back in 2003.

How many times do pundits with conventional sensibilities have to be surprised before they twig to their own blindness? They were surprised by Brexit. They were surprised by Donald Trump. And now, while they’re distracted by Donald Trump’s latest tweets, they’re setting themselves up to be surprised by another nationalist miracle — the wholesale replacement of the decrepit conservative movement by a new national conservatism. The press missed the story of this week’s National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C., an event organized by Yoram Hazony and his newly created Edmund Burke Foundation. The media hive mind had decided that Trump’s tweets were the axis around which political news must revolve for about 72 hours.

America is unraveling into an unhappy confederation of hostile tribes. Extremists on the right are murdering Jews in synagogues and African Americans in churches. The woke left is bullying us into a neo-segregation in which we’re judged by the color of our skin. We’re too obsessed with economic growth to recognize that the rising tide has swallowed entire regions. We’re too proud of our tradition of immigration to admit the failures of assimilation.At a time of such angry division, what can bind up our wounds and bring us together as a nation?A renewed patriotism would be a step in the right direction, but it’s not enough. Patriotism asks us to love our country. But what we need now is more than love of country. We must love our fellow citizens.

My libertarian friends object to some of my recent writings — in particular, an essay for First Things proposing a moderate economic nationalism as ‘A New Conservative Agenda.’ The various intellectual factions on the American right are all susceptible to utopianism and dangerously wishful thinking when they dwell too much in their own minds: they all need the benefit of a look through someone else’s eyes once in a while, even to see their own concerns more clearly. In the letter below, I respond to some friends’ objections and summarize — tidily, I hope — a few vital questions to which libertarians offer inadequate answers.

Adolf Hitler ruined nationalism for everyone, says Candace Owens, which is something of a niche complaint. (She had nothing to say about the toothbrush mustache which, in the 1920s, was a sign of moral seriousness.) Owens is African-American, and a rising star in Trump circles in the way that if you are African-American, or gay, and a Trump supporter, you become a rising star, because the pool of talent is thin and the airwaves – I mean Twitter and Instagram - are fat. ‘Whenever we say “nationalism,”’ Owens said, like a woman reciting a wonky Wikipedia page from memory, ‘the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler.