T. Belman. In essence this is the struggle Israel has waged since its founding. In 1896, Herzl launched the effort to create a Jewish state. It was the age of nationalism. That age ended in WWII when nationalism was discredited to be displaced by universalism, United Nations, European Union, multiculturalism, diversity, and globalism. All these forces have attempted to destroy Zionism, the last bastion of nationalism.
Not only has the nation state been discredited but so has the nation.
Thankfully nationalism is coming back as witnessed by Brexit, the rise of Trump and the rise of nationalistic parties in Europe. The state of Israel is a testament to its virtues.
THIS PROFOUND ESSAY HAS BEEN PUBLISHED IN SIX PARTS.
A conflict is brewing over the shape of the international order. It centers around an idea—a biblical idea—long thought discredited by political elites.
PART I, PART II, PART III, PART IV
PART V
VI. Enforcing a Single Standard of Right
Liberals do not seem to understand that the advancing liberal construction is a form of imperialism. But to anyone not already immersed in the new order, the resemblance is obvious. Much like the Pharaohs and the Babylonian kings, the Roman emperors and the Roman Catholic Church until well into the modern period, as well as the Marxists of the last century, liberals, too, have their grand theory about how they are going to bring peace and economic prosperity to the world by pulling down all the borders and uniting mankind under their own universal rule. Infatuated with the clarity and intellectual rigor of this vision, they disdain the laborious process of consulting with the multitude of nations they believe should embrace their view of what is right. And like other imperialists, they are quick to express disgust, contempt, and anger when their vision of peace and prosperity meets with opposition from those who they are sure would benefit immensely by simply submitting.
Let’s focus for a moment on this last point. The West is now constantly being buffeted by waves of vilification in the media and in the corridors of power and on university campuses—“shaming” campaigns whose purpose is to stigmatize and render illegitimate one or another person or policy or group of people that is perceived as still having the ability to mount any kind of meaningful resistance to the imposition of liberal doctrine: Christians, the British, Trump supporters, the state of Israel, to name a few of the most prominent targets.
Much of what has been written about these campaigns has concentrated on the campus scene, where standards of “political correctness” have stifled the kind of academic freedom that once permitted a broader range of opinions to be expressed than is possible today. But universities are hardly the principal locus of rage against views now deemed inappropriate—including views about homosexuality, immigration, Islam, and a host of other subjects—and against those who hold such views. Much of the public sphere is now regularly visited by the same kinds of denunciatory and repressive campaigns that until recently seemed the special province of the universities. As the scope of legitimate disagreement is progressively reduced, and the penalties of dissent grow more and more onerous, the Western democracies are rapidly becoming one big university campus.
These increasingly insistent demands for conformity to a single universal standard in speech and religion are the predictable outcome of the transition away from the Protestant construction of the West, with its fundamental principle of national independence and self-determination mandating a measure of diversity and toleration for profoundly divergent views. Under the old order, after all, Catholics had to tolerate the existence of Protestant regimes, monarchists had to tolerate republican regimes, and tightly regulated governments had to tolerate more open regimes. Not every individual found it comfortable to live in every country. But there did exist the possibility of negotiating special provisions to allow dissenting communities to be left alone so long as they were not interested in publicly rocking the boat; and if you did want to rock the boat, there was the option of relocating to a neighboring state where your views would be tolerated or even embraced.
Under a universal order, by contrast, in which a single standard of right is held to be in force everywhere, the measure of toleration for diverse political and religious standpoints will necessarily decline. Western elites, whose views are now being aggressively homogenized in keeping with the new liberal construction, find it increasingly difficult to see any need for the kind of toleration that the principle of national self-determination once permitted. Tolerance, like nationalism, is no longer associated with a progressive politics and a good will.
The vituperation heaped upon the English public and its elected leadership in the wake of the Brexit vote is an unmistakable warning to the West as a whole. From the point of view of the liberal construction, the unification of Europe is not one legitimate political option among others. It is the only legitimate option. The moral illegitimacy of Britain’s vote for independence was thus the unrelenting theme of political and media figures decrying the vote: it was alleged that only the aged supported Brexit, thereby disenfranchising the young; or that only the uneducated had supported it; or that voters had meant only to cast a protest vote and not actually to leave Europe; and so forth. These pronouncements, by turns angry and patronizing, were then followed by the demand that the British public’s preference be repealed—by a second referendum, or by act of Parliament, or by closed-door bargaining with the EU. Anything, so along as the one legitimate opinion should prevail.
The alarm and trepidation with which European and American elites responded to the prospect of an independent Britain revealed something that had long been obscured from view. That simple truth is that the emerging liberal construction is utterly incapable of respecting, much less celebrating, the deviation of nations seeking to assert a right to their own unique laws, traditions, and policies. Any such dissent is held to be vulgar and ignorant, if not evidence of a fascistic mindset.
Nor is Britain the only Western nation to have felt the sting of the whip. Needless to say, similar outbursts have repeatedly targeted Israel: for bombing Iraq’s nuclear facilities in 1981, for constructing housing complexes in eastern Jerusalem, for imposing a naval blockade on Gaza, and so on. America, too, is hardly immune. Its refusal to permit the International Criminal Court to try its soldiers, its unwillingness to sign the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse-gas emissions, its war in Iraq—all were met with similar outrage both at home and abroad. In one especially striking incident, when in 2010 the Arizona state legislature permitted the state’s law officers to clamp down on illegal immigration, the Obama administration inserted a legal challenge to this action in a report filed with the United Nations Human Rights Council. Far from defending the freedom of Americans against foreign encroachment, the U.S. government saw fit to join forces with an international effort to tar Arizona with the stigma of moral illegitimacy.
Similar campaigns of delegitimization, in both Europe and America, have been directed against the practice of Christianity and Judaism, religions on which the old biblical political order is based, and whose free exercise has usually been protected or at least tolerated by Western national governments. We have already seen attempts, especially in Europe, to ban such Jewish practices as circumcision and kosher slaughter in the name of liberal doctrines of universal rights. More recently, these doctrines have been used to force liberal teachings on sexuality and the family upon Christians and Jews in the workplace and in schools. It requires no special insight to see that, as more than one recent essay in Mosaic has emphasized, this assault on religious liberty is only the beginning, and that the teaching and practice of traditional forms of Judaism and Christianity will become ever more untenable as the liberal construction advances.
In all of these cases, the first goal is to intimidate. And in many instances, this aim is being achieved. Nations, religions, organizations, and individuals throughout the West now know they have to think a second and third time before speaking or acting as though the Protestant political order were still in place. Genuine diversity in the constitutional or religious character of Western nations persists only at mounting cost to those who insist on their freedom.
VII. Suddenly, an Open Question
In the generation since Margaret Thatcher’s ouster as prime minister of Britain in 1990, it has often seemed as though the consolidation of a new liberal order was a foregone conclusion. But the Brexit vote has opened a window of doubt. The Protestant construction, left to die by British elites in both the Labor and Conservative parties, has proved it still has some life in it. We do not yet know whether the attempt to pry the UK out of Europe will succeed. But the march toward a liberal construction has for the moment been halted, and the direction of the West has suddenly become an open question. The very existence of this question could revive forces that were thought to have dissipated from the world, taking us into a period of intensifying conflict between two irreconcilable visions of what the order of Western nations can and should be.
Voters in countries with strong national traditions, such as the Netherlands, France, Denmark, and Czechia, may have a major effect on what happens next. So will the upcoming U.S. election. The painful debate over Donald Trump’s personal qualities and qualifications for the presidency has made it difficult to sustain a thoughtful discussion about the issues—primarily, the issue of American national self-determination—that catapulted him to the center of political attention. But no matter what happens in November, the political fault line that has been uncovered at the heart of Western politics is not going away. The politics of democratic nations are rearranging themselves along this fault line, dividing the motley defenders of the old Protestant construction from the cohesive and highly professionalized world of those hoping to bring it down. New candidates for office—perhaps more appealing than Trump, perhaps considerably less so—will take up one or another version of the same cause with consequences that cannot yet be predicted.
Although the gathering opposition to the liberal construction is a certainty, the nature of this opposition is still unclear. Since the Protestant construction was built upon two principles, one can, in theory, be opposed to liberalism from a standpoint that insists on only one of them.
Thus, on the one hand, there exists today what might be called a “neo-Catholic” opposition to the liberal construction (I don’t mean that this view is embraced by all Catholics, or only by Catholics). Its spokesmen are known for deploring actions like the court-ordered demolition of a Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the Oklahoma state capitol in 2015 or, in the same year, the U.S. Supreme Court’s imposition of a new nationwide definition of marriage, seeing these as indications of the collapse of biblically derived standards for the conduct of legitimate government; yet these same spokesmen tend to show little appreciation of the grave threat to freedom presented by the abandonment of the national state.
On the other hand, there exists what is in effect a “neo-nationalist” view, which deplores the loss of national self-determination discernible in the project of European integration or in American “multilateralism,” yet recognizes no particular danger in the dissolution of the biblical moral minimum that was once recognized as restraining the excesses of individuals and of the state alike.
Neither of these positions strikes me as offering a plausible alternative to liberalism. Neo-Catholicism will continue to fight rearguard culture wars against liberal elites on issues such as abortion or the definition of marriage, all the while lending active or passive support to the liberal internationalism that is systematically uprooting the right of nations to dissent on religious or cultural issues of this kind. Neo-nationalism may be effective in breaking certain countries out of the liberal order, but it could also produce authoritarian regimes of dubious worth to the nations they govern, thereby reinforcing the claim (promoted from their respective viewpoints by liberals and fascists alike) that the only alternative to liberalism is fascism.
The third alternative is conservatism (or “classical nationalism”), a political movement that has, at least since the early 17th century, sought to establish and defend an international order of national states based on the two principles of national self-determination and the biblical moral minimum for legitimate government. Conservatives recognize both principles of the Protestant construction as indispensable to preserving an international order that has been the freest, and in many respects the most successful, that has ever existed on earth.
In light of the kinds of historical shortcomings that I touched on earlier, any conservative effort to renew the Protestant construction would have to involve updating and revision in keeping with the needs of our times. That having been said, conservatives recognize the two principles of this order as the most realistic framework that has yet been proposed for seeing our way toward a just and peaceable world.
Because European and American elites (including many university-educated Republicans in the U.S. and Tories in the UK) are today overwhelmingly liberal in their training and orientation, it is easy to find many well thought-out versions of liberal doctrines on the level of both theory and policy. By contrast, opposition to the liberal construction has an unprofessional and palpably makeshift quality about it. Conservative, neo-Catholic, and neo-nationalist views tend to be offered by scattered political candidates and intellectuals who share, on an intuitive level, a strong sense that the collapse of the Protestant order will be catastrophic in its consequences. But so far these intuitions have generally failed to give birth to the kind of political theory and historical work that could yield a coherent alternative to the order they are up against.
This means that for conservative intellectuals and politicians, the most pressing task right now is to articulate a restorative vision for re-establishing the political order—one that will be in accordance with the foundational principles of legitimate government and national self-determination drawn from the Protestant political tradition and Hebrew Scripture, while at the same time making provision for a new era. To have a chance of succeeding, this effort will require a meeting of minds among Old-Testament-conscious Protestants, nationalist Catholics, and Jews, in whose collective hands resides the question of how the Western nations can reconnect with the sources of their original, astonishing strength.
On the surface, Britain and America sometimes give the impression of being countries that have utterly freed themselves from their biblical heritage. But these are still nations that were formed by the Bible, and by the biblical message of freedom from empire. The events of the past year have shown just how powerful the Protestant construction remains in both countries, even after decades of ceding ground to the new liberal order that would replace it. The particular events themselves, and the personalities associated with them, may not be to everyone’s liking, but they offer a chance to rethink, from a more critical point of vantage than has been possible until now, the commitment to a universally binding liberalism that has been embraced by elites in Europe and America. They have also given us a chance to ask ourselves whether the biblical freedom bequeathed to us by our forefathers might not still be the better choice.
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