MOSAIC: Nationalism and Future of Western Freedom – PART IV

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 WILL BE 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.

By Yoram Hazony, MOSAIC

PART I, PART II, PART III

IV. The Liberal Challenge

In August 1941, several months before America’s entry into World War II, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt signed what became known as the “Atlantic Charter,” which reaffirmed the principle of national freedom (“the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live”) as the very heart of the Western powers’ vision for the postwar world. At this critical juncture, the Protestant construction remained the unquestioned basis for the international order as it was understood by the leaders of the Western nations. The great challenge before their eyes was to defeat the Nazis and the Soviets in their efforts to overthrow that Protestant order. If they could achieve this, it seemed that all would be well.

But the defeat of the Nazis, and ultimately also of the Soviets, did not bring about the expected restoration of the West’s Protestant construction. In fact, at least since the end of World War II, the future of that construction has only grown increasingly uncertain. We can see this in the progressive abandonment of the view that family, sabbath, and public recognition of God are institutions upheld by legitimate government and minimum requirements of a just society. And we can see it in the sharp decline of concern for safeguarding the independence of nations and the right of self-determination as the most effective barriers to the tyranny of universal empire.

What is driving this crisis is severe pressure from an emerging alternative to the Protestant political order: an alternative that can be called the liberal construction of the West. Although the final victory of this new order is still far off, institutions and individuals committed to it have grown sufficiently powerful to have put the entire Protestant construction in doubt. In recent years, we have seen continental Europe reconstituted under a multinational regime, and in America a series of devastating blows have been dealt to the Protestant construal of what it means for a legitimate government to protect the well-being of its people. With these dizzying victories in hand, the rise of the liberal construction of the West is the most important development in our political world today. Its only rival for this title is, perhaps, the simultaneous rise of radical Islam.

What is this liberal construction?

I’ll focus on a few of its most important characteristics, some of them more familiar than others.

The liberal construction of the West is premised on the idea that there is ultimately only one principle at the base of legitimate political order: namely, individual freedom.

To begin with, unlike the Protestant construction, which thrived on the tension between the two fundamental principles of a biblically-founded moral minimum and national freedom, the liberal construction of the West is premised on the idea that there is ultimately only one principle at the base of legitimate political order: namely, individual freedom. A classical and still highly influential source for this idea is the modern world’s most famous liberal manifesto, John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government.That landmark document, published in 1689, opens with the assertion that all human individuals are born “perfectly free” and “perfectly equal,” and goes on to describe them as pursuing life, liberty, and property in a world of transactions based on consent. From this basis, Locke builds his model of political life and theory of government.

Locke himself was a product of the Protestant construction, and his work was intended to strengthen it, not to undermine it. Nevertheless, in fashioning his theory he downplayed or entirely omitted essential characteristics of human nature and human society. In the Second Treatise Locke abstracts away the intellectual or cultural inheritance that one receives from being raised in a particular family, community, nation, and religious tradition. He ignores the mutual responsibilities that are intrinsic to inherited or adopted membership in such collectives, establishing far-reaching demands of loyalty and honor; and the way in which the inevitable challenges and hardships of human life reinforce these responsibilities and demands and turn them into often immovable features of the moral and political landscape. The result is Locke’s shocking depreciation of even the most basic bonds that had been thought to hold society together.

For example, is there any reason to believe that brothers born to the same parents have any obligations to each other? Do grandparents have any obligations to their grandchildren, or grandchildren to their grandparents? Since such basic family relationships do not come into being by way of consent, Locke’s model generates no obligations of the kind we normally associate with the family. Similarly, the government that is brought into being by the social contract of the Second Treatise is eerily without borders or boundaries, without an awareness of any responsibility to unborn future generations or even of any responsibility to bring children into the world in the first place, and without a concern to honor the memory of generations past who sacrificed to bring the present into being. Locke’s free and equal individuals have not consented to any of these things, which means that institutions such as the national state, community, family, and the church—institutions that set borders and boundaries, establish ties to generations future and past, and offer a glimpse beyond the present to something higher—appear to have no reason for existing at all. Without intending it, the framework provided by Locke’s Treatise makes the Protestant order exceedingly difficult to explain, much less justify.

So utterly unrealistic is the world described in Locke’s Second Treatise, a world in which so much of what constitutes normal political life has been reduced to the demands of individuals freely pursuing property, that it resembles a veritable dream-world. Locke’s first readers were deeply troubled by this. But the radical deficiency of his account has gradually ceased to be recognized as a problem, and Western intellectual life is now inundated with follow-up works—from Kant’s Perpetual Peace (1795) to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957) and John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1972) —that tirelessly elaborate this dream-world, working and reworking the liberal vision of human beings freely pursuing property on the basis of consent and without borders.

At some point, liberal political and economic theory and international law crushed the life out of more realistic, competing accounts, becoming the virtually unquestioned framework for what an educated person needs to know about the political world. With a few exceptions, the most noisily discussed debates among rival views in political theory (for example, between John Rawls and Robert Nozick) or in economics (John Maynard Keynes versus Friedrich Hayek) or in jurisprudence (between Ronald Dworkin and H.L.A. Hart) have, for two or three generations now, been conducted in terms largely internal to the same Lockean paradigm.

Ask a thoughtful person in politics or economics or law today to mount a defense of the national state and you will quickly see how unfamiliar such an idea has become.

University-educated political and intellectual elites in America and Europe, whether they think of themselves as “liberals” or as “conservatives,” are now for the most part sequestered within this liberal frame. Ask a sophisticated, thoughtful person in politics or economics or law today to mount a defense of the institution of the national state, or of the traditional family, or of public recognition of God’s kingship, and you immediately see how unfamiliar these things have become, and how foreign they are to the terms in which members of our elites are accustomed to conceptualizing the world. This isn’t just a matter of disagreeing with the proposition that such things are vital to maintaining a civilized political order. It is rather a matter of being so immersed in the new liberal construction as to be unable even to imagine what a non-Lockean view of reality might look like.

Having been initiated into this paradigm, educated people can now fill their days working in an endless array of liberal projects that make it seem real: the burgeoning political program of European unification; the expansion of unfettered free trade and the free immigration of populations; the transitioning of business enterprises into “multinational” corporations that serve the global economy rather than any particular national interest; the subjugation of nations to an ever-expanding body of international law; the agitation for a universal regime of human rights through international NGOs and the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva; the homogenization of the world’s universities by way of an accelerating system of international standards and peer review. All of these things are pursued as a matter of course by university-trained Lockeans, hardly aware that there might be intelligent and decent people whose estimation of the worth of such enterprises is drastically different from their own.

But despite the great success these projects have had in changing our world, and despite their genuine worth in certain areas (such as economics), the Lockean account remains what it was: a shockingly insufficient basis for understanding political reality. Those factors in human political and social life that have no place in the liberal paradigm have not been eliminated. They have only been denied and suppressed. And like Marxists before them, liberals will discover that while denial is easy, suppression comes at an escalating cost.