This is only tangential to the “patriotism v. nationalism” series I seem to have embarked on, but I’d like to toss it in to the mix now before it gets stale.

Some years ago I read the original “The End of History?” article that Francis Fukuyama wrote in 1989, and out of which grew a book by the same name. This essay persuaded me that, just as youth is wasted on the young, graduate school is wasted on the stupid. I expressed more dismay at Fukuyama and explained why I think he’s an idiot here.

Anyway, Fukuyama wrote a long essay for yesterday’s New York Times Sunday magazine called “After Neoconservatism.” I haven’t read it all the way through yet and will refrain from criticising it directly until I do. But links to the essay took me to this post by Andrew Seal of The Little Green Blog (“All things petty and profound at Dartmouth College – and beyond…”) that’s a gem. Note this paragraph in particular

I would add that neoconservatism is also a reaction to modernization, that the idea, pseudo-Nietzschean as it is, that we can shape history by our will to power (veiled as a will to democracy) is a reaction to a globalized world where awareness of things beyond our power has grown to frightening proportions. It is not that we have less power over our situation than ever before, but that we are more aware of how little power we have always had. I guess Nietzsche himself identified this phenomenon–or symptom, if you prefer–as ressentiment.

This nicely supports what I said of neoconism in the last post, “Patriotism v. Paranoia,” which was a follow up to “Patriotism v. Nationalism“: “I see neoconservatism as proactive isolationism. Foreigners scare us, so we’ll make them be more like us so they’re not so scary.”

Mr. Seal of Dartmouth says it a bit better, though.

Here Mr. Seal quotes Fukuyama and makes a comment —

The [Iraq] war’s supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of institution-building and reform.

In other words, we’ve all clearly been taking things like Locke’s “state of nature” and Rawls’s “original position” a little too literally. Democracy is not, in fact, at the heart of humanity.

This represents some progress on Fukuyama’s part, because in “The End of History?” he assumes that something called “liberal democracy” (which I infer from the essay is neither liberal nor democratic as most of us understand those words) is humanity’s natural state and the final destination of mankind’s political evolution. Once mankind has universally achieved this state, history (meaning wars and other political upheavals) will end, Fukuyama concluded.

I think righties generally have this same view of “democracy”; that whatever it is, it’s immutable, and once you have it you don’t have to be concerned about damaging it or losing it. Subvert it, break it, bend it out of shape, and it’ll just snap back, good as new. Further, once a people have elections, they have democracy, because people will always choose to freedom over totalitarianism. Numerous real-world examples to the contrary will not dissuade righties from this notion.

Also, Mr. Seals says,

Fukuyama is asserting the existence of what Richard Hofstadter called “the illusion of American omnipotence”—that anything seriously bad happening in the world had to be the result of American mismanagement of global affairs. He used the example of the Chinese fall to Communism—many believed that democratic China’s collapse was due to insufficient American involvement and support or even “betrayal.” However, the illusion of American omnipotence has another side as well—we tend to believe that anything good happening in the world is a fruit of beneficial American policies–the embrace of democracy by many of the former Warsaw Pact countries was “due” to our shining example, for instance. (City on the Hill, etc.) Neocons are simply the most ardent believers in the illusion of American omnipotence.

Exactly so. And now I want to treat you to my favorite rightie, Orrin Judd. He remains my favorite even over Michelle Malkin and Captain Ed (and even Confederate Yankee, who loves me but won’t admit it), because he’s such a pure example of the walking delusional state that is rightiness. Others may occasionally be contaminated by momentary bursts of clarity or reason, but not our Orrin. In reaction to Fukuyama’s essay, he writes,

The problem for Mr. Fukuyama and others counseling a return to Realism is that the neocons aren’t the driving force behind the policy of humanitarian interventionism. It is instead a function of the Judeo-Christian remoralization of Anglo-American foreign policy that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan began and that continued unabated under Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, reaching its current heights under our most openly evangelical president, George W, Bush. With Australia, India, Japan, and perhaps now Canada joining the Axis of Good, which requires that regimes be democratic in order to be considered legitimate, there’s not much chance danger of the kind of retreat he’s fretting about. And with John McCain the odds on favorite to be our next president we’re more likely to be increasingly interventionist rather than less.

What can one say to that, but … holy shit.

And be sure to read the comments. As Mary Matalin might say, they are delicious. I think my favorites are “We stepped in and imposed peace. It’s who we are”; and “It’s our fault we’ve let them all depend on us. Democratization is like global welfare reform–get on with your own lives.” The “illusion of American omnipotence” indeed.

This post is a followup to the last post on Patriotism v. Nationalism, in which I argue that the hard-core Right is not patriotic, but nationalistic.

Saturday at Huffington Post, EJ Eskow posted “Shot Through the Heart and You’re to Blame: Conservatism as Psychopathology.” Eskow disagrees with Glenn Greenwald that our current “conservatism” is a Bush personality cult.

I think the truth is simpler and sicker than that. People don’t slavishly obey and follow every whim of Messrs. Bush (and now Cheney) because they revere them. They do it for a more basic reason: They’ve got the candy.

Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld … they’re Mafia bosses doling out the largesse in return for unquestioned fealty. And today’s so-called “conservatives” respond in kind. Will Roger Ailes get more exclusive interviews if he peddles the daily GOP lies and spins? As you wish, Godfather. Will Arnold Schwarzenegger become Governor if he pumps for Bush at the convention? Thank you, Don Karl. Will “Straight Talkin'” John McCain be rewarded with a chance to run in 2008 if he forgets what they did to his wife and kid? It’ good to kiss the ring again, Mr. President. Let me hug you.

Everything conservatism used to stand for, from fiscal restraint to obeying the law to good manners, is being turned on its head by the Bush Regime. And the faithful love them for it. Eskow writes,

Wrecking the country’s finances. Trashing civil discourse. Law breaking. Ruining the earth itself for our grandchildren. That’s some sick s**t. Now, we have the sight of Mr. Whittington — by all accounts a good and decent man — being forced to crawl on broken glass to stay in the club. Hey, too bad about Harry — but business is business.

But now to the psychopathology — Eskow points out that the recent shooting incident (“Get loaded, shoot a guy in the face, tell the world it’s his fault, then make him crawl.”) is illustrative of antisocial personality disorder as defined by the DSM psychiatric manual. Well, yes; Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the top officials of the Bush Administration could fill the Personality Disorder Hall of Fame. But does “they’ve got the candy” really account for Bush’s following among the people of the U.S.? It might explain why other Republican politicians kowtow to the Bushies, but it doesn’t explain Bush devotion among the hoi polloi.

According to some guys at Berkeley, 50 years of research literature reveal these common psychological factors linked to political conservatism:

* Fear and aggression
* Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
* Uncertainty avoidance
* Need for cognitive closure
* Terror management

Fear, aggression, avoidance, terror. As Glenn Greenwald wrote,

When all else fails, what we end up hearing from Bush supporters, usually in quite strained and urgent tones, is that we have no real choice but to consent to the latest item of controversy on the Bush agenda (which now even includes allowing the President to break the law when he decides that our protection requires that), because if we do not, we will all die violent and horrible deaths at the hands of the powerful Islamic terrorists. Our very survival is at risk — the people who want to kill us all are coming — and given our dire state, anything and everything is justified to stop them.

I think righties are genuinely baffled when they find others who aren’t as afraid as they are and who aren’t being driven by fear. Like, for example, lefties. They assume we are innocents who don’t understand how dangerous the world is. And I think they’re unhinged. Yes, terrorism is frightening. Terrorists can knock down buildings and kill people. But terrorists can’t destroy America. There aren’t enough terrorists with enough weapons in the world to invade and occupy America. Terrorists can’t destroy the Constitution or cancel our civil liberties. Only we can do that. And fear is driving the more unhinged elements of the Right into doing exactly that.

In “Bush and the Cultivation of Fear” I argued that support for George W. Bush is built on fear. Even neocon-ism, which on the surface appears to be all about self-confidence and dominance and spreading American hegemony, is an ideology born of fear. I see neoconservatism as proactive isolationism. Foreigners scare us, so we’ll make them be more like us so they’re not so scary.

Relating this to the last post on nationalism — I see nationalism and fundamentalism and most other right-wing isms as essentially driven by fear. In the past century or so our species, worldwide, has undergone some seismic social shifts. People no longer remain neatly sorted by skin color, language, and cultural history. All over the globe people of diverse ethnic and social backgrounds are having to learn to live together. Once upon a time “foreign” places were far, far away. But air travel has brought them closer in terms of travel time; now every foreign place on the globe is just over the horizon. Soon foreigners will be sitting in our laps.

I think nationalism arose and became dominant in the 20th century largely because of these seismic social shifts. People who can’t handle the shifts retreat into nationalism as a defense.

This is from something I wrote in December 2003:

I’ve observed my whole life how Americans can be frightened into stampeding off cliffs. Fear of Communism gave birth to McCarthyism, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the War in Vietnam. Today the Republicans are using fears of terrorism, foreigners, ethnic minorities, and various aspects of sexuality to keep the serfs in line.

Consider also the Religious Right. In her magnificent book The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism, Karen Armstrong demonstrates that fundamentalism arose in response to modernity, especially to scientific rationalism. “Fear is at the heart of fundamentalism,” she writes. “The fear of losing yourself.” This is true of Islamic fundamentalists like Osama bin Laden as well as our homegrown types. Liberals cherish tolerance, democracy, pluralism, and civil liberties; fundamentalists fear these values as weapons of (their) annihilation.

It is important to recognize that these theologies and ideologies are rooted in fear. The desire to define doctrines, erect barriers, establish borders, and segregate the faithful in a sacred enclave where the law is stringently observed springs from that terror of extinction which has made all fundamentalists, at once time or another, believe that the secularists were about to wipe them out. The modern world, which seems so exciting to a liberal, seems Godless, drained of meaning and even satanic to a fundamentalist. [Armstrong, The Battle for God (Ballantine, 2000), p. 368]

I postulate that existential fear is at the heart of most “isms.” And although there’s no objective measure of angst that I know of, the world may seem scarier to We, the People, than it used to, and not just because of terrorism. Collectively, our props are falling away. Compared to fifty years ago (as far back as I can remember), communities are fragmented, families are scattered, jobs are ephemeral. Across rural and small-town America, communities that were once homogeneous are becoming multiracial and multiethnic. “Givens” about God and Man and Sex and other big issues are being openly challenged.

Thus, fearful voters can be incited into voting against their own self-interests by the terrifying specter of gay people getting married.

If you understand the fear issue, then what I call Erin’s Paradox (named for my daughter because she noticed it, not because she has it) becomes more understandable. Erin’s Paradox says that the further away Americans live from any likely terrorist target, the more fearful they are of terrorism. “Likely terrorist targets” are urban, and city dwellers learn to be comfortable with multiculturalism. If you live in some homogeneous little town out on the prairie, however, it’s more likely you are not comfortable with multiculturalism at all. Thus, dusky Islamic terrorists from unfathomable foreign places scare the stuffing out of them, much more so than the potential Timothy McVeigh wannabee next door.

Bottom line: When you are looking at a rightie you are looking at a nationalist; and when you are looking at a nationalist you are looking at someone who has already surrendered to fear. The terrorists have got ’em right where they want ’em — terrorized.

Later I want to tie this in to hate speech from the Right, but I think I’ve gone on long enough for now.

Do you remember Sydney Harris? He was a syndicated columnist who died in 1986. I used to love his column.

Patriotism is proud of a country’s virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues. The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country’s virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, “the greatest,” but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is. — Sydney J. Harris

I’ve been struggling with ideas about patriotism v. nationalism. And then I looked in Bartlett’s Quotations and rediscovered Sydney Harris.

The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.

I miss Sydney Harris. But here’s another good quote on patriotism and nationalism, from some other guy:

Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill and calling for larger spurs and brighter beaks. I fear that nationalism is one of England’s many spurious gifts to the world. — Richard Aldington

“Responsibility” seems to be a common theme:

What do we mean by patriotism in the context of our times? I venture to suggest that what we mean is a sense of national responsibility … a patriotism which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. — Adlai Stevenson

I’m sure by now you see where I’m going with this: Righties are not patriots, but nationalists. And I’m arguing that one of the basic differences between a patriot and a nationalist is that patriots value responsibility. This includes the citizen’s responsibility to his country, a country’s responsibility to its citizens, and the responsibility of a country and its citizens to the rest of the world.

Nationalists, on the other hand, do not value responsibility. They value loyalty, and their loyalty is a type of tribalism. The loyalty may not necessarily be to one’s fellow citizens, but only to members of their tribe. You know the righties feel absolutely no loyalty to us lefties, for example, even though we are fellow-citizens.

The right Americans are the right Americans because they’re not like the wrong Americans, who are not really Americans. — Eric J. Hobsbawm (b. 1917), British historian

Further, nationalists feel no sense of responsibility for the actions of their country. No matter what the country does, the nationalist will either justify it or deny it. Just speaking of the wrongdoing of one’s country is “disloyal” to a nationalist.

Cal Thomas is a nationalist, not a patriot. Recently he wrote,

Last Sunday, Gore spoke to the Jeddah Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia. … Gore told his audience, many of whom have been educated at American universities, that after 9/11 Arabs in the United States were “indiscriminately rounded up, often on minor charges of overstaying a visa or not having a green card in proper order, and held in conditions that were just unforgivable.” … Gore also claimed there were “terrible abuses” of the detainees, but he failed to provide any examples, and media calls to his office produced none.

Thomas should have called the U.S. Department of Justice. In June 2003 the Justice Department’s inspector general issued a report of the results of an internal, but independent investigation. The report reveals that the FBI and immigration authorities seized hundreds of Arabs and South Asians after 9/11 and subjected them to severe prison conditions with barely a nod to due process. A summary of the report is here. The complete report, in PDF format, is here.

Amazing what three minutes of googling will turn up, isn’t it? You’d think a “journalist” like Cal Thomas would figure these things out. Anyway, Thomas continues,

For Gore to make his anti-American remarks in Saudi Arabia is at least as bad as what Nazi sympathizers said in this country and abroad leading up to and during World War II.

One definition of “treason” at dictionary.com is: Violation of allegiance toward one’s country or sovereign, especially the betrayal of one’s country by waging war against it or by consciously and purposely acting to aid its enemies. By any objective standard, Gore’s remarks in Saudi Arabia appear to fit the definition.

Does Thomas not realize an audience of U.S-educated Saudis must have known already about the rights violations detailed in the Justice Department report? Or does he think simple brown natives won’t find such things out unless we tell them? (Puh-leeze … )

What really ticked off Thomas was that, in his eyes, Gore’s admission to a pack of foreigners that America had done something wrong was an act of disloyalty. But acknowledging wrongdoing is an act of taking responsibility. Taking responsibility is what patriots do. Denying that one’s country is ever at fault is what nationalists do.

And if you really want to find an American aiding America’s enemies, Cal, take a look at the Oval Office.

Seems to me that the easiest way to tell a patriot from a nationalist is to apply the “responsibility” test. When the U.S. is at fault, a patriot considers it a duty to speak up and say so. But where a patriot sees responsibility, a nationalist just sees disloyalty. The nationalist will say something like “why are you tearing down your country? Why don’t you talk about this bad thing another country did?” I’m sure you’ve heard speeches like that, many times. And the answer is, because I’m not responsible for that other country. I’m responsible for my country. Nationalists don’t get that.

[Update: The Poor Man finds an example.]

This is from the late, great Erich Fromm:

Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. “Patriotism” is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by “patriotism” I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one’s own nation, which is the concern with the nation’s spiritual as much as with its material welfare–never with its power over other nations. Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.

Fromm puts patriotism in quotation marks; I assume he is using the word in an ironic sense. But speaking of idolatrous worship, last Thursday Dave Neiwert posted about “The Conservative faith” at Orcinus. Responding to Glenn Greenwald’s must-read post “Do Bush followers have a political ideology?” Dave argues that what passes for current “conservatism” is a kind of political religion, a critter defined this way by Wikipedia:

In the terminology of some scholars working in sociology, a political religion is a political ideology with cultural and political power equivalent to those of a religion, and often having many sociological and ideological similarities with religion. Quintessential examples are Marxism and Nazism, but totalitarianism is not a requirement (for example neo-liberalism can be analysed as a political religion).

… The term political religion is a sociological one, drawing on the sociological aspects of religion which can be often be found in certain secular ideologies. A political religion occupies much the same psychological and sociological space as a theistic religion, and as a result it often displaces or coopts existing religious organisations and beliefs; this is described as a “sacralisation” of politics. However, although a political religion may coopt existing religious structures or symbolism, it does not itself have any independent spiritual or theocratic elements – it is essentially secular, using religion only for political purposes, if it does not reject religious faith outright.

Dave Neiwert continues to present, IMO, a solid case that current contemporary “conservatism” is more a nascent political religion than a political philosophy. And this explains much about the righties’ attitude toward American non-righties. We are not just the political opposition; we are apostate. We are blasphemers. We are heretics.

One of the most maddening traits of righties is that they cannot wrap their heads around the simple truth that those of us who oppose the Bush Administration have lots of reasons for doing so. How many times has a critic of Bush policy been dismissed as “just a Bush hater”? It doesn’t matter what facts or documentation the critic presents. It’s all swept away with the simple explanation — Bush hater. Or liberal. Which takes us back to Glenn Greenwald’s observation that anyone who criticises the Bush Regime becomes a “liberal” in the minds of righties, no matter if that individual is as politically conservative as cheesy eagle art. Glenn writes,

People who self-identify as “conservatives” and have always been considered to be conservatives become liberal heathens the moment they dissent, even on the most non-ideological grounds, from a Bush decree. That’s because “conservatism” is now a term used to describe personal loyalty to the leader (just as “liberal” is used to describe disloyalty to that leader), and no longer refers to a set of beliefs about government.

If you understand Bush cultism as a religious faith, then the behavior of Bush supporters becomes, if not understandable, at least recognizable. In their minds, whatever we say is blasphemy; through us, Satan himself speaks. The righteous must plug their ears and refuse to listen.

Religion and nationalism do tend to get mixed up together into the same toxic, warmongering soup. This is precisely what is going on in the Muslim world; Islam as nationalism. You can find examples of enmity sorting itself into religious/ethnic camps in many parts of Africa, Asia, and around the globe. Perhaps as nation-states become more multiethnic and religiously pluralistic, the urge to form enemies and make war is being driven out of the hands of governments and into the hands of charismatic religious/ethnic leaders, like Osama bin Laden. We should note that even though encyclopedias still define the word nationalism as “loyalty to a nation-state,” which would certainly apply to most 20th-century nationalist movements, nationalists can defy existing political boundaries and organize themselves around an ideal of “nation” that excludes existing borders and governments. But that’s a topic a bit too ambitious for Sunday morning.

Let’s go back to Cal Thomas for a moment. Last week Citizen K of DKos wrote a post called “Cal Thomas: the republican call for Leninism and blasphemy” in which the Citizen argued that righties like Thomas “illustrates the takeover of American discourse by Leninist ideology.” Citizen K quotes Lenin saying that anyone who vacillates from the positions worked out by Soviet political leaders “objectively can have only one result … helping the imperialists to provoke the Russian Soviet Republic into a battle that will obviously be to its disadvantage ….” And Citizen K compares this to Thomas’s “By any objective standard, Al Gore’s remarks in Saudi Arabia appear to fit the definition [of treason].” Citizen K concludes,

Because Lenin (and Cal Thomas) are omniscient, anyone who disagrees with them is “objectively” treasonous. The use of this language by Thomas is no coincidence – the neo-cons are a movement of Leninists. The essence of Leninism is Power. Lenin was happy to switch back and forth from capitalism (NEP) to communism, from elections to bullets, from a strong war policy to surrender as long as he retained and built power. The US leninists have the same flexibility. For them, political positions are simply valuable propaganda or not. Balanced budget/unbalanced budgets, gun control/gun banning, anti-choice/”moderation”, gay marriage bans/hiring Cheney’s daughter for gay/lesbian outreach and so on. The suckers who kept trying to find high minded socialism in Lenin were no more or less gullible than the “conservatives” who look for some “conservatism” in Bush/Cheney’s policies. The only consistency is Power.

In the Soviet Union, loyalty to the Communist Party and its leaders largely replaced religion. We aren’t anywhere close to that point here, of course. I do think it can be argued that, in America, the conservative political religion has largely co-opted (and corrupted) Christianity for its own purposes. And I think it can be argued that much of what passes for “Christianity” in America is a political-religious mythos that is Christian on the surface but something else entirely in its heart. But that’s another topic a bit too ambitious for Sunday morning.

Later, today or tomorrow, I plan to post something about politics and psychopathology that ties into this post. But I’ve gone on long enough for now.

Let’s close with some more quotes:

Nationalism is militant hatred. It is not love of our countrymen: that, which denotes good citizenship,
philanthropy, practical religion, should go by the name of patriotism. Nationalism is passionate xenophobia. It is
fanatical, as all forms of idol-worship are bound to be. And fanaticism…obliterates or reverses the distinction
between good and evil. Patriotism, the desire to work for the common weal, can be, must be, reasonable: “My
country, may she be right!” Nationalism spurns reason: “Right or wrong, my country.” –Albert L. Guerard

Nationalism … is the worship of the collective power of a local human community. Unlike the faith in progress through science, nationalism is not a new religion; it is a revival of an old one. This was the religion of the city-states of the pre-Christian Greco-Roman world. It was resuscitated in the West at the Renaissance, and this resuscitation of the Greco-Roman political religion has been far more effective than the resuscitation of the Greco-Roman style of literature, visual art, and architecture. Modern Western nationalism, inspired by Greco-Roman political ideals and institutions, has inherited the dynamism and fanaticism of Christianity. Translated into practice in the American and French Revolutions, it proved to be highly infectious. Today, fanatical nationalism is perhaps 90 percent of the religion of perhaps 90 percent of mankind. — A.J. Toynbee

Finally,

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. — George Orwell

Update: See Digby, “Political Religion.“