So here’s my American conclusion of my article critical of European depoliticization:
The Americans, as our English friend Chesterton observed with some ambivalence, are the seeming oxymoron, a creedal nation. We are, he memorably said, “a nation with the soul of the church.” America, he added, is all about “the romance of the citizen” and “a home for the homeless” everywhere. The American creed is that all human beings are created equal, because there’s a personal center of significance in the universe that grants each of us significance. Everyone, in principle, can be a citizen of our country who accepts the “dogmatic lucidity” of that national faith.
That faith is about citizens, because it’s the foundation of the way of life shared in our territorial home. But it’s a faith that the foundation of citizenship is not a merely national construction; we’re at home with the thought that the nation is not the real source of the significance of citizens. And so the true foundation of citizenship lies in the truth about the person and the relationship between being politically at home and our truest home. We’ve never shared the French view—or even the view of the ancient polis—that citizens are created out of nothing. Nor have we ever shared today’s European view that the person must be detached from the citizen to display his true freedom.
The American view is that citizenship is only one part—but a real part—of whole human lives; the person experiences himself as both a political and transpolitical being. The romance of the citizen, for us, displays part of the truth about the equal significance we all share as unique and irreplaceable beings. (That means, as Chesterton learned, in part, from Lincoln, that our Declaration’s faith is not merely or most deeply Lockean. There is a foundation for the significance of each particular person in nature itself, and that thought depends at least upon a distinctively Christian sort of Deism that was a product of the Declaration’s legislative compromising of Lockean and Calvinist concerns.)
This view of America, which finds its home among conservative Americans today, is the best explanation of why America can be a nation without succumbing to nationalism, of why we are so comparatively adept in reconciling the particularity of the citizen with the universality of personal principle, of why History (with a capital H) never took firm, depersonalizing root here, of why the most Christian of Americans can be the best citizens, of why there are credible Christian and secular accounts of our founding principles that are in some respects in principle irreconciliable but nonetheless are readily compromisable, and of why we are so confident that the nation is the form by which democratic self-government can and should take root everywhere.
This view of America is arguably weakening in the face of the envy of our sophisticates of the purer or postpolitical morality of the Europeans, but its future may be if not certainly the last—arguably the best—hope for the future of both the person and the citizen—the combination indispensable for self-government in our or any Christian or post-Christian time—everywhere.
America’s persistent, political self-understanding of itself as a nation, as Charles Krauthammer pointed out in a somewhat different way recently, is the main reason why that we continue to fund a huge military establishment capable of projecting our power and influence everywhere. The Europeans have chosen to have minimal military expenditures and increasingly reduced military capabilities. When they need airlifts, the turn to our Air Force, and they rely on our navy for keeping the open seas open. Much of Europe’s relative depoliticization or de-nationalization is parasitic upon one nation in particular.
The Europeans can afford not to do everything required to defend themselves precisely because we choose not to be like them. For us (at least so far), the European life of excessive personal liberation in comfort and safety is decadence based on self-denial. If we choose to live like them, who, in fact, would protect us? We seem stuck with being a nation, and the Europeans, it seems to me, ought not only to praise our distinctiveness, but follow the advice of their conservative or national thinkers–such as Roger Scruton and Pierre Manent–and do what they can to imitate it.
So I’m not endorsing any particular American intervention, but I do think the isolationism of the republicanism of our Front Porcher friends misunderstands who we are and our indispensable purpose in the world in our time. I also think it’s more pagan than Christian, but that’s a story for another time.
November 17th, 2009 | 11:48 am
So there’s a real split today between two versions of Augustinianism: American and European. Th European critique of nationalism and by extention, strict political sovereignty, is partly the result of its failures in the 20th century but also partly the result of its view that man is not reducible to his political existence. It’s an oddly secularized Augustinianism since, precisely speaking, there is no City of God for them. The American version still retains the force of the full bifurcation but updates it as well: in the American view, the alientation we naturally feel in the political theater doesn’t seem to entail the same demotion of the political that it did for Augustine–we are intensely political, even enthusisatically patriotic, and even see our political foundations as rooted in justice, in a way that Augustine would never countenance. This, of course, means that the American view of human nature is not simply Augustinian, nor is our Christianity the same as his either.
November 18th, 2009 | 7:38 am
So, Peter, one of the most important contemporary developments in Christian theology (and Scritpure studies) that we “partisans of the poltiical,” hence, of the nation-state today, ought to pay close attention to are the various “nation-state == idolatry”; “American, an imperial power = ancient imperial Rome = the false Gospel” that are so widespread in contemporary theology. Radical Orthodoxy; Stanley Hauerwas; William Cavanaugh; etc., etc. This is one of the most momentous developments in contemporary culture, one affecting the nexus of poltiics and religion today in multiple and signficant ways, and political scientists should pay acute attention to it/them. Merely reading MacIntyre isn’t sufficient (altthough it’s necessary).
November 18th, 2009 | 8:54 am
Paul, You are right again. That’s the theology of many Porchers, and it’s unreasonably anti-American and is infused with a kind of vulgar Marxism. Certainly that development has influenced in a big way the culture of conservatism, and what’s attractive about even MacIntyre is in my view semi-fatally compromised by a self-indulgent political stupidity that flows from the complacent thought that we live in basically nihilistic or “after virtue” times. That way of thinking is also what’s wrong with more traditionally Orthodox Mr. Hart (who still has much to teach us). America may be merely an empire from a certain theological view, but it’s still pretty much the most benign empire ever. “Christian culture” would hardly flourish better if we to become, as it were, a republic, not an empire, in the “American conservative” mode. And I’m only “a partisan of the political” in a very qualified sense, in a Christian way that can be easily distinguished, as I’ve explained time and again, from the mainstream Straussian position.
November 18th, 2009 | 9:48 am
Of course, there’s another strange possibility, possibly too outlandish for present-day ears, but an arresting vision nonetheless: Europe, exhausting even its own capacity for denial, unites in such a way as to afford America the luxury of recovering a bit more of its traditional or aboriginal position in the world — no longer the nation without which all is lost.
November 18th, 2009 | 10:31 am
Well, that’s why I said Europeans should listen to Scruton and Manent. It could happen, perhaps in response to a crisis that I can’t flesh out at the moment. But it seems most unlikely any time soon.
November 18th, 2009 | 11:12 am
James may it be so. On Tocquevillian grounds, and with Christian hope, I’d predict a revival of some signficant extent occuring in Europe during our lifetimes or towards the tail end of them.
Paul is right that this is a serious theological trend and problem. It is convincing and confusing way too many intelligent evangelicals, Catholics, and E. Orthodox.
The deep antidote: Manent, Fortin, Peter’s Aliens in America and After Virtue books.
A more immediate antidote: Hugh Heclo’s book Christianity and American Democracy.
November 20th, 2009 | 11:57 am
While I agree that being “post-political” is fundamentally detrimental to Europe, there is a danger in equating the nation-state and the political too closely. The nation-state is something we have only had for about five centuries. If we reach back to Robert Nisbet, we can see a conservative critique of the theoretical backing given to state sovereignty by Bodin and Hobbes, not in favor of transnationalism but in favor of localism. Whatever the idiosyncrasies or mistakes of the Front Porchers, I see them as embodying that basic Nisbetian preference. It’s a battle that was lost centuries ago, but is it the wrong battle?
It is all too easy to use “empire” as an epithet, but critically examining America’s imperial impulses is not anti-American. Couldn’t we use Augustine as our guide? He acknowledged the benefits of the Roman Empire but attacked its “libido dominandi.” Such a critique could take place without buying into the narrative preferred by academic Marxists or ethnic agitators.
I would also take issue with describing America as a “nation without nationalism.” Can we honestly describe the Bush Doctrine and its implementation as free of nationalism? “National greatness conservatism” as imagined by some on the right has no element of nationalism?
November 21st, 2009 | 8:52 pm
Peter: I quickly concede that I haven’t read everything you’ve written, so I’m not wholly conversant with all your views. But I do want to reply to your specific reply posted Nov. 18 at 6:54 a.m. which I find off base.
Your accusation is that Porcher views are “Anti-American and is infused with a kind of vulgar Marxism.” Let me counter that there is nothing anti-American about wanting America to deal with its own concerns at home instead of ranging the world. Our military is stretched very tightly in the key combat areas; and overall, I needn’t tell you that fighting “wars” on two active fronts, maintaining bases all over the world, and the additional activities of America, World Superpower, are significantly draining our blood and treasure. Other countries can and do successfully remain largely within their legal borders; they defend their own land, not the entire world. And that is a perfectly reasonable thing for the U.S. to do as well. In fact, anything else is, in the long run unsustainable. One country, even a naturally rich one such as we are, cannot successfully “police” the entire world.
Secondly, although Marxism holds within it some aspects of isolationism, that “Porcher” principle was developed long before Marxism and should not be associated with it. The conservatives you are criticizing do, I think, believe that there is usefulness in community (not necessarily communally organized however). They also believe in being as self-sufficient as possible at the lowest level instead of relying increasingly on an international economy. Personhood before profit, is perhaps one way to sum up a bit of the philosophy. Marxists, under certain conditions, can be said to want to do the same — but from a different fundamental view of the human being and society at large and with different means and ends. Conservatives whom you refer to as Porchers (because some of them do, I understand) are NOT Marxists, however, and did not stem from the Marxist movement. Far from it.
If we continue as we are now and lose our republic to globalist economics, superpower militarism, and additional huge fiscal outlays for social programs from cradle to grave, we will also stand to lose the religious freedom to practice Christianity as we wish. We see some of the dangers right now with a government that is pursuing all of the above and is giving unabashed signals that it wants to rein in Christianity. These are the “fruits” of the kind of out-of-control government we Americans have allowed to become entrenched. If we are to save ourselves, we must not only elect people to office who will get fiscal policy under control but who realize that our nation cannot continue its nanny state policies or its empire (not matter how “benign”). The citizens of the U.S. are entitled to a government that works in their best interests, not in the interests of the world at large. The U.S. is one nation under God. It is not the entire world and it cannot take responsibility, either monetarily or militarily for it.
We need to respect other nations’ sovereignty and, in turn, demand that others do the same for us. We can certainly work with other nations, but as partners, not as master or occupier. And, of course, we will always defend our borders…or at least that should be our goal, but currently the government is more worried about who crosses Pakistan’s or Afghanistan’s borders illegally than who crosses ours. Just one of the problems with our current determination to mind everyone else’s business but not our own….
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