[Congressional Record: December 10, 2001 (Senate)]
[Page S12769-S12770]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
[DOCID:cr10de01-56]
ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS
______
THE ANTI-WESTERN IMPULSE
Mr. KYL. Mr. President, John O'Sullivan is one of the wisest
men I know. Advisor to Margaret Thatcher, editor of National Review and
author of political commentary here and abroad, O'Sullivan has been
concerned for years about the future of Western civilization in general
and the United States in particular.
In the December 17, 2001 issue of National Review, he weaves together
ideas of John Fonte of the Hudson Institute, Samuel Huntington and
James Burnham to elaborate on his theme that our civilization is under
fundamental assault from modern liberalism, what he calls an ``anti-
Western impulse'' assaulting ``the institutions invented by classical
and constitutional liberalism in its great creative phase, not merely
the free market, but also individual rights, free scientific inquiry,
free speech, the rule of law, majority rule, democratic accountability,
and national sovereignty.''
Skeptical? Then I challenge you to read what follows: ``Safe for
Democracy, and a Nation--The idea of this country post-9/11.'' It is
the best statement I've seen of the challenges we face from what Fonte
calls ``trans-national progressivism.''
I ask that the commentary be printed in the Record.
The commentary follows.
[From the National Review, Dec. 17, 2001]
Safe for Democracy, and a Nation--The Idea of This Country Post-9/11
(By John O'Sullivan)
One of the difficulties bedeviling political science is the
protean nature of political words. As Robert Schuettinger
pointed out in his study of European conservatism, the phrase
``a conservative socialist'' could mean a hardline Stalinist,
a social-democratic revisionist, or merely a socialist who
dressed and acted in a modest, inconspicuous way. When words
like ``conservative'' and ``liberal'' are being used, context
is all. So the theme of this article is advertised in neon
when I begin with the definitions of these philosophies
advanced by two distinguished American political theorists:
Samuel Huntington and James Burnham.
Writing in The American Political Science Review in 1957,
Huntington defined conservatism as that system of ideas
employed to defend established institutions when they come
under fundamental attack. As Huntington himself put it:
``When the foundations of society are threatened, the
conservative ideology reminds men of the necessity of some
institutions and the desirability of the existing ones.''
And in his 1964 book, The Suicide of the West, James
Burnham described liberalism as ``the ideology of Western
suicide''--not exactly that liberalism caused that suicide;
more that it reconciled the West to its slow dissolution.
Again, as Burnham himself put it: ``It is as if a man, struck
with a mortal disease, were able to say and to believe, as
the flush of the fever spread over his face, `Ah, the glow of
health returning' . . . If Western civilization is wholly
vanquished . . . we or our children will be able to see that
ending, by the light of the principles of liberalism, not as
a final defeat, but as the transition to a new and higher
order in which mankind as a whole joins in a universal
civilization that has risen above the parochial distinctions,
divisions, and discriminations of the past.''
If we put these two quotations together, the function of
contemporary conservatism becomes clear: to defend the
institutions of Western civilization, in their distinct
American form, against a series of fundamental assaults
carried out in the name of liberalism and either advocated or
excused by people calling themselves liberals.
To say that liberalism advances Western suicide, of course,
is to say something controversial--but something much less
controversial than when Burnham wrote forty years ago. When
Ivy League students from mobs chanting ``Hey, hey, ho, ho,
Western Civ has got to go,'' when their professors happily
edit the classics of Western thought out of their curricula,
and when the politicians preside happily over a multicultural
rewriting of America's history that denies or downplays its
Western roots, no one can plausibly deny that an anti-
Western impulse is working itself out.
This liberal revolution is an assault on the institutions
invented by classical and constitutional liberalism in its
great creative phase--not merely the free market, but also
individual rights, free scientific inquiry, free speech, the
rule of law, majority rule, democratic accountability, and
national sovereignty. It promises, of course, not to abolish
these liberal institutions so much as to ``transcend'' them
or to give them ``real substance'' rather than mere formal
expression. In reality, however, they are abolished, and
replaced by different institutions derived from a different
political philosophy. John Fonte of the Hudson Institute has
mapped out the contours of this revolution in a series of
important essays, and most importantly in ``Liberal Democracy
vs. Transnational Progressivism.'' What follows in the next
few paragraphs borrows heavily from his work, though the
formulations are mine. Among the more important changes
advanced by transnational proressivism (as I shall here
follow Fonte in calling it) are:
One: The replacement of individual identities and rights by
group identities and rights. Race and gender quotas are the
most obvious expression of this concept, but its implications
run much furthher--suggesting, for instance, that groups as
such have opinions or, in the jargon, ``perspectives.''
Individuals who express opinions that run counter to the
perspectives of their group, therefore, cannot really
represent the group.
[[Page S12770]]
Two: An attack upon majority rule as the main mechanism of
democratic government. Majority rule, its opponents contend,
gives insufficient weight to minority or ``victim'' groups,
and should be replaced by a power-sharing arrangement among
different groups. This ambitious concept has not been totally
enacted anywhere, but steps towards it have been taken. The
Voting Rights Act, for example, requires that election
districts be drawn in such a way as to ensure specific racial
outcomes; and some European nations have recently introduced
laws requiring political parties to ensure that a given
percentage of their election candidates are women.
Three: Transferring power from political institutions
directly accountable to the voters, such as Congress, to
judges, bureaucratic agencies, and international
organizations outside the control of the voters. Originally,
this transfer of power required the consent of the elected
bodies; increasingly, however, judges interpret international
law, including treaties that have not been ratified or that
have been greatly expanded in scope since ratification, as
overriding domestic law. This process, still in its nervous
infancy in the U.S., is far advanced in the European Union--
where the courts have overruled national legislatures on
issues as different as territorial fishing rights and the
right of soldiers to become pregnant. If allowed to continue,
this trend must first erode and eventually render obsolete
both national sovereignty and self-government.
Four: De-constructing and re-constructing the self-
understanding of America. Every nation has a sense of itself
and its history that is embedded in a national narrative
marked by heroic episodes. In this traditional narrative,
America is the progressive universalization of English
civilization--Magna Carta expanded to accommodate slaves, and
later immigrants, and enriched by the cultures they brought
with them. It is therefore a branch of a branch of Western
civilization; but multiculturalism seeks to undermine this
self-understanding and to replace it with an entirely
different narrative, in which America is seen as a
``convergence'' of European, African, and Amerindian
civilizations (and therefore the natural basis for a
political system based on group identities and rights).
This re-constructionist impulse has become the orthodoxy
in many public schools.
Five: Re-constructing the people by mass immigration from
other cultures. As long as new immigrants are assimilated
into the existing nation, no problem arises; if assimilation
fails to occur, the nation is gradually dissolved into a
Babel of different cultural groups with conflicting
allegiances. Under existing law, however, assimilation is not
only made difficult by the sheer numbers of people arriving,
it is also discouraged by official policies of
multiculturalism and bilingualism.
Six: Divorcing citizenship from nationality and bestowing
the rights of citizens--including the right to vote--on all
residents in the nation, including illegal immigrants.
According to this theory, citizenship should be carried on an
immigrant's back to whichever nation he manages to sneak
into. If seriously implemented in law, it would transform
nations into mere places of residence; the symbol of this
kind of citizenship is Mohamed Atta, the hijacker who
destroyed the World Trade Center.
In the post-national world Fonte described, nations are no
longer peoples united by a common history and culture, and
``the mystic chords of memory''; they are simply the varied
inhabitants of an arbitrary piece of real estate. Political
authority is no longer constitutionally limited and located
in particular national institutions; it is diffuse, and
scattered among bodies at different levels. Politicians no
longer have to take responsibility for hard decisions; they
can pass them onto higher organs of unaccountable power.
Civic patriotism is no longer the prime civic virtue; it is
displaced either downwards, by a narrow ethnic loyalty, or
upwards, by a cosmopolitan loyalty to international
institutions.
But a terrible beauty has not been born. Instead,
Leviathan, by dividing itself up into several spheres, has
slipped free of constitutional restraints and popular
control. For the ordinary voter the world has become a
mysterious place, far more difficult to navigate, let alone
control. For political elites, it has become a market in
power in which bureaucrats, pressure groups, businesses, and
international lawyers exchange favors behind a veil of post-
national irresponsibility.
For years, this progressivist revolution proceeded rapidly,
chiefly because the public was paying little or no attention
to it. But whenever it emerged into the light of
controversy--as when Lani Buiner's nomination led to the
revelation that law professors believed in something like
John C. Calhoun's ``concurrent majorities''--the public
reacted violently against it. The typical lack of public
interest was due in part to the GOP's nervous reluctance to
raise such issues as racial preferences, bilingual education,
or even the International Criminal Court. Although
conservatism dictated a principled defense of the
Constitution against these attacks, the Republicans backed
off. In effect, they went from ignoring such assaults under
Reagan, to going along with them quietly under George H. W.
Bush; to even embracing some of them with a show of
enthusiasm under George W. Bush. If the revolution were to be
stopped, the political equivalent of a thunderbolt would be
required.
To everyone's horror, that thunderbolt was delivered, in
the form of the attack on September 11; as everyone agrees,
that changed everything. In particular it revealed that
America had deep reserves of patriotism and that there was a
wide, though not universal, desire for national unity. In one
terrifying moment, it created or revived constituencies for a
firm assimilationist approach, for tighter immigration
policies that protected U.S. security, for a reading of
American history as the narrative of a great achievement, and
for the celebration of U.S. power against all the recently
fashionable follies of post-nationalism. In foreign policy,
the Bush administration met this public appetite with a clear
declaration of war on terrorism, and a clear military
strategy for waging it; it has been rewarded for this with
high popular support.
In domestic policy, however, it has been largely inert--
preferring to constrain liberties internally rather than to
strengthen protections against external threats. In the less
tangible but vitally important matter of national unity and
moral, it has concentrated entirely on (very proper) warnings
against anti-Muslim sentiment--but without asking for
expressions of loyalty from Muslim leaders or, more
generally, asking immigrant communities to make a public
commitment of their loyalty to the American nation. That is a
profound mistake. Most immigrants would be happy to make such
a commitment; it is America's cultural elites who would
resist it most strongly.
But then, they are the shock troops of post-national
progressivism; and they would realize that the demand for
loyalty would be an unmistakable sign that America had
recovered complete confidence in itself, in its own
institutions of constitutional democracy, and in its
historical mission. Without such a demand, moreover, many
decent moderate people might drift idly into the kind of
multicultural extremisms that helped shelter the World Trade
Center attackers. For, as Americans above all should know,
you can't beat something with nothing.
This, then, is a moment of great significance and
opportunity in American politics. Democracy and the nation-
state are the Siamese twins of political theory; democracy
rarely survives apart from its twin. Every attempt to create
a multicultural democracy either has failed or is deeply
troubled. Bush could very reasonably weave a national appeal
around the theme of defending American democracy--with equal
emphasis on both words. It would resonate strongly with the
American majority; command the support of many voters in
minority groups; provide the GOP with a raft of popular
domestic policies; and attract Democratic constituencies such
as patriotic blue-collar workers. and if such an appeal is
not make, the progressivist revolution is going to end up
winning.
____________________
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