European politics is dysfunctional because no center-right party challenges the secularist, European Union vision of a European future. Most parties, center-right or center-left, have done nothing to debate fundamental issues. Is there a place in Europe for nations that reject secularism as an organizing system? Can nations like Poland choose God? Can a society organize around religious belief (including Islam) and still be part of the West? Is there a place for nations of historically oppressed peoples to have a home to express culture (eg. Israel for Jewish people, Poland for Poles)?
Too often those asking these questions are fatally tainted with the anti-Semitism of the past or the “blood and soil” nationalism of the era prior to World War I.
The failure of Europe to develop a center-right that does not accept multi-national corporations as decision makers without appealing to “blood and soil” nationalism has left a gap. When the only people who argued for Brexit were half-mad, the mad men gained credibility through being the only open advocates for Brexit. Leave pride in Western values only to the the racists and soon the racists will woo the working class to the harm of us all.
If nothing else, President Trump represented a rebuke to both major political parties in the United States who also narrowed the range of discourse. Republicans gave lip service to traditional values or to patriotism, but in practice did too little to challenge the secular, international consensus. This space was left open and Mr. Trump seized it.
His speech in Poland, in my opinion, was the kind of speech that must be made. My serious worry is that Bannonism combined with Mr. Trump’s own character makes that speech impossible for many to hear or read correctly. Worries that bad men will misuse his speech in the very dangerous European alt-Right are real.
I received two dissenting views from Christian academics I regard highly, one thinking I was far too naive about the President and the other that Bannonism is not the great problem I think it is. Here is my response to both to conclude this discussion. I will quote extensively from each piece, so if you wish only the bottom line, then you can skip to last section!
To My Colleague, Democrat, Christian
First, a regret: as usual, one cuts out the parts where we agree (as I will do with my Trump friend), so trust how much I appreciate your kind words and willingness to interact!
You say, “The core problem is context. The president stood in the square where thousands were murdered by Nazis, thousands who expected Allied aid that never came, and he did so as the first US president to play footsie with NATO’s Article 5. He praised a Poland of the past that overwhelmingly stood between tyrants and their victims, a nation in which the highest proportion of individuals chose to sacrifice themselves in order to personally hide Jewish people from Nazi death squads, and he called Poland’s current refusal to accept today’s refugees a continuation of that spirit instead of what it is: its betrayal.”
This is a strong point. As you know, I am (by heritage) a Jack Kemp Republican. I have (generally) favored legal immigration and a positive, opening policy toward refugees. However, in the case of Poland, I worry. Poland has a history of being forced to forget her language (official Tsarist policy), persecuted for being Catholic, and spent hundreds of years unable to express her national spirit. Poland is not Great Britain. There is no Polish Empire. Must the Poles adopt the immigration policy of the Germans and so see Polish culture become a minority (given historically low birth rates in Poland) in some of her great cities?
This is a difficult question. Poland is a special case in Europe. Can there be a Polish homeland? Must the people of Poland allow this dream to die? I think this is a harder question than you make it. This is not an argument in favor of racialist arguments against immigration, just a pause to consider. In Poland the power dynamic is not in favor of the Poles, but the invader.
You say, “The trick of white nationalism is to pretend the power dynamic is inverted. The conquerors, therefore, only conquer out of fear of conquest. The oppressor only oppresses to prevent greater oppression.” This is so. It must be guarded against at all costs. When Western elite values are so dominant that Belize must have the sex morals of Washington or lose aid, worrying about “losing” our values must sound bitter to a Belizean. (They told me so!) Poland, however, is not Washington. Warsaw is no former colonial power and the future of the world will not (mostly) be written in Polish. Is there a place for a ethnic enclave? What of the First Nations? The Jews?
This is sticky work and we dare not leave it to the Bannonista. The President sounded a more hopeful note to me, but perhaps not. Of course white nationalism is a major problem from the start to the present in American history. Jack London on the Left, Mark Twain in the curmudgeonly middle, and (God help us!) even great men like Lincoln thought of this as a “white man’s place.” Even a black boxing champion could cause, white terror.
This is true, but not all the truth. The other theme, of course, was liberty. Trump’s speech might have echoed the bad bass note of America history, nobody escapes it, but it also suggested any person could be an ally or a member of the West. Generally, we agree that there is always much to learn from any other people. Yet I am not sure that the West has not (along with all the harm) been the mother of much that is good that simply has not existed in other cultures. If we do not speak this good, while speaking the bad, then we will leave the praise of our mother, the West, only to those on the alt-Right who would use it to do great harm.
If the West needs saving, and it does, it does not (mostly) need saving from Daesh, but from herself. The evils we have done, the good we have abandoned, and the values we are corrupting are all doing more harm to what is noble in the West than all our foes. As Lincoln might say, Islamic terrorism could not with all her power control a city in Appalachia or defeat our military even if given one hundred years. Our peril is within us and is us, but that is just plain Christianity to anyone with power! Heavens, my friends all over world ask to be saved from us at the same time they ask for help.
It is a hard thing: help without domination, doing more good than harm.
You suggest three plans of action and I agree with at least two. We cannot play games with the alt-Right. We still have a long work to do in race relations. We cannot forget our own history, bad and good. We cannot allow romance to cloud our vision of the horror of chattel slavery or of Wounded Knee. Yet we cannot forget as we do so the good we have done, the people liberated, extreme poverty dropping globally, and science spread. These have been works of the West as well.
No romantic vision: positive or negative.
Delenda est Bannonism. Yet I cannot concede that this administration can be reduced (at all times) to Bannonism. Perhaps I am too hopeful, but I still have hope that the next four years can be better than I had feared.
That is where, I am sure, we disagree. Give me some more books. I should keep reading!
To My Colleague, Trump Supporter, Christian
Before all else, I thank you for modeling the real tolerance so many academics lack. You and I had good hard arguments about Mr. Trump before the election. You thought he could win, I thought he could not. You were right and I was wrong. I thought him inherently unfit for office and you argued he was not, yet you remain a friend in the wider struggle against secularism. Thank you. I admire your work greatly. As I said to my Democratic colleague, I will have cut out all the (many) places where we agree and left only what concerns me.
We plainly agree on the centrality of the West, the need for a renewal of the West. But . . . and you knew a but was coming! I am (for good and evil) a man of the West and my entire career has been to try to redeem what was good and heal what is rotten in her. I know I cannot, the task is too great for me, but I love the West, and so what else can I do?
You define the West here (in part to remove the taint of racism):
The idea of Western civilization predates Christianity by several centuries, and the invention of racism by Darwinian anthropologists by several millennia. Western civilization is essentially Roman civilization. Cicero and Virgil define its essential shape and tone, involving a way of life in which we find the rule of law, a sharp distinction of private and public, individual rights and private property, intermediate institutions, including schools and corporations, anthropomorphic gods, freedom of debate and philosophical inquiry, and a literature extolling civic virtue and romantic love.
I simply do not agree with this definition. Imitating Pope Emeritus Benedict, I see the West as a fusion of Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian thought. One can dissent from some of what produced the West, for example rejecting Christianity, and still be a child of the West, but the West was a cradle for that child and Christianity was part of that cradle.
Here, however, you make an important point critical to future discussion:
Does Trump propose that Western ideas and values are superior to those of other cultures? I can’t find any such reference in the speech, in sharp contrast to the militant universalism of both GWB and Barak Obama. Trump instead speaks over and over about defending our traditional way of life from external threats. It is a ringing endorsement of national self-determination, not of liberal imperialism.
This is vital and could do great good, if Trump himself can deliver the message credibly. This might be a message of modesty and a retreat from cultural imperialism almost a century after geographic colonialism became unsustainable. There is a crying need for a Western party rooted in smallness, community, subsidiarity, without seeking to export values by power (economic or militarily).
We also agree that Russia, essentially the Italian economy with a large nuclear force, is not the threat of the communist Soviet Union. However, pressure on Ukraine, the Baltic States, and even Poland is real. Russia is not looking for global hegemony (the Soviet world), but if you are in her sphere of influence, Russia is looking to restore the old borders of 1914.
This is dangerous to some of our allies. Mr Putin has done good to some Christian communities in places like Syria, but nobody should be fooled that he is (as you note) anything but a thug. Can we work with him? We can and must. He has too many nuclear weapons to ignore. A comforting thing to many of us was Mr. Trump taking on Putin in his address where Putin should be challenged. Sadly, as my critic from the Christian left would point out, the days following the speech were not promising. Putin dominated the stage in a way disproportionate to actual Russian power.
We agree on so much, but our central disagreement is about Bannon and Bannonism. I am unalterably opposed to what I call Bannonism. You counter:
Let me close by addressing the larger question, the supposed “Bannonism” of the Trump administration. Ethnic, ethnicity, ethnos—these are not curse-words, some litany of Satanism. The creation and recognition of the status of nations (ethnos is simply Greek for nation) is one of the fruits of Christian civilization. I recommend the work of Roger Scruton, especially The West and the Rest, and T. S. Eliot’s classic Notes toward the Definition of Culture.
No nation is reducible to a set of ideas or a propositional creed. That includes the United States. Trump critics pose a false dichotomy: either abstract universalism or fascistic racism. Like any other created reality, the ethnos can become an idol or absolutized into an ideology. The result is indeed a great evil—Nazis, Fascists, Tojo’s Japanese empire. This abuse of nationalism doesn’t tar all ethnicity, all love of one’s own people, as inherently evil.
I define Bannonism as being both an idea and an approach to politics. Let’s begin with the approach. Bannon has advocated a “by any means” conservatism, beating the left at her own game. Politics is not a Sunday School picnic and we can hit hard, but not use any means. We cannot (as Christians) hate, torture, or slander.
Christians are not too genteel to do those things, but too meek like Moses or Jesus. Of course, you do not take issue with this, I assume you are not in favor of “by any means,” but that is central to my rejection of Bannonism. Christians are willing to be martyred rather than “win” in the short term!
You defend the nationalism of Bannon and here too we disagree. I think strong patriotism is compatible with Christianity, but not nationalism. I am an American and I love my nation, but I cannot think her special or unique. We are not “chosen” as Israel was chosen, though like any people group we have a work to do. The best expression of this idea of love of nation and her calling without nationalism is in That Hideous Strength.*
Can we at least agree in rejecting “Blood and Soil” nationalism? Again, these ideas of kinship and historical homeland were distorted and abused by the Nazis, but all nations necessarily have an element of kinship and territorial continuity at their foundations. Here’s a thought-experiment, inspired by a recent Bret Stephens column in the New York Times. Suppose we deported all 300 million Americans, scattered them about the world, and replaced them by 300 million Chinese or Indians, each of whom passed a test of ideological purity, affirming all the propositions of the American creed. Would America survive? Self-evidently not.
I look before the Nazis who were so bad that, you are right, nothing they touched is wholly pure, to the era before World War I. That War destroyed much that should have lived and birthed hideous monsters in the West, not the least communism. Millions died that did not have to die and what some had called the Christian century ended in ruin. Something went wrong and we both agree about some of the bad ideas of the time yet I think part of the problem was nationalism. German nationalism, blood and soil nationalism, led to the butchery of Flanders, but so did the same disease in Russia, Serbia, and other states.
One hesitation every classical educator must have (God help me!): the butcher bill of Europe was charged by the classically educated. Something went wrong and we must be humble in the face of the horror. Not a month passes when I cannot see the killing of 1918 in my dreams . . . and we must never forget what classicism, blood, nationalism, and power produced. Something went wrong.
Blood and soil definitions are dangerous coupled with power and remain so. Yet, I am sympathetic to the idea that people groups that wish it can have a place to be themselves, especially if they face existential threats. Poland and Israel are two good examples. Religion, a history of shared suffering, language, and, yes, ethnicity need not create terror. Yet what of minorities, Jewish people in Poland (there is an ugly history there) and other dissidents. What of the Romany?
Nations defined by ethnicity have a very, very mixed history. And this is where the United States of America seems different. I think what was great about America was always that we were a set of ideas. These ideas came (mostly) from Great Britain and Europe. Our language has (mostly) been English with the deep impression it has made, but from the very start, many states had huge populations of non-Anglos. The enslaved populations of many states built those states, formed the language, and much of the culture.
Would America survive a transplant of 300 million ideological Americans from China and India? God grant such a miracle! My (by heritage) Indian neighbors often have values more in line with traditional America than I find in Anglo rural Texas down the road! The charismatic church around the corner, where I would be a minority (my family came in the 1630’s), is delightful.
Embrace the ideas, at least most of them, and you can be an American. We are a people defined neither by blood or soil. Of course, that is one idea you must embrace if you come here! An Italian, Englishman, Chinese person, or Indian must cease to (mostly) think of themselves as part of the old country. They can add new words, foods, and ideas to the mosaic, but the picture must remain American.
If only this experiment were possible, I would apply to take the test and hope I could stay!
Give me even more books! I should keep reading! In the meantime, we all join in praying, as I do daily, for our President and hoping that he leads us toward liberty and justice for all.
Concluding Thoughts
We can disagree as Christians on political issues, because our faith must always seek understanding. We know some truths, and even agree on them, but applying them is hard, especially in a broken world. The good news is that having people who believe each human life is precious and that our rights come from God and argue about how to protect life and value our God-given rights is comforting!
When these friends fight with me, fundamentally, I am in good hands.
And so I believe the President’s speech was a good one and it points the way to a new center-right movement in Europe. Trump, especially with Mr. Bannon in the picture, may be a fatally flawed messenger. I remain, however, hopeful, because as an American I hope my President succeeds (as I did under President Obama). As someone who did not vote for Mr. Trump, I am part of the loyal opposition: opposing what must be opposed, but supporting what I can.
Come quickly, Lord Jesus!
———————————-
My view of patriotism without nationalism from That Hideous Strength:
“So that, meanwhile, is England,” said Mother Dimble. “Just this swaying to and fro between Logres and Britain?”
“Yes,” said her husband. “Don’t you feel it? The very quality of England. If we’ve got an ass’s head, it is by walking in a fairy wood. We’ve heard something better than we can do, but can’t quite forget it . . . can’t you see it in everything English— a kind of awkward grace, a humble, humorous incompleteness? How right Sam Weller was when he called Mr. Pickwick an angel in gaiters! Everything here is either better or worse than—”
“Dimble!” said Ransom. Dimble, whose tone had become a little impassioned, stopped and looked towards him. He hesitated and (as Jane thought) almost blushed before he began again.
“You’re right, Sir,” he said with a smile. “I was forgetting what you have warned me always to remember. This haunting is no peculiarity of ours. Every people has its own haunter. There’s no special privilege for England— no nonsense about a chosen nation. We speak about Logres because it is our haunting, the one we know about.”
“But this,” said MacPhee, “seems a very roundabout way of saying that there’s good and bad men everywhere.”
“It’s not a way of saying that at all,” answered Dimble. “You see, MacPhee, if one is thinking simply of goodness in the abstract, one soon reaches the fatal idea of something standardized— some common kind of life to which all nations ought to progress. Of course, there are universal rules to which all goodness must conform. But that’s only the grammar of virtue. It’s not there that the sap is. He doesn’t make two blades of grass the same: how much less two saints, two nations, two angels. The whole work of healing Tellus depends on nursing that little spark, on incarnating that ghost, which is still alive in every real people, and different in each. When Logres really dominates Britain, when the goddess Reason, the divine clearness, is really enthroned in France, when the order of Heaven is really followed in China— why, then it will be spring.
Lewis, C. S.. That Hideous Strength: (Space Trilogy, Book Three) (Kindle Locations 7540-7557). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Notice two that nations (ethnos) come and go . . . Saxon Britain was not Celtic Britain, but then it was not Victorian Britain either. Nations do their work and then die . . . submerged by evil or just done with their work.
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