This post began as a quicky update to I'm Late, I'm Late, which briefly explored some ideas about oikophobia, the aversion to home, the mirror to xenophobia. But perhaps it can serve as a brief meditation on nationalism on this holiday weekend which honors the birth of the United States. Born on The 4th [via Maggie's Farm, which dredged up this old article by David Gelernter that I read before but had forgotten]

As Disraeli saw it, liberals and conservatives were equally progressive. But liberals were rational internationalists who worried what the Germans would say. Conservatives were romantic nationalists who worried what their forefathers would have said. (Thus "national" Republicans invoke the wisdom of the people and the authority of the Founding Fathers. "Philosophic" Democrats invoke the wisdom of the intellectuals and the authority of the United Nations.)

There's some mixing of concepts here. In Disraeli's time "liberals" were Whigs who favored free trade and such, and so quite different from the Democrats he seems to equate them with. And conservatives were Tories who favored protectionism and such to preserve their land based wealth foundation, and so different from the Republicans he seems to equate them with. Still, the thrust of his point that there is a distinction between those who are nationalists in deference to tradition - seeking the approval of the ghosts of ancestors as well as the not yet embodied souls of descendants; and those who are internationalists in opposition to tradition - seeking the approval of notional peers with regard to conformance to abstract principles.

The Liberal says, in despairing disbelief: Can't you sense the world around us? Don't you care about its disapproval? The Conservative says, in despairing disbelief: Can't you sense the generations behind us? Don't you care about their disapproval? Liberals live "horizontally," spiritually in touch (they believe) with all the world's nations. Conservatives live "vertically," spiritually in touch (they believe) with their forebears and with generations to come.

My bias is to care more about peers than ancestors, and it can be argued that everyone is progressive in the sense of courting the approval of descendants, seeking a good name and a legacy as a type of immortality (or at least life extension). But which view is more sensible? How does either actually know the views of those they seek to please? Do we in fact understand what our ancestors thought? Does anyone actually understand the alien views of those who have their own inscrutable traditions? It may be that our understanding of ancestors, however imperfect, is superior to our understanding of other cultures, whose thoughts and views are shaped by such different forces, and who do their thinking in different languages which may constrain what can be thought, and bias outcomes. My bias for peer approval may be suspect. My rationalism may be romanticism in drag, and so little different from the essentially emotional motivation of conservatives - identical yet opposite.

Marx and Disraeli are perfect countertypes--partly the same, partly opposite (like particle and anti-particle in nuclear physics; when they meet, they destroy each other). Marx and Disraeli are the principal creators of the modern left and right respectively--two 19th-century Jews whose fathers had them baptized, who worked mainly in London, who counted on British power to protect the world from a dangerous Czarist Russia, who died within two years of each other, in 1881 (Disraeli) and '83 (Marx). They were both obsessed with Jews and Judaism, but Marx (the atheist left-winger) hated Jews, Judaism, and religion in general; Disraeli (the devout right-winger) felt differently. . .

Yet Marx-to-Disraeli is not finally a left-to-right spectrum. Marx gave birth not only to the modern left but to totalitarianism. Marx's end of the spectrum is the "shame end," Disraeli's the "pride end." Shame was a powerful force in Marx's life; witness his self-hating anti-Semitism. Twentieth-century totalitarianism was created (not only but in large part) by shame. Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany were born out of humiliating defeat in the First World War: Germany beat Russia (Russian communism followed); the allies beat Germany (Nazism followed). Defeat and shame were not the only forces at work, but we can't understand the 20th century without them. Nor can we understand today's radical Islamic terrorism and totalitarianism (totalitarians being terrorists who have already got what they want) without understanding the central role of defeat and shame.

Modern liberals are nothing like Bolsheviks or Nazis. They are closer to Disraeli's end of the spectrum than Marx's. Yet American liberals are more likely than conservatives to focus on the shameful in American history, conservatives on the things that make them proud.

Perhaps this is why I've never been a good liberal (in the American sense) despite having progressive, internationalist views. I'm not ashamed. I'm not an oikophobe, but also not a xenophobe. By some odd coincidence I have always understood and approved of the central distinction of America. Tim says it well.

. . . in the end, the thing that is both exceptional about the United States and potentially exportable or shareable with the world in a struggle against fundamentalism or oppression is not apple pie and chevrolets. It’s a basic insight about the nature of governmental (and possibly non-governmental) power: that power must be constrained to be productive, that the rights of individuals are not provisioned by the state but define the limits of state power.

Amendment IX of the US Constitution may be its heart and soul: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” States around the world, whether weak or strong, failed or successful, imagine themselves to fill any void, to claim all powers. What rights their citizens possess, they possess because the state gives them their rights, and the state conceptually fills all the infinite spaces of possibility beyond. The US Constitution sees it differently: what rights humans possess, they possess before the state exists. The state is a steward of those rights, not the provisioner of them. What the state is not given as its powers, it is not permitted to do: all of what is unnamed is the people’s, not the state’s.

The sometimes baffling views and behavior of some other Americans, even their graceless blunders and mean spirited acts, are small beer to me. There are also behaviors full of style and grace. All of this, the good and bad, takes place in a setting that that honors their right and power to be weird or beautiful as they choose without domination from above by any priggish totalitarian, however holy or enlightened they may judge themselves to be.

This is one view of the struggle for the soul of America, and so worth thinking about this weekend. Politics is stupid, both the Democrats and the Republicans are despicable, activists and advocates of all sorts are parasites and predators who do great harm and no good. But, there is something at stake, something that could be lost or ruined if any of them ever gain too much power. The idea that "power must be constrained to be productive", and that "the rights of individuals are not provisioned by the state but define the limits of state power", is not widely understood or shared even in the US in these degenerate times. It isn't often taught in schools or even understood by teachers. They tend to be dark siders deluded about the "wisdom of intellectuals", and so more like religous fundamentalists than the fallibilist sceptics that founded this nation on the rock of people power and inherent individual rights.

We can and should celebrate the birth of a nation that is to this day fairly unique in championing, at least by tradition, the rights of people. That is a tradition worth preserving. Happy Birthday America. May you live long and prosper.