Paul Gottfried is quite right to relate the on-going discussion over identity with the larger debate over the status of America as a “propositional nation.”  As is well-known, neoconservatives (along with many libertarians) and paleoconservatives have squared off for decades over this subject.  Whereas neocons claim that the Declaration clearly asserts the equality of all human beings, paleocons reject such ahistorical abstractionism in favor of a focus on more identitarian influences like history and tradition in the early republic.  Historically, the debate often gets bogged down over the question of “equality.”  Does the claim that “all men are created equal” truly sideline once and for all differences based on culture, language, and ethnicity?

Dare I say that there is a defensible form of equality at the heart of the Founding, but it’s probably not the type of equality which would satisfy various factions on the Right (or Left, for that matter).  I have usually adhered to the interpretation of the Declaration given by Willmoore Kendall and George Carey: that the equality clause is not meaningless if it is interpreted as the teaching that all “peoples” who understand themselves as one people are equal to others who have likewise identified themselves.  In short, the Declaration teaches that the Americans were equal to the British or French in having the right to determine whatever government they seek to have.  Presumably, if Americans wanted to restore the English monarchy, then the Declaration does not stand in the way!

Would this hermeneutic satisfy anybody on the Right today?  Libertarians would be annoyed that an American “people” (not a collection of individuals) would have the power to favor governments which violate property rights (like the old English monarchy).  Neoconservatives would be angered that this interpretation is too “relativistic,” since it does not necessarily favor democracy as the best regime for all of humanity.  And paleoconservatives would worry that the meaning of the “people” can change over time.  The Americans in the age of the Founding certainly had a different understanding of tradition, church-state separation, and equality, compared to public opinion today (to say the least!)  The people may not be reliably traditionalist over time.  And obviously the democratic Left doesn’t want to hear about the people deciding on new forms of government if that “people” consists of middle-American rightists.

In fine, we are probably having this debate right now because the idea of the “propositional” nation is still with us, in all its ambiguity. 

When I first started to read various articles from American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia (2006) I was both pleased and amused to discover that a fine article by Jeremy Beer had been devoted to the thought of George Grant (1918-1988). Pleased, because I believed that this Canadian Tory philosopher deserved considerable attention and appreciation from conservatives of all nations and cultures. Amused, because here was an encyclopedia of American conservatism that included an article on a Canadian nationalist who doubted that there even was such a thing as American conservatism! As a descendant of the old Tory ruling class which once dominated Canadian politics, Grant believed that the republic to the south had been far too revolutionary and liberal to merit the accolade of possessing a “conservative tradition.” Many bloggers on this site have made similar claims to those of Grant, and I won’t repeat these here.

I bring up the thought of Grant for a different reason than that of rehashing debates over which nation—Canada or America—once had the “real” conservatism. My purpose is to warn against the temptation of drawing parallels between conservative movements, past and present. Having noticed various favorable predictions of the future success of the Ron Paul movement on this site and elsewhere, I was struck by the prediction of a few admirers of Dr. Paul that his movement was in the “Goldwater” stage. That is to say, even though defeat of Paul at the GOP convention is a foregone conclusion, the overall appeal of his movement will presumably build a new vanguard of supporters (especially among the young) who will eventually revive true conservatism in America, just as Goldwater’s massive defeat in 1964 foreshadowed the emergence of a new and successful conservatism that lasted until the Bush hegemony finished it off.

Now George Grant had some interesting observations about the Goldwater debacle. In his deeply pessimistic book, Lament For A Nation: The Defeat Of Canadian Nationalism, which appeared one year after the GOP defeat of 1964, Grant made it clear that the Goldwater massacre was not a victory in disguise, anymore than the defeat of the conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker in the Canadian election of 1963 presaged a golden age of Toryism. Instead, he dismissed it as “the last-ditch stand of a local culture,” since most of the votes for the GOP had come from the South. Grant laid much of the blame on the naivete of the Goldwater camp itself, especially their failure to grasp what they were up against.

The older liberalism had its swan song in the election of 1964. The classes that had opposed Roosevelt were spent forces by 1964. [...] Goldwater’s cry for limited government seemed as antediluvian to the leaders of the corporations as Diefenbaker’s nationalism seemed to the same elements in Canada. [...] The Goldwater camp was outraged by the sustained attacks of the television networks and newspaper chains. Were they not aware who had become the American establishment since 1932?  Corporation capitalism and liberalism go together by the nature of things. The establishment knew how to defend itself when threatened by the outrageous challenge of outsiders from Arizona. The American election of 1964 is sufficient evidence that the United States is not a conservative society. It is a dynamic empire spearheading the age of progress.

Of course, this “establishment” consisted of the left-liberal managers of the warfare/welfare state which came into existence in America in the 1930s (minus the warfare element, a virtually identical type of state came into being in Canada at the same time). No one on the right denies the power of this elite. Still, it may be easy to sneer at Grant’s pessimism. Did not the GOP build a new “republican majority” energized by millions of disaffected Southern whites out of the ashes of the Goldwater defeat?  And did not this majority go on to win several elections for the GOP for almost forty years after the blow-out of 1964? And can’t the Paulist legions do it all again?

Well, it is hard to glean from the evidence of the last 40 years that the establishment which Goldwater went up against has been challenged in any significant way. As it turns out, Grant correctly surmised that this power elite would consume any serious right-wing opposition (as Goldwater, Diefenbaker, Manning, and Buchanan have all discovered). Big government is even bigger than it was in 1964, fewer differences on foreign and domestic policy exist between the two political parties than they did in 1964, and GOP administrations have alienated traditional conservative voting blocs on a host of issues (of course none of this is news to takimag writers and bloggers!) 

Perhaps, after all, a cigar is just a cigar, and the Goldwater defeat was truly a defeat, rather than a prelude to true victory. And perhaps Ron Paul supporters (among whom I include myself) ought to retire the “Goldwater” parallel, lest history truly repeat itself with a new defeat for American conservatism in the third millennium. 

I did not intend to respond to my numerous critics of my essay on Lincoln, since such a reply would simply restate what I had already written. Many of my detractors have projected ideas and themes onto my piece which I did not even discuss. Since Professor DiLorenzo has entered the fray and responded to my critique of his work on this still most controversial of presidents, the temptation to respond is now impossible to resist, especially when my original piece devoted only a paragraph to his work. Now is the time to fill in this lacuna. 

First, I want to recapitulate the main issue of my piece, since many bloggers missed it: to question the conventional view among neoconservatives and paleoconservatives that Lincoln was a prophet of global democracy. I was focused only on this issue. I was not discussing the debate over the Morrill tariff, Lincoln’s views on the races, the legality of secession, or the devastating consequences of the Civil War for the Southern way of life. The issue was simply the fallacious attempt of twentieth-century rightists to associate Lincoln with crusades for democracy which began over fifty years after his assassination.

In the spirit of Platonic dialectic, I shall focus on the least weighty objections and move onto the more pressing ones. DiLorenzo is offended that I classified him as a “paleoconservative,” when in fact he is a libertarian. He has every right to call himself whatever he wants, and so I cheerfully withdraw this classification. I suppose that I employed the paleo-term because paleoconservatives and libertarians generally agree on portraying Lincoln as a prophet of democratic imperialism, but if this agreement doesn’t justify classifying one camp with the nomenclature of the other, so be it.

DiLorenzo also targets my piece for attributing to him the view that he portrayed Lincoln as the “architect” of Leviathan. Apparently I ignored his view that Hamilton and the Whigs had planned a statist program for America long before Abe, who simply continued the revolution. Yet DiLorenzo’s books (which I have read, by the way) are clear that Lincoln was the most successful architect of federal centralization up to that point in American history. (Perhaps I should have added the words “most successful,” but it does not change my argument significantly.)  In The Real Lincoln, he agrees with Lincoln hagiographers like Garry Wills that the president “remade” America. In the same work, DiLorenzo claims that the federal government could not have acquired as much power as it did in the late nineteenth century if not for Lincoln. Presumably this legacy of Lincoln’s clashes with the libertarian vision of Jefferson, even though this president—as I observed in my piece—was also not terribly shy in using the powers of the state against his political foes or in the economic arena. (These facts about Jefferson are copiously documented in Leonard Levy’s Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Dark Side, a book whose arguments DiLorenzo and his admirers have never addressed, to my knowledge.) 

In short, DiLorenzo still lays the lion’s share of the blame for big government on Lincoln, which then helps him to concoct a portrait of Abe as the first global democrat who used the powers of Leviathan to impose “foreign policy imperialism” onto the world. Oddly, DiLorenzo doesn’t discuss this issue in his response, which was the whole point of my essay! Yet it is abundantly clear from his major books on Lincoln that he agrees with the neoconservative caricature of the president as a global democrat. In The Real Lincoln, DiLorenzo does not fault Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson for invoking the name of Lincoln in their democratic crusades; they had every right to do so!  In the same book, DiLorenzo adds that there would have been no Spanish-American War or American entry into World War One had it not been for Lincoln.  Yet DiLorenzo simply asserts the existence of this straight line between Gettysburg and San Juan Hill; he does not prove it. The fact that TR and WW quoted Lincoln proves nothing whatsoever about a president who died long before these interventions occurred.

In his Lincoln Unmasked, DiLorenzo shows even more sympathy with the neoconservative-Straussian usage of Lincoln’s legacy. In chapter 15, DiLorenzo does not challenge the right of Walter Berns—a prominent Straussian scholar—to invoke Lincoln in support of spreading democracy by force all over the world. As DiLorenzo well knows, Berns’ position is no different from that of Harry Jaffa, whom he dismisses as a “crackpot.” Well, frankly, this position is no different from DiLorenzo’s either! In this context, the only difference between DiLorenzo and the Straussians is that he opposes the cause of global-democracy. On the image of Lincoln as the first true imperial democrat, however, there is complete consensus between DiLorenzo and his ideological enemies that this is the most accurate way to portray Abe.

It may surprise DiLorenzo and his supporters, but one can dispute the idea of Lincoln as a proto-Bush Republican without necessarily being a member of the “Lincoln cult.” I see no value in surrendering to this neocon portrait of Abe, which allows Berns, Jaffa, and many others to persuade Americans to support wars which were unthinkable to Lincoln, a nationalist who was out to save his country (at least as he understood it), not the world itself.   

It appears that many of my readers are under the misapprehension that I was unfair to the pagan tradition, which undeniably contributed to the richness of Western civilization. As Nixon used to say, let me make one thing perfectly clear. I never claimed that “neo-pagans” were actually pagans. My main argument was that the neo-pagan movement romanticizes the pagan tradition while it demonizes Western Christianity. Despite the blessings which Christianity has bestowed upon the West, neo-pagans (such as Michel Maffesoli in his La violence totalitaire) display a disturbing penchant for blaming all the vices of modernity—like Marxism and totalitarian atheism—on Christianity. Somehow it is legitimate to draw a straight line, as Benoist does, between the Passion and the Gulags, without missing a beat.

This simplistic dismissal of Christianity is in synch with the neo-pagan idealization of the other great founding tradition of the West. The problem is that neo-paganism is more modernist than pagan.  Their brand of romanticism has more to do with a repudiation of the Enlightenment than with anything discernibly pagan. Neo-pagans seek to change the world just as fervently as the rest of their fellow moderns. As the great comparative religionist (and favorite author of neo-pagans) Mircea Eliade has shown, true pagans would never seek to transform the world, whether that involves restoring a past golden age or moving forward into a utopian one. Pagan philosophers, playwrights, and historians were all resigned to the immutable cycles of time. The very idea of changing the world for the better is a Christian idea, based on an attitude of faith and hope in a loving God, which has no equivalent in paganism; this view of change continues to have great impact on the modern mind. It is no wonder that St. Augustine, who admired Plato, nevertheless considered the pagan concept of time to be a depressing prospect, since one is moving from fortune to misfortune without any choice in the matter (perhaps this is what Leo Strauss meant by the “heartless” nature of Greek thought). To say the least, neo-pagans do not strike me as particularly fatalistic when they write about the need to change the status quo (although Tomislav Sunic in his Against Democracy and Equality rightly observes that neo-pagans do not offer nearly as much reason to hope for the future as Christianity does). Even Nietzsche admitted that the “will to power” has Christian roots. 

Which brings me to the very willful Straussians. Despite the claims of a few bloggers, I never asserted that the Grécistes had nearly as much influence as the Leo-conservatives. Still, a few of my respondents correctly pointed out that there are differences between the neo-pagans of GRECE and the Straussians. I heartily agree. Benoist at least has the honesty to recognize that Christianity continues to influence the West (and not for the better), whereas Straussians typically write as if the faith had no impact at all on political philosophy in Europe or America. Nevertheless, both camps share the temptation to romanticize Hellas for their own purposes, and make every effort to distinguish paganism from revelation.  Very often, their message is a mixed one, particularly in their portrayal of the Greeks as both tolerant and xenophobic.  Whatever the merits of this portrait, the end result is to place Christianity in the worst possible light. Yes, the Straussians are agenda-driven intellectuals, but is there any other kind?

In fine, I would advise my fellow rightists against the inclination to project their modernist biases onto the pagan texts (yes, conservatives are moderns too, ever since they came into being in the 18th century). Whenever conservatives call for the restoration of a lost golden age, I immediately sense desperation. Even that great romanticist Rousseau doubted that Sparta or republican Rome could be re-created in the decadent Europe of his age. As decayed and vilified as western Christianity is at present, it is still a living tradition, and the only one that religious conservatives in the West can build upon.