By “resistance” or “opposition” what is meant is the need to combat egalitarianism. Lest anyone doubt where I stand on this subject, let me say that I agree with Ryszard Legutko’s contention that the demon is in democracy itself. Thinkers since Plato and Aristotle have noted that democracy places a premium on equality; and once believing democrats are in the saddle, the questions then center on how far and in what ways these doctrinaires will push their highest value.
In old-fashioned forms of popular government, like the Swiss cantons and early America, the dangers of democracy were largely contained. Although political leaders had to be elected, the franchise was limited to male property-owners, who fulfilled residence and sometimes religious requirements. Functioning political entities by modern standards were also spatially quite restricted; and even local governments that belonged to larger nation states or empires were largely self-governing, while almost all public affairs were addressed by citizens or their representatives, who were personally known to their voters.
We have moved from that model of popular government to a more radically egalitarian form in which people no longer govern themselves. Large administrative states look after “populations,” not “citizens,” and public administrators and their collaborators in the media and state educational system socialize us and redistribute our earnings based on what they consider to be “equity” or “fairness.” Anyone who wanders into a country, which is now reduced to an administrative district in an ever-expanding supranational state, is almost instantly eligible for social programs, and will be eventually enfranchised to vote.
The present requirement for being a democracy is no longer simply letting everyone and his cousin vote in periodic election rituals. Being properly “democratic” also obliges the subject to campaign for special recognition for feminists, homosexuals and the transgendered. A lack of openness to this newest wrinkle in “being democratic” disqualifies popularly elected governments, like Victor Orban’s Hungarian government, from being accepted into the supposed community of the virtuous. Further, “being democratic” compels good democrats to condemn white Euro-American Christians for not having treated other groups as equals. The recent craze for Critical Race Theory in the US and the anticolonial and Islamophilic instruction in Europe are both examples of onetime Western countries turning toward a politics of self-debasement.
Although I would not deny that other circumstances have contributed to this result, it would be remiss of an historian not to notice the quest for a more perfectly realized equality as a political ideal. The destruction of traditional hierarchies, including gender distinctions, and the war on ethnic and cultural distinctness in Western, onetime Christian, nations has progressed entirely in the name of equality. Quite properly serious democrats, particularly those who view themselves as engaged in unfinished work, wish to overcome past inequalities, and have empowered government administrators and educators to help in this task.
Some political thinkers, like Alexis de Tocqueville and Bertrand de Jouvenel, have argued that democracy can be rendered more tolerable through countervailing forces that will hold in check democracy’s leveling tendencies. This theory goes as far back as Aristotle’sPolitics(Book Three), in which the Greek philosopher argues that a stable form of democracy tends toward a “mixed regime.” This is a quasi-democracy in which oligarchic and possibly other elements may and should be introduced to keep the have-nots from despoiling those of means with better education.
In my study of bourgeois liberalism and its dissolution, After Liberalism, I deal with similar efforts made by liberal thinkers in the nineteenth century to keep “the river god” of egalitarianism from destroying the inherited civilization. This holding action has worked only in the short and middle term. Countervailing forces like local hierarchies and patriarchal families allowed Western countries to hold back the rising ideological tide for a few generations, but eventually the principle of democratic equality swept all before it.
Although used as an exercise of control, the final goal, if there is one, is never achieved. Today we have deeply entrenched, increasingly totalitarian elites that pay homage to the ideal of equality but are far from practicing it. In view of the inevitable cognitive and social differences among human beings, this failure to achieve egalitarian standards for everyone should surprise no one. Nor should we be astonished that the more affluent the neighborhood the more likely one is to encounter BLM signs on the lawns of those who have no dealings with blacks, except as maids and lawn maintenance workers.
An alliance has been formed between the political class, corporate heads, elite universities and high-tech and the underclass, in which the wealthy and powerful dominate. How, one might ask, does this arrangement lead to more equality among citizens? Obviously, it doesn’t; but the people in charge of our system appeal unceasingly to the ideal of equality, just as Charlemagne and Louis IX claimed to be fighting for the Christian faith, or the Turkish Sultans for the teachings of the Koran.
Moreover, an elite that dominates us in the name of a more perfect democratic equality will likely be more radical and less restrained than its predecessor in carrying out its supposedly righteous agenda. It is not working to keep in place the social order or our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. Our elites are striving to obliterate what they tell us was an unjust past and to build a more homogeneous world.
Meanwhile we’ll have to put up with the wrecking crews tearing down historical monuments and the ideologues who are rewriting our history and controlling our speech. These are supposedly small prices to pay for the achievement of “equity;” that is, a more perfect equality, in pursuit of which most of us are reduced to drones.
It truly is a great delight and honor to bring to our readers this insightful and wise conversation with Paul Gottfried, one of the foremost thinkers in America today. He is the author of well over fifteen books and innumerable articles, all of which carry the mark of his great scholarship that is the perfect cicerone upon the high road of wisdom. He edits the prestigious journal, Chronicles. Professor Gottfried is here interviewed by Zbigniew Janowski.
Zbigniew Janowski (ZJ): You are American, but unlike most Americans – I do not mean ordinary people who never left the country, who are hardly aware of the outside world – you are critical of America. In many respects, you remind me of someone you wrote about, namely, Robert Nisbet, a towering figure in American sociology, who was also critical of America and her egalitarian tendencies. From our private conversations, I get the impression that you perceive the present-day America to be a danger to itself and the rest of the Western world. Am I correct?
Paul Gottfried (PG): I’m not really hostile to the US, and in fact I value my friendship with my neighbors in the small Pennsylvania town in which I reside. They remind me of the people I grew up around in a Connecticut rust-belt city in the 1950s. I also admire the founders of the American republic and their obvious civic-mindedness and skill in creating a form of government that provided for ordered liberty. Where I become more ambivalent and even suspicious is seeing how American “liberal democracy” has developed in the twentieth century and even more in the last twenty years. The combination of triumphalism in international relations (which is pushed by our bogus conservatives) and LGBT madness as a crusading American political religion will likely sow harm beyond this country’s borders. Since the US is hardly a minor player on the world stage, our influence is felt in other “liberal democracies,” particularly in the Anglosphere. I can easily understand why the Russian government, which is situated on the nationalist Right, would present itself as the defender of whatever normal behavior the American government now identifies with “prejudice.”
Paul Gottfried.
You are right to assume from reading Revisions and Dissents that I learned a great deal from Robert Nisbet, who figures large in my autobiography, Encounters. There were two sides to Bob: an America-affirming perspective that is reflected in the occasionally hopeful things that he said about the country (this was especially evident during his friendship with the neoconservatives), and the very dark perspective that can be seen in Quest for Community and Twilight of Authority. Clearly, I was more influenced by this second Nisbetian perspective. Nisbet was also among the few American social thinkers who valued the European counterrevolutionaries for laying the groundwork for the study of social theory. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Louis de Bonald.
ZJ: In your view, is what we call Corporate America, American free-market capitalism, part of the problem as well?
PG: I’m not sure that our corporate capitalists represent the free-market system that our libertarians praise and which they sometimes imagine exists in this country. Corporations now support the totalitarian Left and are quite happy pushing vast redistribution schemes that the government is urged to carry out, at the expense of the middle and working classes. The corporate board members and the tech giants won’t have to worry about their earnings being redistributed, since they wield vast power on the political Left and in any case have tax attorneys to protect their profits. It is our corporate capitalists who provided most of the billion or more dollars that went to Black Lives Matter and Antifa last year to wreak havoc in our city streets and to shoot policemen. Employees of our corporations are drowned in Critical Race Theory and LGBT slogans. By the way, I am not against a “free market economy.” What I oppose is a socially and morally destructive capitalist class, which seems to be making war on the white Christian population of Western countries. They also seem more than willing to fund the assassins of black and Asian business owners and policemen.
ZJ: Let me touch upon PC ideology, something you devoted a few of your books to. When people ask me, when PC started, I tell them: probably around 1987 – the date of the publication of The Closing of the American Mind. In this book, Allan Bloom captured the cultural trends that morphed, very quickly, into what gave expression to PC in the early 1990s. PC started with something that appears very insignificant, but which is of paramount importance – the changes in language (the use of personal pronouns). You belong to the generation that learned that the personal pronoun “he” refers universally to all of mankind. At the beginning of the 1990s, a number of academic institutions would send around “guidelines” on how to use masculine and feminine pronouns, so as not to exclude women. Ever since then, we talk about “inclusive” language. Now we are told that there is more to us than just men and women. Hence the need to create even more inclusive language.
I am invoking this because what started as something that few people had objected to 30 years ago, became a battlefield on which the fate of Western civilization is being played out. Commonsense, as Orwell’s Winston came to understand, is a heresy. It can get you killed. Several years ago, Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson refused to use the “new” inclusive language. His colleagues signed the petition to have him fired because of that. To a normal person, it sounds silly, childish. On the other hand, as we know from the history of totalitarianism and Orwell’s 1984, without a new language, or New-speak, totalitarian reality is impossible. Language can be a prison, and totalitarian reality is just that: It is a realm where there are no free people, only prisoners. Would you agree that unless we create an alternative, non-PC language, we will persevere in our absurd reality.
PG: I have never thought highly of The Closing of the American Mind, because of Bloom’s exaltation of America as a global democracy with a universal rights mission and because of his unproved claim that Heidegger, Nietzsche and other German thinkers had corrupted college students. The American disease that I have witnessed infecting the Western world has not been “the German connection.” It is the fixation on equality, and then the search for ever-new ways to apply this dangerous concept to the human situation. At a certain point, it became obvious that we were not going to apply that concept and its implications to economics, because capitalists were part of the ruling class and because Americans were not going to adopt the economic practices of impoverished socialist societies. So, we looked for other new ways to push our poisonous obsession with equality, which would not be incompatible with the pleasures of a consumer society. Given the modest position to which I was reduced professionally by both the Left and the conservative establishment, I have never had to worry about giving offense by using gender specific pronouns. I do it all the time, with impunity.
I think much of what Orwell wrote in his description of Newspeak and thought control in a future totalitarian state is already happening. What clearly separates our therapeutic regime from what Orwell depicted in his writing is the absence of a warrior ethic. In Nineteen Eighty Four there seems to be a lot of fascist settings and rhetoric left over from the Second World War. In our version of mind control, we find a purer, egalitarian Left in power, and well-orchestrated indoctrination, making physical coercion of secondary importance, if not totally unnecessary. Unlike the world of Nineteen Eighty Four, we also hold ritualized elections but also make it hard for anyone but PC leftists to win. The media and the rest of the political class relentlessly smear any challengers as fascists or neo-Nazis.
ZJ: Even if you are right that Bloom’s diagnosis is not satisfactory, he was viciously attacked by the academic establishment just before academia turned PC. Is it a coincidence? Bloom must have said something that touched the nerve of the academic establishment.
PG: Bloom was not really addressing PC. What he was attacking was the development of the Hippie culture and to some extent the New Left, which emerged in the 1960s. He targets some of the familiar villains of the Straussians, value relativism, insufficient faith in liberal democracy, and a lack of appreciation for the classics, as taught by Bloom and other students of Strauss. Bloom also goes into a long tear against certain German philosophers, whom he manages to blame for both Nazism and the breakdown of discipline in American universities.
ZJ: I find your explanation persuasive. However, there is one point which, I think Bloom was right about: His discussion of the impact of psychology on America. Until recently, the big divide between the US and Europe was psychology. To be sure, Europeans would not deny the validity of psychology as a discipline, man’s psychological problems, and they go to psychologists too, but not en-masse, not to seek solutions to their daily problems; whereas Americans made psychology a national sport. Everyone has a shrink. How do you account for it? In my mind, this has detrimental effects on society. A shrink is like crutches without which Americans can’t walk. We are a society with thousands of experts trying to help us find solution to our problems, most of which are banal. Schools, colleges, corporations employ them full-time. They are a disease. As Bloom said, a hundred years ago, people would have claimed they were sinners; today, they seek various explanations pertaining to the Self.
The American Self is weak; and the weaker it gets, the more problems it creates. Part of the PC movement is the protection of a weak individual against old social norms and institutions, which are fundamental for the maintenance of a healthy and strong society.
PG: My book, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, explores this aspect of Bloom’s work much more thoroughly than he does. Sam Francis does the same in numerous essays for Chronicles. What may be different in Bloom’s case is that the neocons and the conservative establishment in general pushed his book to the top of the bestsellers list because he was also getting across their views on American Exceptionalism, the evils of German thought, and the harm that the hippies were inflicting on the Academy. Unlike the Old Right, Bloom has only kind words to say about American foreign policy and the “liberal democratic” state.
ZJ: You wrote the book, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement. It is, as the subtitle says, a critical appraisal. You said that what you find objectionable in Bloom is his faith in liberal democracy. Now, as liberal democracy shows its threatening face, one can indeed be skeptical of Bloom’s diagnosis. Was the Bloomian defense of liberal democracy of his own making, or did he learn it from his Master, Leo Strauss, as did his other students, such as Harry Jaffa? Strauss was a refugee from Nazi Germany, and, like most of his generation, he could see totalitarian Nazism and Communism to be a threat to freedom; whereas liberal democracy was perceived as a paradise, a place where individual freedoms and the free market could flourish. Not long after Bloom published his book, his student, Francis Fukuyama, wrote an influential piece in the early 1990s, after the collapse of Communism, in which he claimed that History ended. It was a triumphalist piece.
PG: As I have argued repeatedly (perhaps to no avail), it is impossible to understand Straussianism as a school of thought without noticing its explicit political thrust. Although that thrust can already be found in the Master, it has been far more operative in most of his prominent disciples. If you are asking me whether Bloom’s livre de succès was not an event that Straussians and their neoconservative allies planned for political effect, allow me to respond unequivocally in the affirmative. They and their media allies pulled out all stops to promote Bloom’s book, as a statement of their ideas about an American mission, their academic grievances, and other assorted complaints.
ZJ: Bloom told me once that American political science was the creation of the Germans – Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin (he was Austrian, but in this context, it may not matter). To what extent, according to you, did they influence how American academic political science establishment thinks of politics? Now, there is a world of difference between Strauss, Arendt and Voegelin, but one thing that they shared was the reading of the classics, especially the Greeks and the Romans. This last point makes me think that their insistence on deriving the principles of politics from the ancient sources is in keeping with the American tradition of Great Books that goes back, if I am not mistaken, to the 1920s and 1930s, but also to the Founding Fathers, who, like Jefferson and Adams, were very well versed in the classical tradition.
PG: What I argue in my book is that certain themes and concerns in Strauss’s writings take on added importance among disciples like Bloom. The cult of Anglo-American liberal democracy, Zionism, suspicion of the “German connection,” and an aggressively liberal internationalist foreign policy can all certainly be found in Strauss’s remarks and observations focusing on current events. But they became even more pronounced among his epigones, who may have gravitated toward the master at least partly because of these shared causes and concerns. This would apply to disciples who were not Jewish, like Walter Berns, Thomas Pangle, and Harvey Mansfield, as well as to the very self-consciously Jewish Bloom.
Of course, there have also been people influenced by Strauss’s scholarship (e.g., Stanley Rosen) who did not show the characteristic (not to mix words) idiosyncrasies. Strauss was indeed well-versed in classical languages and scholarship, much more so (I would guess from reading her) than Hannah Arendt. Voegelin was probably Strauss’s equal as a scholar; and although I am much more attracted to his interpretation of Plato than I am to Strauss’s and believe that he is correct about the religious elements in modern ideology (which Strauss mostly ignores), I think Strauss was the more original thinker. As a scholar of German thought, I recognize all the stuff that Voegelin borrowed from Carl Schmitt, Hans Jonas and even that philosophical popularizer Karl Jaspers. Strauss creates his own school of thought with his own ideas. Although I disagree with his premises about the dangers of relativism and historicism, his rationalistic approach to the classics, and his sometimes-strained efforts to uncover the secret intent of political thinkers, I regard Strauss as a serious scholar.
ZJ: You have been writing a lot about our current problems. Do you have an explanation as to what happened in the last 30 years or so? Or, were we doomed to be where we are? What I mean by this, is that certain theoretical assumptions about politics were bound to create problems we now deal with, and from which we no longer know how to extricate ourselves. From what you said about Bloom, you do not see the problem to have its sources in Hippie culture, relativism, and the so-called “culture wars” of the 1990s. You imply that the problem lies deeper; that it is democracy itself which is a problem. In this respect, forgive me for saying so, you sound like a heretic. I spent the last 36 years in America and can be forgiven for not having much faith in democracy on account of being foreign born. You, on the other hand, are duty-bound to praise the system. I cannot think of a single TV anchor, politician, policy-maker who would express doubts about “the people,” popular government, the founding principles of America, the glorious breakaway from the British Crown. In the minds of most Americans, including serious historians, these points are like the theological dogma you must believe. Disbelief is heretical. You, on the other hand, openly question the American belief in democracy and equality.
PG: I am very much in agreement with you and Professor Legutko about the demon in liberal democracy, as a modern political invention that has been used to radicalize society. Mind you, I am not against the kind of Volksdemokratie that exists in Poland, Hungary or Japan, providing the current political culture and “Umwertung aller Werte” (although not in Nietzsche’s sense) that is pouring out of “the democratic West” is kept away. What has happened is that the religion of equality has corrupted all human institutions in the West, although the result has not been to create a society without classes. Instead, we are burdened with our present anti-Western, anti-white elites that claim to be helping us to overcome “prejudice” and “discrimination.” This rule does not at all clash with the spread of corporate capitalism because within it there are busily-at-work multinational corporations, Big Tech, and international finance. Managerialism and Deep States also belong to this system of control, which justifies itself as means of making us all more equal and more resistant to “prejudice,” however tendentiously that term is defined.
ZJ: The language of “prejudice” and “discrimination,” which you referred to, is the expression of the egalitarian spirit. Without it, the whole PC edifice would collapse. I am convinced that if we retain a blind faith in equality, we will continue being prisoners of the current predicament and the situation will only get worse. Do you see much sense in applying this term anywhere else than in administration of justice?
Secondly, you said about “overcoming of ‘prejudice’ and ‘discrimination.'” This sounds familiar to every student of Marxism. In Marx it was called “false consciousness,” and socialism was a state where all forms of discrimination (or alienation, as Marxists would have it) were to disappear. Religion, arts, justice, family, morality, law, science were to Marx forms of the so-called “false consciousness;” they are like prison-cells which we must liberate ourselves from before we can view the world objectively. The American justice system has been attacked as racist many times (it serves either the dominant White class, or the class of heterosexuals; you can hear that science is an expression of the White mind (therefore minorities are not doing well in science classes), marriage and family (man and woman) is problematic, and so on and so forth. You wrote about Marxism; so the topic is familiar to you. Do you see the American fight against “prejudice” and “discrimination” as something that the American Left borrowed from the communist tradition?
PG: I fully agree that the reckless war against “prejudice,” in which the majority white male population stands under judgment, issues from the “liberal democratic’ obsession with equality. This lunatic project, as I argue in my forthcoming book on antifascism, is kept going by the practice of linking all still permitted inequalities to fascism and eventually to Hitler’s Final Solution. Even the concept of freedom, as interpreted by most libertarians, can only be understood through the prism of equality. Everyone on the planet is meant to enjoy the same abstract freedoms, which are hubristically or imaginatively raised to universal applicability.
The only political freedom that makes sense to me comes out of and must be justified by long-standing historical experience. What Edmund Burke wrote about this topic struck me as self-evident, even when I was an undergraduate sixty years ago. Except for the Hobbesian axiom that subjects only owe allegiance to a state that protects them, I avoid speaking about universal “rights” and “freedoms.” Provoking wars to spread or impose these inventions, which is an American progressive-neoconservative temptation, may become a real international danger. Our state department has begun to treat LGBT demands as a foundation for international relations. What idiocy comes next in order to implement “equal rights” more perfectly everywhere in the world?
The rhetoric and concepts wielded by our Left and Conservatism Inc. (to make a difference without a real distinction) sounds like a variation on what the Communists used to say. I’m not sure this comes from direct borrowing as much from the fact that Communism, Intersectionality and American Exceptionalism share a leftist point of origin. To a certain extent, all leftists think alike.
ZJ: It would be difficult to disagree with what you said about LGBTQ demands as the foundation for American international politics. One can say the same thing about the European Union. The conflict within the EU over Poland and Hungary’s stance – both countries strongly oppose the imposition of EU regulations in this regard – is very telling. In both countries, there are conservative governments; and one can be certain that as long as they stay in power, it is unlikely that they will yield to these kinds of demands. The UK, France, Spain, Germany capitulated to the new ideology. If you add to it the immigration policy in those countries, the situation is dire. What do you expect the near future to bring, and is there a way out of this situation?
PG: I just began writing about this for an American Greatness column. I don’t expect anything good to come out of any of this demographic and cultural change. Central and Eastern Europe (if we exclude the robotized Germans) seem to be largely immune to the disease of wokeness and (not coincidentally) resistant to American media and cultural influence. Unfortunately, residents of the former Soviet bloc are going to be affected by what happens in the Anglosphere and Western Europe, given the pervasiveness of American power and our ubiquitous cultural industry. As someone influenced by Carl Schmitt, I believe that friend/enemy relations form an essential part of human society as well as political life. Once the “liberal democracies” finish their war against themselves and their ancestors, their less civilized or less decadent successors will fall out among themselves. I don’t see any way the Western world can recover from the devastation caused by its struggle against “prejudice,” which has now taken the pernicious form of a war against gender distinctions and national identity.
ZJ: How far, in your opinion, can we extend equality?
PG: The quest for further equality (which itself suggests madness) has empowered a vicious, totalitarian elite, which may no longer be removable. There is a tiny hope that the Deplorables and the rest of the populist Right will succeed in wresting power from the woke elites and the Deep State. I sometimes focus on this possibility in my commentaries and make it appear that resistance can win. It may be too late for a genuine revolution (the woke elites representing the ruling class in all the liberal democracies). But I have no doubt that the black nationalists, corporate executives, High Tech giants, gays, feminists, Muslim Fundamentalists, and other members of the leftist coalition will fight over the spoils once they’ve destroyed what remains of a normal society. Their combined rule over the rubble won’t last very long.
ZJ: This sounds very much like a Leninist scenario, at least from the 1905 Revolution to the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. Then you had another episode, after Lenin’s death: the infighting between Stalin, Trotsky, and Zinoviev over succession. In both cases, only the most radical element won. The Bolsheviks were more radical than any of the socialist factions; and Stalin was more radical than the two other competitors. The winner takes all – all the spoils.
PG: I’m not sure the Soviet example works very well, because the Bolsheviks were more rational than the current intersectional Left. The battle that Russian Communist leaders engaged in for power after Lenin’s death involved contending leaders, often with differing visions of where the Bolshevik Revolution should lead. The present leftist actions approaches sheer madness. Antifa and LGBT mobs, warriors against fixed gender identities, and black racialists are unleashing their anger on normal Americans, who are mostly trying to stay out of the line of fire. Meanwhile the Deep State, the tech giants, and corporate executives, all of whom are promoting the lunge toward the cultural Left, are trying to manipulate the activists, naturally for their own ends (I can’t really figure out their end game). My own question is whether these powers will be able to control the Bedlam they’ve unleashed.
ZJ: You know the chapter from my Homo Americanus: “The Dissidents’ Rights and Wrongs.” I wrote it because I was troubled by the fact that there are no “dissidents” in the sense that we talk about dissidents under Communism. Without them one can hardly imagine the collapse of Communism. They were a voice of conscience. They rebelled against injustice, enslavement, moral corruption that socialist ideology created. Dissidents, if they happen to emerge in a democracy, have no (or extraordinarily little) public support. And if someone says something that sounds like a voice of conscience, he is condemned within minutes and apologizes. This is a phenomenon that Tocqueville observed and which Zamyatin explored in his We. Having different views from the rest is to place oneself outside the great collective, it is to be sick, like Zamyatin’s protagonist or Orwell’s Winston. There is no room for moral and intellectual independence in a democracy.
Would you agree that democracy is highly successful in suppressing conscience? My experience in teaching young Americans tells me that only religious students, mostly Catholic, have a sense, intuition, that something is not quite right with American reality. My explanation is that most secular students, students who had no religious upbringing, derive their sense of morality from schools, from the media. Their morality is social; it is imposed from above; it tells you how to be a member of a collective; what the rules of engagement are – but tell you nothing how to form a moral bond with other individuals. Without a moral bond, we cannot build a community. At best, it will be a legalistic society with a growing mountain of rules and regulations.
PG: Allow me to try to answer your last several questions in one unifying response. It seems to me that religious Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant, will resist the antiwhite, anti-biblical egalitarian rot that is being forced down their throats by public institutions and the media throughout the “liberal democracies.” But there is an openness of both religious groups to the Left. Their leaders have increasingly sold out to the power elites to avoid marginalization, and in European countries, defunding. In the US, Catholics still generally tend toward the Left, because they view the Right as dominated by nativist Protestants (this of course is vastly exaggerated), or because American Catholics have parents and grandparents who came out of the “labor movement.” Protestants who gravitate toward the Left (and they move in that direction in somewhat fewer numbers than Catholics) seem to be hung up on “racism” and the continued persecution of gays. Antiracism has become dominant issue, truly an idée fixe, in American Protestantism; and this is true for the Evangelicals as well as the de-Christianized leftist denominations like the Methodists and Episcopalians).
I agree that a right-wing proletariat without leadership may not offer the most effective resistance against our leftist rulers, but that deficient resistance is still better than having no resistance at all. What would make our opposition (or what there is of one) more useful is a serious Right rather than the silly clowns whom I see on Fox news and who keep telling us that the Democrats are the real racists, antifeminists and homophobes. Massive boycotts of large commercial enterprises that support black terrorists should be taking place. The Right should adopt all the same tactics as the Left in order to show that it will not be pushed over. Unfortunately, our bogus conservatives want to dialogue with the Left (and perhaps be invited to write for the New York Times) rather than deal with a determined totalitarian enemy. I always compare our authorized conservatives to the Blockflötenparteien in the DDR, which were called into existence to offer fake opposition to the communist regime. Merkel and other German “liberal democratic” politicians came out of that system.
ZJ: In your answer you touched upon the social differences between the Catholics and the Protestants. This may certainly be one difference, but don’t the cultural differences between them stem also from older theological difference, histories of their respective churches. Let me give you one example that illustrates this difference. We live in what i called in my book a great age of democratic apologies. We apologize for trespassing against our 7 deadly sins. Our apologies remind me of Protestant confession of sins; it is a group behavior, Calvin’s Geneva. You prostrate yourself before the community of the faithful, not in the privacy of the confessional. Protestantism was always more “democratic,” and the PC movement is almost an exclusive property of the Protestant countries. The extent to which it exists elsewhere, it is a borrowing from America and the Anglosphere. You know Protestant culture all too well. Do you see this the way I see it? Sins are public, not just private. They are not just offensive against the Almighty but against the community and its set of values, a community claims you to be its member. Thus, dissent is more difficult.
PG: This is what happens to Catholic countries when they decay internally. My commentary will be posted on American Greatness. Onetime Catholic Ireland may be becoming even more decadent than what is no longer Lutheran Sweden.
You may have read my book, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt in which I make most of your points. But it seems to me that one should distinguish between historical Calvinist churches (some of which have been very conservative) and the way Protestantism has manifested itself in the US as a force that nurtures both American Exceptionalism and Political Correctness. These tendencies may have more to do, as I argue in my book, with a peculiarly American synthesis of politics and religion than Protestant theology as such. What is however true is that Protestantism has been generally more malleable to political ends than the Catholic Church, which has maintained an authority structure, and which is overseen by an international magisterium. There are of course certain characteristically Calvinist (but not Lutheran or Anglican) beliefs and attitudes that have manifested themselves with suitable adaptations in the religion of wokeness and white guilt. Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt goes through all of them all in detail.
ZJ: I would like to make the following comment. You seem to be fond of Poland and Hungary; the current socio-political situation there. For many decades, under Communism, Poles and Hungarians were looking up to the West, especially America; longed for civilized existence and democracy as it was practiced there. Now, three decades after the collapse of Communism, some of the comments you have made make me think that Americans like you long for “la democracie a la polonaise.’ A paradox?
PG: It’s not that we on the American intellectual Right want the US to turn into something it is not, namely, a European country. But we notice that countries that were in the Soviet bloc have been spared or been able to resist the latest wave of modernity, the effect of which has been to destroy human society and the civilization that preserved it. I would also note that these countries have been less poisoned by the antifascist ideology (which is a lethal variation on the Communist formulation) that has gravely infected Western “liberal democracies.” Curiously in the German case, American “reeducation” of what was a supposedly Nazified country has resulted in a Nazi-like adherence to Political Correctness among German anti-Nazis. The most tolerant Germans I encounter are the German nationalists, who among Germans seem least to resemble our received stereotypes about authoritarian German personalities.
ZJ: Given your comment, I would agree that today (I am not sure for how long) democracy in Poland may be less “demoralized” than in the US or Western Europe because, as you pointed out, “modernity” there developed more slowly, given Communism. In the meantime, the countries on the Western side of the Iron Curtain embraced modernity or progressivism more fully, much faster, which destroyed culture that had kept democracy alive and well for several decades.
Here are a few thoughts that I would like you to comment on. It would be consistent with what you said to argue that, for a healthy democracy to operate well, we need strong culture. You destroy culture and democracy will collapse. However, one could also argue that democracy is bound to disintegrate for the reason Plato gave us in The Republic, Bk. 8: namely, equality dissolves authority. Expansion of equality is the real problem; and the last several decades saw historically unprecedented expansion of equality. (All we hear about is “more rights,” “more equality”). When no one yields authority over another, Plato says, we prepare ground for anarchy.
Even in democracy we need authority to preserve democracy. But this does not seem possible – democracy’s twin sister is equality, which wants to appropriate more and more for itself, and the more equality you get the weaker authority becomes. Democracy in Athens collapsed not because “modernity” corrupted Athens’ “cultural” foundations; it collapsed because the expansion of equality created the situation which led to lawlessness. We observe the same process on American streets and in other Western countries, college campuses, at home where parents can’t discipline their children, and so on.
PG: I fully agree with your observation that sooner or later democracies show their true character as egalitarian enterprises, in which other goods are subordinated to the demand for a more perfect equality. That is why popular government has to be tempered with nondemocratic and even aristocratic features to prevent this derailment (parekbasis tes politeas) from occurring. Thus, Aristotle, and other wise political thinkers after him, insisted on the need for “mixed regimes” that could rein in the passion for equality and contain the danger they saw as inherent in democratic government.
But with modern “liberal democracies” there is another problem that ancient and medieval thinkers did not foresee – the role of public administration, and more recently, the media in shaping popular beliefs. This is not something that Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant or even Tocqueville could have imagined in those bygone ages in which they lived. These developments occasion the question of whether what calls itself democratic in Western countries reflects a popular will or merely expresses the will of powerful elites. They also cause someone like myself who is critical of democracy to rally faute de mieux to the populist banner because what the populists are fighting seems so much worse. In the US, we are confronting a counterrevolution by leftist occupants of high political and media positions, as well as by corporate capitalists. They are making war on poor and middle-class white Christians, by inciting racial riots and radicalizing the culture. The ruling class is hypocritically claiming the egalitarian high ground, while trampling on those below them.
ZJ: You alluded to Legutko’s The Demon in Democracy and my Homo Americanus. Do you think it is a coincidence that the two books, which are unabashedly critical of democracy and equality, were written by foreigners? (I should add, however, that I left Poland for America 36 years ago); or, should I say, the former denizens of the egalitarian paradise who for this very reason happen to dislike equality? One should also mention here Leszek Kolakowski, another Pole, and his magisterial critical study Main Currents of Marxism, which deals with another egalitarian utopia.
PG: I don’t think it’s surprising that two incisive critical works on American egalitarian “democratism” should come from Eastern Europeans. You and Professor Legutko stand outside the milieu of democratic-human rights zealotry. You are writing as informed observers looking at our American obsession from outside. Because of my quasi-European background, I too have looked at this all-enveloping ideology with wonder and sometimes horror. I became persona non grata to the American conservative movement, when I dared to notice how its celebrities made all the same curious noises as the Left that it claimed to be opposing. The sad truth is our conservative establishment trades in the leftist platitudes of five or ten years ago about democracy, equality, progress, and human rights. It can never leave the leftist conceptual and programmatic framework that you and Professor Legutko call attention to. By now this foolishness may be an identifiably American thing passed on to our satellites.
ZJ: You are editor of a very prestigious and influential magazine: Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, founded by the Rockford Institute, edited in the late 1970s and 1980s by a Polish émigré, Leopold Tyrmand. His name is still well-known in Poland, especially for his Diary 1954 (1954- Dziennik), which is a fantastic record of life in Stalinist Poland. You knew Tyrmand very well. There is no question that as editor of Chronicles, Tyrmand shaped the “ideological line” of it. Did he exert influence on you as well?
PG: Leopold Tyrmand gave the magazine a direction that it has clung to over the years, although it may be a case of taking a provisional strategy for a long-term orientation. He conceived of Chronicles as the voice of the American heartland, which represented a more cohesive and more pristine concept of the American people, than urban publications, particularly those based in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, or even Chicago. Although Leopold always hoped for a reconciliation and possibly alliance with the neoconservatives, he continued to promote the heartland theme until such a plan could be worked out. He even tried to create a Rockford Institute in New York, which turned out badly (after his death) and led to more bitterness between paleoconservatives and their more advantageously placed neoconservative adversaries.
Tyrmand balked at the idea of making me editor of the magazine, while he tended to other matters, because of my firm belief that a war with the neocons was inevitable and that we should give up any notion that we could deal with them as equals. I also differed with Leopold (although we became close friends) on his optimistic view of America. Unlike him, I thought we were headed for a moral and cultural crisis because of an irremovable leftist hegemony. But even I failed to understand how bad the looming crisis would become.
ZJ: Your rather unexpected answer made me think of something: Tyrmand was an émigré from socialism who became editor of a very American journal, located in Illinois – the heartland of conservative America; back then, the place was much more conservative than it is today. How well, in your opinion, did he understand the States, its culture and American conservatism? From our private conversations, I would say that your understanding of America – its religious and political traditions and history – is exceptional. Even if Tyrmand was wrong about you (as you said, he balked at the prospect of you taking Chronicles over), would you say that the history of the last 30 years vindicated you and disproved Tyrmand? On the other hand, he was not blind to the shortcomings of the American system. If there is one thing that he should be remembered for is his piece “The Media Shangri-La.” As far as I know, it was a piece that caused commotion and made him visible.
PG: I think my forebodings turned out to be justified, while Leopold misjudged the gravity of the political and cultural situation we were facing even in the 1980s. What underlies “The Media Shangri-La” is the assumption that the media are a self-contained negative force that inhabit their own zweite Realität (to use Voegelin’s phrase, borrowed from Heimito von Doderer). Actually, the media constitute (in my phrase) the “priesthood of the ruling class” here and throughout the Western world. They are not an isolated band of eccentrics. They are a power elite, who determine what the masses of people are allowed to believe and to say. As far as I can tell, Podhoretz and other neocons thought that Tyrmand was a “conservative Polish Catholic.” Needless to say, this false idea could be the kiss of death in their circles. Kolakowski was more acceptable, since he was not viewed as a Polish nationalist; nor was his Catholicism thought to be a powerful influence on him. I would never credit neocons however with being worldly thinkers. They came out of an exceedingly narrow cultural world and inherited lots of unfortunate prejudices. Those factors make their triumph seem even more remarkable.
ZJ: You are described as a paleoconservative, the category less known today, but something that was very well known in the 1970s and 1980s, just like the traditional conservatism of Russell Kirk, the author of The Conservative Mind. Both were often contrasted with neo-conservatism. What does the term paleoconservatism mean? What are the basic suppositions of your version of conservatism?
PG: I am inclined to give you the long introduction to an anthology of essays on paleoconservatism that Cornell University will soon be bringing out. But I shall resist that impulse. Paleoconservatism has been ruthlessly canceled by the conservative establishment (which is a slightly recycled version of neoconservatism plus GOP boosterism). No one associated with our movement is now allowed to publish in any conservative magazine (other than Chronicles); and even The American Conservative, which started out with paleo leanings, now belongs to the conservative establishment. The main difference between the paleos and their despisers in the continually updated conservative movement is that we dare to say “No” to all the accommodations of the Zeitgeist that Conservatism, Inc. engages in to make itself agreeable to its leftist talking partners. We have no leftist talking partners, and certainly not in the “LGBT community” or among those who believe that the US before the civil rights and immigration reforms of the 1960s was an “unjust” country. In this case the reforms proved more disastrous than the injustices they were supposed to address. Paleos represent the only American Right, because we alone – of all American political positions – do not worship the idol of equality, and in fact view it as the enemy of all traditional social institutions. Americans and their satellites are going to have to live with hierarchy in the end; and that form of it, provided by the media, “educational institutions,” and public administration may be the pernicious example of that arrangement.
ZJ: You authored some fifteen books, and you edited a magazine. You know that ideas matter and that reading good authors and good magazines is essential for a healthy life of a society. Today, students read bad authors and their dreadful books. The effect is the society in which we live. From your own books, I would choose Revisions and Dissents, which is a wonderful and beautifully written little collection of essays. There is a chapter on Robert Nisbet, a towering figure in the field of sociology, whom I read passionately in the 1980s, and forgot. If you were to advise a young student what 10 contemporary authors, in the field of sociology, psychology religion, political theory – people of Nisbet’s generation and older – and 5 magazines he should turn to, what would you recommend?
PG: Of all the book that I have published, the one that seems the most zeit-relevant is The Strange Death of Marxism. The other book that seems made for the time is the work on antifascism that Cornell will be bringing out this summer. By the way, the conservative press and most conservative magazines in this country have a policy of never mentioning my books or even my name, except to remind their readers that I’m paranoid and should not be brought into polite conversation. I doubt that my efforts to distinguish the current Left from classical Marxism or even from what used to be called “socialism” will meet any approval from “conservatives” who blame everything now on a “return to Communism.”
Nisbet may be among the last social theorists, chronologically, whom I would recommend to the young, although there are some French and German social critics who impress me. The only American magazine that I’m reading these days is my own, which requires a lot of editorial work from a dedicated staff.
I should mention Chantal Delsol as a contemporary social thinker whose French books I have been avidly devouring. I also published last year a long German essay in Neue Ordnung (an illustrious Austrian conservative magazine) on Rolf Peter Sieferle, the author of Finis Germania. Sieferle was an environment-conscious man of the Right, who committed suicide out of despair for the future of his country and the West. These days I read (as well as help edit) my own journal; I also pay attention to First Things and The American Conservative, which the editors graciously send me gratis and which cover some of the themes that we address.
ZJ: Thank you so very much for this insightful and delightful conversation.
As a fascism junkie I couldn’t resist ordering and reading the last work of the eminent historian Renzo De Felice (1929-1996) on a subject to which he devoted more than thirty years of his life. This preoccupation also led De Felice to produce an eight-volume study centered on the life of Benito Mussolini. In the foreword to Breve Storia del Fascismo (A Short History of Fascism), Falco Quilici, a friend of the late author, notes the extreme care with which De Felice searched all available archives for his massive research project. Moldering piles of scrap paper ( tutte pile di scartoffie) bearing on his subject found anywhere in Italy attracted the author’s attention; and he would personally search through these dusty piles for new data even after publishing his gargantuan work.
This short history of fascism that relates both the movement and its leader to the interwar period summarizes the leading points in De Felice’s eight-volume work. An astonishing fact for those who know little about the struggle between fascists and the Resistance in Italy is the relative paucity of those involved on either side of this confrontation that unfolded in the fall of 1943, between a German-controlled Italian fascist regime and various leftist militant groups. Only about 4 million Italians out of a total Italian population of 44 million played any role in this struggle.
The “myth” of a massive Resistance came along later to generate the useful image of the Italians as an antifascist people. The revenge wrought on collaborators was far more ruthless and indiscriminate than any persecution that Mussolini while in power initiated. Clearly the Salo Republic that il Duce presided over, in name only, which was established in Northern Italy after the Germans rescued Mussolini from internment (and after the King and the fascist Gran Consiglio had removed him from power and imprisoned him on July 25, 1943) behaved quite brutally. But this happened mostly owing to the de facto imposition of a Nazi German regime.
De Felice points to the aspect of overcompensation that characterized Italian fascism. The Italian peninsula was never truly unified in the nineteenth century by the House of Savoy based in Turin. Despite the presence of a national government and the availability of literature and operas that stressed Italian solidarity, deep regional and social divisions remained after the country’s apparent unification. The North and South were culturally and economically divided; and the owners of industry and the latifundia that dotted the Italian countryside stood in opposition to a radicalized working class and impoverished peasants.
Efforts were made to resettle Italian population, particularly from the south, in North African colonies, but in 1896 the Italians lost 18, 000 soldiers to 88,000 Abyssinian warriors in the Battle of Adua, a national humiliation that Mussolini tried to erase by attacking Ethiopia in 1936.
There was also the hope among Italian nationalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that their country might complete the work of unification by taking the South Tyrol and Istria, on the Adriatic Coast, from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That goal drove the Italian government into the First World War against the Central Powers, a disaster that resulted in 531, 000 lost lives and which did nothing to improve the country’s economic condition. We might also note that between 1890 and 1920 Italy lost 4 million of its countrymen to the US. 10 percent of our immigrants then arrived from Italy, and almost all of them came from the Mezzogiorno, the region extending south from Rome into Sicily.
The fascist regime was intended to overcome those problems left from Italy’s faulty unification in 1870. The parliamentary system that it put in place added to political difficulties by creating a spoils system between alternating ruling coalitions. Mussolini’s tirades against “the fetid corpse of liberalism” were aimed at the parliamentary corruption that preceded his advent to power in October 1922. A unified state, or one that claimed to be such, was the fascist response to Italy’s failed experiment in self-government.
According to de Felice, the Fascist Party of Italy remained in “a secondary position” relative to the Italian fascist state and indeed “could be easily sacrificed if the superior needs of the state required it.” Unlike the German National Socialists or the Soviet Communist Party, Italian fascism placed the state above party, race or just about anything else. This “fascistization of the state” presupposed the operation of a Duce, who would mediate social differences. This figure was indispensable to the entire balancing of interests and stood above the Italian monarchy and a subservient party structure.
A “totalitarian state,” or at least one that claimed to be such, would help Italy, or so it was hoped, rise above internal disunity and economic scarcity. This Italian state was seen to exemplify a “national revolution,” and so it claimed to fuse the nation with the political order. Despite the stunning architecture, marches, and iconography that came out of the fascist experiment, its creative answer to Italy’s earlier failed national revolution did not end well.
In a less ideological cultural world, Helmut Roewer’s investigation of the crucial role of the English government at the outbreak of World War I would be taken for granted. What Roewer diligently uncovered should not astonish any expert. The trick is that the author reveals to us what the anti-German intelligentsia has hidden or pushed aside for decades.
It has long been clear that Fritz Fischer and his followers could only prove the thesis of the belligerent German Second Reich, which triggered a Europe-devouring war for world domination, only by disregarding numerous sources. When the quirks attached to the Fischer thesis became apparent, anti-German historians like Hans-Ulrich Wehler and my dissertation supervisor, Hajo Holborn, tried again and again to patch up the fabric of the usual narrative. At least for me the measure was too high when I encountered an assessment of this kind by the German-American historian Fritz Stern forty years ago, who was serious when he said: Even if the Fischer thesis is not uniformly consistent, decency demands that we accept his botch-up out of moral considerations, in order not to let German nationalism out of the bottle.
How The Sole Guilt Thesis Began To Falter
In the meantime, numerous younger historians around the world have dispelled the sole guilt thesis. The burden of guilt was thus shifted to the Tsarist Empire and France, without dropping the position as a whole, that the Central Powers were most to blame for the outbreak of war. Every now and then the Serbian government is brought up and its connections with the assassination attempt on Franz Ferdinand and his wife are properly noted. It is also permissible to address the mobilization of the Russian armed forces along the German-Galician border on August 1, 1914. That was a pathogen that brought about the German declaration of war against Russia and the attack on Russia’s ally, France.
It is also permissible to point out that the French and Russian governments discussed war measures against Germany and Austria-Hungary in June 1914. On June 22, 1914, French President Raymond Poincaré assured the Russian Foreign Minister that if the Russians took up the fight first, they would enter into disputes against the Central Powers. The Australian historian Christopher Clark also added that neither the Central Powers nor the Entente allies could have imagined the extent of the devastating war. At most, the armed forces expected a “short, limited war” at the beginning.
In addition to this post-Fischer pattern, the Austrians allowed the outbreak of war through the enormous demands placed on Serbia. And the German government went catastrophically astray when it issued the Austrians a “blank check” to proceed against the hostile Serbs. The Central Powers are far from being absolved of all guilt.
Why England Has Received So Little Attention Thus Far
Helmut Roewer (here in the BN interview) now looks at the English way into the First World War in On the Way to World Domination. The contribution of the government of Sir Edward Gray, the British Foreign Minister, to the start of the war is under-emphasized for two reasons. The English are typically portrayed as partial outsiders in relation to the approaching storm. While they were allied with France and Russia against the Germans, the impression still exists that England was forced to make war on Germany because the neutrality it guaranteed for Belgium had been violated by the German armies. Until now, England’s concern has been recognized that a defeated France would have given Germany preponderance of power in Europe. Despite its initial wavering, England threw itself into the breach to ward off the aftermath of a devastating German victory. In addition, “liberal democratic” England enjoys a higher political value than the German Second Reich, which for the leading intelligentsia was already considered an authoritarian regime at that time.
England Wanted To Isolate Germany Since 1905
Historians, such as, Harry Elmer Barnes and Christopher Clark, who emphasize the shared responsibility of the armed forces on both sides for the outbreak of war, are somewhat sparing of the English government. They consider the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Gray, to be a minor player in the events that took place in August 1914. But because the Germans got the ball rolling, illegally overran Belgium and threatened France, did the English feel pressured to plunge into the fray. Roewer, on the other hand, focuses on the precarious foreign policy of the Gray government of 1905, which was aimed at isolating the Germans from the other European powers. Enemy encirclement was known to be successful and England benefited economically and politically from it.
To confirm his thesis, Roewer expands his field of vision retrospectively, from the run-up to the war to the long road leading to the outbreak of war. From this point of view he tries to measure the extent of the responsibility of Gray and his government confidants. It would be misleading, according to Roewer, to examine the war crisis that intensified in the summer of 1914 without a background that included the British government. Since the creation of his coalition government, the key figures in Gray’s cabinet had been trying to forge an anti-German front with the French and Russians. Influential press barons and the warring party in the cabinet discussed the “war in sight” behind the scenes, without the knowledge of the less contentious cabinet ministers, who were left in the dark.
Did England Plan World War I Together With The USA?
Immediately after the first act of war, Gray made the decision to weigh his country into the fray. He admitted this in his memoirs published after the war. On the other hand, Roewer’s attempt to assign the American government and the banking industry in the USA a steering role in the anti-German intrigues of Gray, Churchill and the like, is less convincing. The American elites of the time were determined to ensure an English victory. But that in no way justifies that something like divided war planning was going on.
Despite the participation of the American upper class in the English cause, it cannot be inferred thereby that the two countries forged a war plot with each other before the shooting started. If one wants to paraphrase the foreign policy of the Wilson government from 1914 until the declaration of war against Germany, then one can say that it was capable of doing everything possible to ensure that the British gained the upper hand over the Germans—but without entering the war directly. That was definitely not true neutrality. However, as Justus Doenecke abundantly demonstrates in his balanced treatment of Woodrow Wilson’s neutrality policy, the American president, who was admittedly pro-British, wanted to maintain a middle course between the war—inducing WASP Republicans and the anti-war elements in the Democratic Party.
Either Way, The US Was The Big Winner Of The First World War
Wilson never contained the wave of pro-British or anti-German sentiments of his colleagues; but he was willing to favor the British side without sending American forces to Europe. The German re-use of submarine weapons in 1917 to relieve the British hunger blockade allowed the American interventionists to force Congress to join the war. Without glossing over these machinations, it is fitting to make a distinction between American participation in British preparation for war and pro-British partisanship.
There is no question that the United States had many alternatives during the First World War that would have allowed it to maintain its position of power without using armed forces against the Central Powers. The American government was able to mediate peace, a prospect that the British, more than the Germans and Austrians, let slip away. Even a negotiated victory in favor of the Central Powers would hardly have brought the USA to its knees. They would have stood out brilliantly as the world power of the future, regardless of which side in Europe had better weathered the atrocities.
English War Propaganda Extremely Effective
How the ruling class was attuned, however, had to be taken into account. The committed Morgan banking house extended piles of bonds to the British, while the American ammunition manufacturers supplied arms to the Allies as often as possible. But that was hardly a coincidence. Those involved acted in this way because they were inclined to the anti-German or pro-British side. One has to come to this conclusion without treating the Central Powers as the more morally blameworthy side.
It was just as relevant that the English were more proficient with their war propaganda than the Germans. Common language, sensible use of the transatlantic telegraph wire, and the ability to effectively address the sensitivities of American elites and to shape them appropriately were inexhaustible advantages for the English advertisers. This in no way means to justify the American government’s course of war. The aim is to explain why the American involvement in the war happened. And there is no need to point out a conspiracy to understand this urge to intervene in war.
It was different with the English. A bustling cabinet cabal managed to enflame feelings on the continent. Roewer’s treatment of the history of American development up to the American entry in World War I therefore lags qualitatively behind his presentation of the English cabinet’s schemes. In the latter case, he limits his investigation to the actual warmongers without, as Fritz Fischer did with the Germans, degrading an entire nation. With the English, Roewer differentiates between the guilty and the rest who had been duped and lied to. With the Americans, on the other hand, he is not so careful with the innocent.
In an earlier article, I described Panajotis Kondylis as a philosopher “without a mission,” in the style of his follower, Falk Horst. Horst understands this simply and plainly: While Kondylis took a critical position derived from the Enlightenment, he rejected the dream images that some – if not all – Enlightenmentists attached to their worldview.
When Kondylis developed his deliberately value-free process, he took care to bring forward an optimistic vision of the future. Such a separation can also be found in his thick volume,Die Aufklärung im Rahmen des neuzeitlichen Rationalismus (The Enlightenment in the Framework of Modern Rationalism).
This procedure criticizes left right-wing ruler, who believe that anyone who is not enthusiastic about progress has reactionary intentions. The living as well as the dead, they further believe, pushed away egalitarian values because, according to Zeev Sternhell and Jürgen Habermas, they spurned human good.
Ethnic Differences, Irrational Folk Customs, A Preference For Order
This gallery of villains includes, among past figures of thought, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Comte de Buffon and Herder. All these pioneers of the modern age adhered to scientific methods to the best of their ability, but ended up – viewed from the left – on suspicious terrain. Ethnic differences, the defense of irrational folk customs and a preference for a strict order of authority arise from their work.
Because of these errors, these dissident scouts received bad marks from the progressives. Kondylis’ inability to achieve a well-deserved reputation stems from his distancing from the “principle of hope” (Ernst Bloch). What is meant is the utopian fermentation agent, for which our best-known advocates of the Enlightenment advocate.
The self-proclaimed party of progress ignores the ambiguity and contradictions of the pioneers they adore. They refuse to relate their heroes to the prevailing values of a bygone age. Rather, they are putting together a pedigree for their reform work, which lumps all preferred “predecessors” together. Anyone who contradicts this transfiguration loses his place at the round table.
Kant – A Racist?
Contrary to this notion, the Enlightenment adheres to a variety of approaches that our progressive Enlightenment thinkers could hardly satisfy. Even with the typical representatives of the âge des lumières one encounters pessimistic and anti-progressive aspects, as can be read in Henry Vyverberg in Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment. Vyverberg examines his main theme not only in exceptional or doubtful cases, but also in figureheads like Voltaire and the encyclopedists gathered around Diderot.
Enlighteners who strongly questioned a theory of progress were not marginalized. Just as widespread among these rational people was the creation of an order of hierarchically systematized ethnic groups – an exercise that has caused consternation among today’s do-gooders. Kant, for example, in his anthropology saw colored people as less developed than Europeans.
Most of the deceased Enlightenmentists would not have adapted themselves better than Kondylis to the templates of our progress priesthood. The endeavor to lure the Germans away from their special path also refers to carefully selected progressive traditions that some re-educators want to impose on their compatriots. However, pieces of evidence that clearly show that even among Western people of reason, “retrograde” positions can easily be found.
Voltaire And Democracy
For example, Voltaire turned up his nose at democracy, continually mocked the Jews and glorified Frederick the Great as the most sensible ruler par excellence. Furthermore, the advocate of natural rights and the social contract, John Locke, wanted to keep atheists and Catholics away from his desired civil society.
In the basic constitutions of the Carolinas, written by Locke (1669), this precursor of the Enlightenment ensured that the settlers of a prosperous North American colony should certify religious tolerance. In the following century, Voltaire could hardly contain himself when he praised this English freedom-thinker who wanted to grant freedom of belief to idolaters and pagan Indians.
Noteworthy, however, was Article 101 in the same document, which granted the slave master unlimited power over his subjects. So powerful was this authority that the master could kill his slaves with impunity. The purpose of this is to draw attention to a truism. It is a futile task if one tries to reconcile the mental figures of a distant epoch with our late modern values.
In Return of the Strong Gods, R.R. Reno makes this perceptive point: In “the second half of the twentieth century, we came to regard the first half as a world-historical eruption of the evils inherent in the Western tradition, which can be corrected only by the relentless pursuit of openness, disenchantment, and weakening. The anti- imperatives are now flesh-eating dogmas masquerading as the fulfillment of the anti-dogmatic spirit.”
Reno is entirely on the mark when he tells us that fighting the “dogmas” of the past has become integral to our political culture. In Western countries, particularly in Germany, this struggle has taken the form of a perpetual battle against fascism, which has become the hallmark of what is supposedly an almost uniformly evil Western past.
In pursuit of a fascist-free society, social engineers in government and education have trampled on freedoms and engaged in nonstop persecution of those who are regarded as standing outside of necessarily leftist, political conversation. In a book, in press with Cornell University, I undertake to show how utterly pernicious antifascism has become and how little it has to do with what was once understood as fascism or Nazism.
Antifascist bigots manufacture their own dogma to combat alleged “fascist” intolerance, which by now means disagreeing with progressive gatekeepers. “Fascist” is also attached to anyone who doesn’t march in lockstep with the antifascist elites and who therefore must be destroyed socially and economically to protect a multicultural society.
Where I depart from others who may agree with these premises is in my insistence that certain political developments promoted the antifascist anti-dogma dogma. The Russian or Japanese government does not push this as a state ideology. Only Western countries promote this stuff; and there may be something specific to these societies that predispose them toward antifascist crusades.
All antifascist countries have undergone similar political and educational experiences, although the Germans previewed this transformational process with the “democratic” reeducation inflicted on them by their American and British conquerors after World War II. Such conversions are not attributable simply to the “spirit of the age,” or because of moralizing on the editorial pages of the New York Times or Le Monde. The conversion to antifascism as a state-enforced doctrine, particularly in Western Europe, has happened incrementally for quintessentially political reasons.
Although we can trace back this antifascist fixation to an earlier point, the best time to start may be after World War II, when there were already an entrenched concept of antifascist education and a new stress on universal rights that were to be globally enforced. In the 1960s first in the US and then in other Western countries, an expanding crusade against racism and its supposedly twin evil of sexism was taking place. This enthusiasm gained in intensity, partly under state sponsorship, and brought along a government apparatus to fight “prejudice” and “discrimination.”
In the US, this undertaking was bound up with fighting racial discrimination, while in Europe it built on the struggle against Nazism and colonialism. But this crusade, once begun, just went on and on. It became ever more intrusive and obsessive and enjoyed the support of myriads of administrators, an expanding media empire and a state-subsidized educational establishment.
Throughout this conversionary enterprise, the focus has been on a constant enemy “fascism,” but never communism; and those who have wielded power have conjured up the specter of Hitler, or his right-wing stand-ins to underline the perpetual threat to democracy.
The point to be underlined is that identifiable turning points and coercive policies contributed to the problem that Reno mentions. There were also actors who helped advance a particular model of “liberal democracy,” which supplanted other less controlling and less radical forms of constitutional government.
Certain variables might have made this all-controlling ideology less oppressive and less pervasive, e.g., fewer young people having their brains laundered at our universities by madcap academics, a smaller electorate made up of long resident, literate property-owners, and the absence of a centralized administrative state that in the name of social policy set out to reconstruct the family.
All these factors, and other discernible ones, contributed to the rise and continuity of our antifascist state religion. Here concrete interests came together with ideology in a war against “the evils inherent in the Western tradition.” These evil supposedly culminated in fascism, understood as both Nazi tyranny and whatever obstacles the cultural Left was opposing at a particular time.
A major vehicle for this new dogma has been the managerial class ensconced in both government and corporations. Although this class could conceivably profess non-radical values, this is not the case at the present time. Its members are out to expunge such values and the culture that created them.
Admittedly the “flesh-eating dogmas” we are addressing make no sense to me as a coherent, demonstrable set of beliefs related to any reality that I can grasp. But I am interested in knowing who is benefiting from this crescendo of madness. The old question of “cui bono?” remains relevant here.
Characteristic of the work of the late Greek scholar, who spent a large part of his life in Heidelberg and who mostly carried out his conceptual drafts in German, was his interpretative starting point based on claims to power. In contrast to other historians of ideas and social affairs, who are inclined to moralize, Kondylis never fought for the “good.” Although influenced by the Enlightenment, his editor, Falk Horst, is right when he speaks of a philosopher of the Enlightenment without a mission.
Kondylis dissected successive world views based on the Middle Ages; but he undertook his task as impartially as possible. He called this approach “descriptive decisionism,” which he differentiated from value-based understandings of human decisions and claims. And he called the scientific approach, which he pursued in his mature works, as “social ontology.”
First and Foremost A Social Being
Kondylis starts from the basic assumption that the human being cannot be separated from a certain social relationship. From his point of view, man is primarily a social being, whose relationship to fellow human beings and to the world outside must be taken into account through his position in a given hierarchy.
First and foremost, one takes care of self-preservation, which requires the cooperation of others, and then of defending one’s niche against opponents. In his small volume, Macht und Entscheidung Die Herausbildung der Weltbilder und die Wertfrage (The Formation of World Views and the Question of Value [1984]), Kondylis focuses on the combative and power-striving side of interpersonal interactions.
Moralism or Nihilism
Fundamental to his lengthy books on the Enlightenment, classical conservatism and the age of world politics is his use of a power-oriented perspective of interpretation. Even with scholarly disputes and strictly developed theoretical work, a fighting spirit that shapes all concerns can be discerned. The scientist sets his thesis against that of his opponent.
The Enlightenment thinkers set out to assert nature and sensuality against a medieval way of thinking. But the former participants went their separate ways when the question arose whether the struggle against the rejected metaphysics should result in a normative morality or in a nihilism that decomposes everything. The Enlightenment thinkers, the advocates of a rational morality like Kant and Voltaire, and nihilistic materialists like Holbach and La Mettrie, split into two opposing groups of thought.
The bourgeois society, which upheld the cultural world of the Enlightenment, had to wage a two-front war against conservatism, which wanted to reassert the ideals of a premodern social order, and against mass democracy, which advocates the equality and exchangeability of the crowd. Without considering this dialectical, militant thrust, Kondylis believes, successive ruling classes and leading ideologies can hardly be understood. Only with regard to a counterpart does the individual develop collectively, as being-like and abstract.
A Synthesis of Marx And Carl Schmitt?
Kondylis’ social ontology and anthropology is usually interpreted as an imaginative amalgamation of the thought of Marx and Carl Schmitt. It may be astonishing that Kondylis recognized Marx, but far less Schmitt, as a pioneer. He also generously admitted as influences in his world of ideas both Reinhart Koselleck, with whom he had a long-term correspondence, and his doctoral supervisor from Heidelberg, Werner Conze. He also mentioned Spinoza, whose theological and political treatise helped shape his concept of power.
But why did Kondylis treat Schmitt, whose friend-foe thinking he shares, almost neglectfully? It may be that Kondylis wanted to emphasize the originality of his terms. Just as relevant, as Horst’s anthology makes clear, Kondylis was radicalized in his youth when he had protested against the Junta of the colonels in his Greek homeland.
The Marxist character can be traced back to these youthful years, even if the mature thinker could hardly be classified as a Marxist or as a leftist. The focus on the course of history and socially determined major cultures point back to a Marxist-inspired focus. It is clear, however, that Kondylis like Koselleck and other leading German historians of ideas from the second half of the last century, was influenced by Schmitt.
The fact that Kondylis handled a single-track or overly simplistic view of the world is a common criticism of his anthropological and political perspective, which revolves around self-preservation and striving for power of the socially settled individual. But that presupposes that the social researcher Kondylis wanted to provide an overall picture of political, community and ideological action. Instead, his ideas can be used to shed light on human behavior and to provide insight into human motivation in individual situations.
Not An Optimist
For all his devotion to the Enlightenment and the associated insights, Kondylis by no means represented the optimistic view of the future which shaped eighteenth-century rationalism. He belonged to the group that Zeev Sternhell and Isaiah Berlin characterized as “les Contre-lumières,” and which were supposedly up to no good. These brooders used the critical approach of the Enlightenment to question and even devalue their final vision.
In other words: Kondylis understood his teaching assignment differently than the moralists he mocked. Apart from the decision-making of socially located and motivated individuals and groups, who act in the area of conflict, with other similarly determined beings, Kondylis cannot offer us a world-picture or a vision of the future. To his credit, he warns against those whitewashers who want to abolish our freedom and our sobriety.
