Conservative intellectuals are at a turning point: Normalize Trump or resist him?
Conservative intellectuals are at a turning point: Normalize Trump or resist him?
President Trump at the White House on Wednesday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
By Anne Applebaum at the Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/conservative-intellectuals-are-at-a-turning-point-normalize-trump-or-resist-him/2019/07/19/25e5b06e-a978-11e9-86dd-d7f0e60391e9_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_source=reddit.com&utm_term=.5b3cef900cbe
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It is still possible for American conservatism to avoid this trap. According to several accounts, the co-organizer of this “national conservative” gathering, Israeli academic Yoram Hazony, banned open white supremacists from the meeting and warned the conference against them. Many speakers chose unifying themes, focusing on a more communitarian, less individualistic vision of society, a path away from libertarianism that some European conservatives also want to follow.
But Tucker Carlson did use his moment on the podium to dismiss the problem of racism as boring. (“It can’t be fixed; it can’t be changed.”) One or two of the speakers are already established fellow travelers, active participants in the whitewashing of authoritarian nationalism in Europe. Hazony’s own book in praise of nationalism contains a bizarre and ahistorical description of the formation of nations: groups of families, clans or tribes that came together in some mythical pre-modern era and decided to be unified — a definition that might fit biblical Israel but clearly excludes the United States, as well pretty much every other modern nation-state. He also dismisses any forms of international cooperation as “imperialism,” understands almost nothing about the European Union and seems incapable of coming to terms with the idea that “patriotism” might be something different and distinct from “nationalism.”
But there is a reason that, in recent history, we have consistently spoken about civic patriotism and not nationalism in the United States: because we are not, and never will be, a nation held together by ethnic blood ties. In its way, this is what gives us our strength. All nations are imagined communities, and our imagined community is based on a uniquely inspiring set of principles. Americans have proved that they can be loyal to, and will fight on behalf of, a more complex, more cerebral national ideal, one derived from ideas of democracy and justice as opposed to blood and soil. By contrast, those who promote a narrower, nativist definition of America will weaken and divide us, as the president is already doing. They will teach us to hate one another and lose us the respect we once had abroad.
Having left it myself, albeit quite a while ago, I have some sympathy: The conservative movement is at a real turning point. But its most intelligent thinkers will soon have to decide whether they will continue to normalize Trump, providing him with the intellectual framework to indulge the dangerous impulses on display in Greenville, or whether they will try to create something that gives the Republican Party, at least, some viable alternative once Trumpism fails. If they can bring themselves to abandon the word “nationalism,” that will be a good sign.
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