Since the crushing, truly humiliating defeat that it suffered with the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency, neoconservatism, at least temporarily, experienced a dramatic reversal of fortunes.<\/p>\n
It isn\u2019t, of course, that neoconservatives have gone away; and it certainly isn\u2019t the case that they have lost power and influence in any substantive\u2014as opposed to symbolic\u2014respect.\u00a0 Still, the sort of standard GOP\/neocon agitprop that prevailed during the George W. Bush days, and even into the Obama era, has been less audible in the Age of Trump.<\/p>\n
We should not, however, be misled by this into thinking that some of the distinguishing ideas of neoconservatism don\u2019t continue to inform American domestic and, especially, foreign policy. In fact, there is a real sense in which some of these ideas inform the contemporary cultural consciousness.<\/p>\n
Within the ideological solar system that is the neoconservative view, there is one idea specifically that is arguably the sun around which all of the others revolve. This is the idea that America itself is an idea<\/em>\u2014or what is otherwise known as the doctrine of \u201cAmerican Exceptionalism\u201d (AE).<\/p>\n AE Considered<\/strong><\/p>\n What can it mean to say that America (or anything) is an idea or concept or \u201cproposition?\u201d\u00a0 An idea is an intangible or incorporeal sort of thing.\u00a0 Ideas, in other words, are without bodies, nonphysical.\u00a0 They are without borders<\/em>.\u00a0 In principle, then, any given idea can be discovered and, hence, endorsed by anyone, irrespectively of culture or history.\u00a0 One may become consciously <\/em>aware of an idea at a specific juncture and courtesy of culturally and historically-specific circumstances; but the idea itself, considered as an idea, needn\u2019t owe anything to the contingencies of space and time.<\/p>\n An idea, inasmuch as it is thought to transcend all civilizational differences, is universal.<\/p>\n That the proponents of AE think of America the Idea in just this way is borne out by their insistence that anyone <\/em>can become an American. We receive confirmation of this as well whenever the members of Respectable Society, both \u201cliberal\u201d and \u201cconservative,\u201d talk about immigration, whether legal or illegal: Although it is only ever recognizable leftists who use the term \u201cundocumented\u201d to describe illegal immigrants, those on the official right implicitly endorse the idea behind this term when they too speak as if the only<\/em> meaningful difference between immigrants and American citizens is that the former haven\u2019t yet satisfied the formal or legal criteria for American citizenship.<\/p>\n To put it another way, as long as a person affirms America as Idea, then regardless of where that person resides, that person is an American.<\/p>\n When George W. Bush says that \u201cfamily values\u201d don\u2019t end at the Rio Grande, or Barack H. Obama tells us that foreign immigrants and refugees differ from Americans only inasmuch as they were born elsewhere, they are telling us that America is, ultimately, borderless, for it is an Idea or Creed that, as such, can be embraced by anyone anywhere.\u00a0 Borders are arbitrary lines on a map, symbolic and capricious walls, and the requirements for official or legal citizenship are so many bureaucratic hurdles.<\/p>\n America the Idea is, essentially, the ideal of what neoconservatives and those further to their left call \u201cLiberal Democracy.\u201d\u00a0 It is the idea of a Universal Regime of Equality, a Democracy under which the \u201chuman rights\u201d of all find protection.\u00a0 The champions of AE maintain that the territorial expanse that the world recognizes as the United States of America is Liberal Democracy in the flesh.<\/p>\n To put it another way, just as Plato believed that the particular, temporal instances of imperfect justice, truth, beauty, and goodness that we find in our world are but shadows or reflections of eternal, universal archetypes\u2014Justice, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness\u2014so too do the proponents of AE regard the geographical and historical entity of America as but a shadowy imitation of the real <\/em>America, the Idea of a Universal Nation.<\/p>\n Implications & Criticisms of AE<\/strong><\/p>\n Ahistorical Fiction<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n First, AE is as ahistorical a fiction as any of which Western political philosophy is littered. This being said, we must resist the temptation to place it alongside such other political-moral fictions as the State of Nature, the Classless Society, the Original Position, and Plato\u2019s perfect Republic, for unlike the merchants of these imaginary devices, the peddlers of AE indicate not the slightest awareness that their doctrine of choice is an ideal, a thought experiment, a theoretical construct.<\/p>\n AE\u2019s handlers are true believers\u2014or at least they sound as if they are.<\/p>\n Rationalization for the Universal Empire<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Second, AE is ahistorical, but it is a fiction the political and ideological benefits of which seem to be bottomless.<\/p>\n To put it bluntly, if one is in search of an intellectual rationalization for the Universal<\/em> Empire<\/em>, one needn\u2019t look any further than AE.<\/p>\n Being an abstraction, America as Idea is utterly devoid of every vestige of historical contingency.\u00a0 Emptied of all of those racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural particularities, the individual and collective experiences of the generations of human beings who made America what it is, AE is bloodless, lifeless, an eternal, timeless category that is designed to accommodate a virtually infinite number of pieces of machinery (human beings)\u2014as long, of course, as those pieces are either indistinguishable from one another or at least treated as if they are such.<\/p>\n Thus, we find American Exceptionalists enthusiastically supporting relentless and potentially limitless immigration from practically anywhere and everywhere in the world, but mostly from countries and cultures whose mores, histories, and traditions are often not only distinct from, but antagonistic toward, those of Americans.<\/p>\n Yet at one and the same moment, American Exceptionalists swear to us that America, being the <\/em>Liberal Democracy par excellence, <\/em>must make war, or threats of war, so as to make the rest of the planet safe for Liberal Democracy, for Equality, for Human Rights.<\/p>\n So, since Americans are constantly in danger of being destroyed by non-Americans who despise \u201cour values\u201d (Liberal Democracy), we must make sure that the threat of American force is omnipresent.\u00a0 However, in the meantime, we need to continue to allow into the United States millions of non-Americans, often from these very same lands that American Exceptionalists assure us pose an existential threat to it.<\/p>\n AE squares this circle.<\/p>\n Learned scholars, like my friend and esteemed scholar, Paul Gottfried, have long argued that contemporary America (along with other Western societies) are presided over by regimes that are best characterized as \u201cadministrative\/managerial\u201d States.\u00a0 This characterization is true as far as it goes.\u00a0 However, in light of the centrality with which AE figures in our political universe, it is most apt, I believe, to see the first role of the American government as that of Educator<\/em>.<\/p>\n More specifically, it has assumed the persona of a Trainer.<\/em><\/p>\n As the philosopher Michael Oakeshott was quick to note, between a genuine education and a training there is all of the difference.\u00a0 An educator seeks to teach his students how <\/em>to think\u2014regardless of what it is they choose for themselves<\/em> to think about.\u00a0 A trainer, a seminar instructor, in dramatic contrast, is essentially concerned with teaching his students what <\/em>to think.\u00a0 And because he wants to make it stick, because training requires far less time than an education, the content of the training must consist of propositions, <\/em>statements that are explicit <\/em>and that, therefore, can be seared into memory.<\/p>\n The doctrine of AE, the doctrine that America is an Idea, a Proposition of Equality or Human Rights that anyone can affirm, delivers in spades:<\/p>\n Those foreigners who want to destroy us, who \u201chate us for our freedoms,\u201d differ from those foreigners who continue to pour into our country insofar as the latter have endorsed AE while the former have repudiated it. \u00a0Immigrants, even illegal immigrants, are enlightened and, thus, good Americans.\u00a0 Those non-Americans who detest us haven\u2019t yet been instructed in the Truth.\u00a0 Like Socrates, the supporters of AE think that evil (or evil as they understand it) must be a function of ignorance.<\/p>\n According to the logic of AE, America is the Great Teacher. \u00a0\u00a0Actually, given that it is only content that can be learned by rote that she is interested in imparting to her students, America here is the Great Correspondence School: After she has scrubbed the minds of her subjects clean, making of them blank slates, America seeks to drill a small handful of propositions into the minds of the Uninitiated.<\/p>\n Against Patriotism<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Third, the champions of AE have been remarkably successful in convincing Americans, particularly self-described \u201cconservatives,\u201d that the affirmation of AE is nothing more or less than the expression of patriotism.\u00a0 Yet not only is a commitment to the ideology of AE and a commitment to America two different sorts of commitments; they are mutually incompatible.<\/p>\n Alasdair MacIntyre, a Catholic philosopher of the Aristotelian-Thomist persuasion and a proponent of patriotism makes the point.\u00a0 He observes that insofar as the patriot has \u201ca peculiar regard\u2026for the particular characteristics and merits and achievements of\u201d his nation because they are his <\/em>nation, \u201cthe particularity\u201d of the patriot\u2019s relationship to his country is \u201cessential and ineliminable.\u201d<\/p>\n The patriot\u2019s morality is \u201ca morality of particularist ties and solidarities,\u201d of \u201ca class of loyalty-exhibiting virtues\u201d like \u201cmarital fidelity, the love of one\u2019s own family and kin, friendship, and loyalty to such institutions as schools and cricket or baseball clubs.\u201d The morality of patriotism demands of the patriot \u201ca peculiar devotion\u201d to his country.\u00a0 It demands that he \u201cregard such contingent social facts as where I was born and what government ruled over that place at that time, who my parents were, who my great-great-grandparents were, and so on, as deciding for me the question of what virtuous action is [.]\u201d<\/p>\n AE, in glaring contradistinction, is a species of what MacIntyre calls \u201cliberal morality,\u201d an outlook that demands of moral agents that they abstract \u201cfrom all social particularity and partiality\u201d in rendering \u201cimpersonal\u201d judgments.\u00a0 Yet \u201cliberal morality\u201d is not only \u201csystematically incompatible\u201d with viewing patriotism as a virtue, it actually \u201crequires that patriotism\u2014at least in any substantial version\u2014be treated as a vice.\u201d<\/p>\n AE is a species of \u201cliberal morality:\u201d America the Idea has no history, no particular culture, religion, ethnicity, or nationality in which to ground it.\u00a0 AE, comprised as it is of abstract propositions, is a universal creed.\u00a0 Affirmation of its principles requires an attitude of, not partiality, but im<\/em>partiality.<\/p>\n As eminent neoconservative Allan Bloom expressly acknowledged, given the neocon\u2019s vision of America as Idea, \u201cpatriotism\u201d must<\/em> be reconfigured accordingly.\u00a0 Whereas traditional societies instilled in its members \u201can instinctive, unqualified, even fanatic patriotism,\u201d education in the United States has been geared toward inspiring in its citizens a \u201creflected, rational, calm, even self-interested loyalty [.]\u201d Yet this loyalty is not to the country as such, but to its \u201cform of government and its rational principles [.]\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n From this moral perspective, \u201cClass, race, religion, national origin or culture all disappear or become dim when bathed in the light of natural rights, which give men common interests and make them truly brothers.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Notice, from this vantage point, it is abstract principles and \u201cthe form<\/em>\u201d of government that exists in America that become proper objects of the patriot\u2019s devotion.\u00a0 This form of government is the \u201cEnlightenment\u201d ideal<\/em> of\u2026\u201cliberal democracy.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cThere is practically no contemporary regime that is not somehow a result of Enlightenment, and the best of modern regimes\u2014liberal democracy\u2014is entirely its product.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Liberal democracy is \u201cthe regime of equality and liberty, of the rights of man,\u201d and \u201cthe regime of reason,\u201d and America is its epitome in that it is the first country in all of human history to have been founded upon \u201crational principles.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Irving Kristol, \u201cthe godfather\u201d of neoconservatism, identifies \u201cthe equality of natural rights\u201d enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as \u201cthe principles of\u201d America\u2019s \u201cestablishment,\u201d the principles of \u201cthe universal creed\u201d upon which the nation is \u201cbased.\u201d The United States, then, is \u201ca creedal nation\u201d with a \u201c\u2018civilizing mission\u2019\u201d to promote \u201cAmerican values\u201d throughout the world, to see to it \u201cthat other governments respect our conception of individual rights as the foundation of a just regime and a good society.\u201d<\/p>\n Kristol is unambiguous in his profession of the American faith: the United States, given its status as a \u201cgreat power\u201d and its \u201cideological\u201d nature, does indeed have a responsibility \u201cin those places and at those times where conditions permit\u201d it \u201cto flourish\u201d to \u201c\u2018make the world safe for democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n However, from the standpoint of \u201cliberal morality,\u201d patriotism has been decried as a vice.<\/p>\n Take, for example, David McCabe, a contemporary philosopher and champion of \u201cliberal morality.\u201d\u00a0 McCabe unabashedly declares that \u201cliberal morality\u201d is \u201cfundamentally at odds\u201d with patriotism, for the latter \u201cmay help tempt people away from the appropriate claims of equal moral treatment and towards something resembling group egoism.\u201d<\/p>\n Paul Gomberg is another philosopher and proponent of \u201cliberal morality.\u201d\u00a0 He is even more to the point in remarking that \u201con the most plausible assumptions about our world, patriotism is no better than racism<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0 After all, Gomberg explains, \u201cmoral universalism implies that actions are to be governed by principles that give equal consideration to all people who might be affected by an action.\u201d But patriotism is \u201ca preference for one\u2019s fellow nationals or for one\u2019s own traditions and institutions over those of others,\u201d and this in turn sounds dangerously like \u201cethnic and national chauvinism.\u201d<\/p>\n The American patriot, whatever else he may be, most definitely cannot be an American Exceptionalist.<\/p>\n Against Christianity <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Finally, as we have seen, AE is every bit as much an expression of dogma as is the Nicene Creed.\u00a0 This consideration alone should suffice to deter the traditionally religious from embracing it. Traditional Christians especially should scorn it.<\/p>\n AE is, in a very real sense, blasphemous.\u00a0 It is unthinkable that the doctrine of AE could have emerged in any cultural context other than that in which it in fact did emerge, the context of a civilization that was once known as Christendom and that, even if largely unbeknownst to itself, continues to depend upon its Christian inheritance for much of its self-understanding.<\/p>\n AE presupposes the framework of the Incarnation.\u00a0 This framework has its roots in Judaism, but it assumed center stage with the advent of Christianity.\u00a0 The Jews maintained that God became embodied or \u201cincarnate\u201d in the Temple.<\/p>\n Christians, though, believe that God did indeed become incarnate in the Temple, yet they think that this Temple, a Temple not made by human hands, is the Person of Christ.<\/p>\n God became a human person in Jesus of Nazareth.\u00a0 This is the uniquely Christian doctrine of the Incarnation.<\/p>\n American Exceptionalists preserve this Christian doctrine\u2014but without<\/em> the Christos<\/em>. \u00a0They divest the Incarnation of the God-Man while substituting for the latter the country of America, which is now the incarnation of the ideal of Liberal Democracy.<\/p>\n Or, to put it another way, America-as-Idea (Liberal Democracy) assumes flesh or becomes embodied, or most fully embodied, in the admittedly imperfect and finite concrete, historical country that the world knows as America.<\/p>\n Being pseudo-Christianity, this drivel must be rejected by all Christians\u2014and, hopefully, by everyone else as well.<\/p>\n Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n As I showed here, it is exactly because<\/em> it is an ahistorical fantasy that the doctrine of American Exceptionalism serves as the perfect justification for the Universal Empire that its peddlers want for the United States to be.\u00a0 In addition, its packaging easily lulls the unsuspecting into thinking that it is compatible with America\u2019s traditional Christian faith and demanded by love for America.<\/p>\n In reality, though, AE is at odds with true patriotism and a perversion of Christian orthodoxy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since the crushing, truly humiliating defeat that it suffered with the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency, neoconservatism, at least temporarily, experienced a dramatic reversal of fortunes. It isn\u2019t, of course, that neoconservatives have gone away; and it certainly isn\u2019t the case that they have lost power and influence in any substantive\u2014as opposed…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n