He [Buruma] marveled over Ramadan’s mix of anti-globalist fervor and ultra-conservative cultural views. “In American terms,” Buruma remarked, “he is a Noam Chomsky on foreign policy and a Jerry Falwell on social affairs.” ~Paul Berman
So, in other words, he’s rather like…me? Well, not quite. For starters, my grandfather did not found the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a piece of information that any cursory introduction to Ramadan always mentions, but which Berman has failed to bring up in the first page and a half of his miniature biography). Of course, this description of Ramadan doesn’t tell us much about him, since the religion and tradition he wants to conserve are radically different from the religion and tradition that I want to conserve. Incidentally, Berman does not go into much detail about why Ramadan was denied an entry visa when he tried to come to this country. It was denied because the government claimed he gave material support to Palestinian terrorists. Now it may be that the government is wrong, but you would think that something like that would be worth mentioning early on.
Anyway, there is nothing that strange or marvelous about a combination of social and cultural conservatism and ferocious anti-globalism and anti-imperialism. Indeed, the two pretty much go hand in hand. “Don’t Tread On Me” and “mind your own business” are saying more or less the same thing with slightly different emphases. It is only because of the weird confluence in a few Western countries of the battered remnants of classical liberalism with social and cultural traditionalism (a combination of the interests of capital and cultural capital, you might say) that those who are (at least rhetorically and symbolically) culturally conservative at home endorse the whirlwind of “creative destruction” sweeping over the world and devastating, er, “enriching” everyone else’s cultures. Perhaps this is because these people see this process as a creation of “our” culture and therefore a demonstration of our culture’s vitality or value, but then they have to ignore that this creation acts rather like a nihilistic parricide against the very culture that raised it up in the first place.
The more fiercely conservative you are about your religion, your culture, its habits, morals and traditions, the more likely you are to regard all forms of globalism and globalisation–political, economic, cultural–as perverse, destructive and hostile to your “vision of order” and your way of life. Opposition to hegemonism and globalisation on the one hand and opposition to cultural decay and fragmentation on the other are a natural pair. Support for their opposites (with some qualifications in the realm of foreign policy) forms another natural pair. The paleocon combination is the normal, relatively more common conservative response to these phenomena around the world. The pairings of social democracy/cultural hedonism and economic liberalism/cultural conservatism are extremely weird and abnormal. It doesn’t actually make sense for people who want to preserve tradition to support international capitalism with the enthusiasm that many conservatives do, and indeed some “conservatives” today not only see the contradiction but decide that they are quite happy to let tradition fall by the wayside for the most part. That is the outcome of the fraud of “fusionism”: the decision to discard virtue and to start a torrid affair with “economic dynamism.” The marriage of liberty and virtue that ”fusionism” was supposed to represent and defend did not take account of that ”other woman,” which we might also call “growth.” For that matter, it doesn’t make much sense for people who believe social solidarity is extremely important to endorse rampant individualism in social and cultural matters. Both are like patients suffering from ulcers who believe that drinking acid will help with the cure. These combinations exist only in fully industrialised Western societies and map onto no other alignments anywhere on earth.
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May 29th, 2007 at 5:28 pm
johnsavage
You are right on, Dan. I wanted to share with your readers something I’ve written on the topic, about how I expect politics to be realigned in the 21st century to conform to the more consistent positions that you suggest ought to be natural combinations. What we have now is a holdover from the Cold War. I welcome suggestions for improvement, as this is still rather in rough draft stage. So here we go:
Toward a Twenty-First Century Politics
by John Savage
Since I believe strongly that our political categories are obsolete, I’d like to elaborate on the new alignment I hope for. This might be regarded as a call for a new “fusionism”. Back in the Cold War era, “fusionism” referred to an alliance of traditionalist and libertarian anti-communists. With communism gone, we are in a time defined by different issues – primarily globalization – making it logical to discard the old “fusionism” and start with a new one. Many writers, including ones diametrically opposed to myself, have predicted this. On the more friendly side, Thomas Frank has been struggling for years to have the Democrats reach out to socially conservative voters threatened by globalization. On the less friendly side, David Brooks (“Changing Bedfellows”, New York Times, June 15, 2006) once wrote that populists are joining together, and so are elitists. Tom Friedman in The World is Flat predicted the following, which I want to quote in full because for once I mainly agree with Friedman:
“Given these conflicting emotions and pressures [caused by globalization], there is potential here for American politics to get completely reshuffled – with workers and corporate interests realigning themselves into different parties. Think about it: Social conservatives from the right wing of the Republican party [sic], who do not like globalization or closer integration with the world because it brings too many foreigners and foreign cultural mores into America, might align themselves with unions from the left wing of the Democratic Party, who don’t like globalization for the way it facilitates the outsourcing and offshoring of jobs. They might be called the Wall Party and militate for more friction and fat everywhere. Let’s face it: Republican cultural conservatives have much more in common with the steelworkers of Youngstown, Ohio, the farmers of rural China, and the mullahs of central Saudi Arabia, who would also like more walls, than they do with investment bankers on Wall Street or service workers linked to the global economy in Palo Alto, who have been enriched by the flattening of the world.
“Meanwhile, the business wing of the Republican Party, which believes in free trade, deregulation, more integration, and lower taxes – everything that would flatten the world even more – may end up aligning itself with the social liberals of the Democratic Party, many of whom are East Coast or West Coast global service industry workers. They might also be joined by Hollywood and other entertainment workers. All of them are huge beneficiaries of the flat world. They might be called the Web Party, whose main platform would be to promote more global integration. Many residents of Manhattan and Palo Alto have more interests in common with the people of Shanghai and Bangalore than they do with the residents of Youngstown or Topeka. In short, in a flat world, we are likely to see many social liberals, white-collar global service industry workers, and Wall Street types driven together, and many social conservatives, white-collar local service industry workers, and labor unions driven together.” (pp. 221-222)
For someone who sees American politics through the lens of Brave New World, the best one-dimensional political spectrum places people based on their friendliness to “progress” in the direction of Brave New World. At the left of the spectrum are those most resolutely in favor of Brave New World. These people are generally considered centrist in a 20th-century light, but are the most modern in their outlook. They are liberal in the 19th-century sense of the term, which still holds currency in Europe. In my view, Americans were right to throw out the 19th-century meaning of “liberal” during the Cold War. At that time, people who favored social change also tended to favor economic change, moving closer to the communist economic system in order to bring about more equality and thus defuse the appeal of communism to the lower classes. Despite deviating from classical liberalism in their support for the New Deal, they were rightly called liberals. Hard-line anti-communists tended to be both socially conservative and strongly committed to the free market, and were appropriately called conservatives. Significantly, liberals tended to be lower in economic status than conservatives. There were people who combined social liberalism and free-market views, or social conservatism and desire for less economic freedom, but they were rare and unconventional.
With the fall of communism, free-marketeers moved to the left on social issues. Starting with the baby boom generation, capitalists were a different breed than before. Many of them being ex-hippies themselves, they no longer saw danger to their livelihood in supporting far-left positions on church and state, abortion, homosexuality, and race. They abandoned economic nationalism and championed open borders and free trade. Realizing the difference between the new capitalists and 20th-century liberals, but seeing the similarity to classical liberals, some analysts coined the term “neoliberal” to describe them. Neoliberals tend to be high in economic status and define themselves against the socially conservative white working class. Ironically, one would expect the opposite of a “neoliberal” to be a “neoconservative”, but the latter term has a different origin. In some ways, a neoconservative is simply a more militant and extreme version of a neoliberal, someone who wants to bring modernity to the whole world rapidly and by arms, rather than gradually and peacefully. The opposite of a neoliberal, confusingly, ended up being called a “paleoconservative”. Paleocons retain some of the old commitment to the free market, but most have also stuck to their opposition to international free trade. They remain strong nationalists who favor tariffs and immigration controls to protect the welfare of Americans first. Opposed to almost everything “modern”, they are the strongest opponents of Brave New World in America, and therefore belong at the right end of the spectrum.
That leaves the people who still think in 20th-century terms, and therefore are still categorized as 20th-century “liberals” or “conservatives”. They would belong more toward the center of the 21st-century spectrum, since their views are more modern in some ways, but traditional in others. Their numbers, however, figure to lessen in the 21st century as they adopt positions that are more consistent in relation to the new realities. Many old conservatives have fallen for the so-called neoconservatism, moving to embrace radical change abroad because of a perverted form of nationalism. I do not pretend to fully explain this phenomenon here, but failure in foreign wars may eventually win them back to a more authentically conservative position. On the other hand, old liberals are already dividing. Those who do not feel economically threatened by globalization are discarding whatever opposition they might have had to free-market capitalism. As capitalists cut their ties with the parochial, socially conservative Right, it is natural for them to reach out to those who preceded them in fighting for greater personal liberties. Thus affluent, urban and suburban, mostly boomer-generation liberals are becoming neoliberals at the far left end of the spectrum. However, there is still room for anti-modernists to reach the rest of the old liberal camp. We need to loosen our ties with libertarians and emphasize our commonality with all those who oppose the reckless takeover of the world by transnational corporations with no checks on their power. We must emphasize the indispensable nature of national and subnational identities in motivating widespread popular resistance to globalization. Although we cannot expect to convert all the old liberals to a traditional, religious position on social issues, we can hope that they will come to support religion as the only proper counterweight to the exclusive domination of economic values.
It should be obvious that libertarians would move to the left end of the spectrum, even being willing to sacrifice some conventional libertarian positions to get support on their most fundamental issues. As long as others are willing to support them on international trade and personal liberties, many of them are willing to go along with expansion of government and more military action abroad. The neocons have actually had to behave rather incompetently to lose the support of many formerly hawkish libertarians, given that neocons and libertarians also share a utopianism that makes them natural bedfellows. My unfriendliness to libertarians thus stems from a conviction that they are moving away from my position. The path of least resistance for most libertarians is toward Brave New World, not away from it. For those libertarians who differ, I would welcome them, but always with the expectation that they will not consider themselves libertarians much longer. Libertarianism is not much different from the classical liberalism that is being revived as neoliberalism.
For leftists who I hope to welcome as new allies, I think that the path of least resistance could lead in different ways, but for those already somewhat disillusioned with neoliberals, it could easily lead to the right end of the 21st-century political spectrum. Although most New Leftists don’t know their own intellectual heritage very well, the New Left has already borrowed many of its anti-consumerist, anti-technology, localist, and culturally particularist ideas from traditional conservatism. That’s why I still consider many of them ideological first cousins, which is not something I’d say about libertarians. I’ve found my political home as an anti-consumerist, anti-modern, anti-rationalist, neo-Luddite, economic nationalist, pro-family, anti-immigration, foreign-policy realist social conservative. I’m sure that if opponents of Brave New World do our job, many more former leftists will find their home with us as well.