Redstate

By Paul J Cella Posted in History — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Ross Douthat, guest-blogging at andrewsullivan.com, has stirred up a hornet’s nest by delivering a series of polemics against Michael Ledeen from that prominent position. It began here, and Ledeen answered; then it continued, and several others, including Ledeen again and Redstate’s own Pejman, responded rather fiercely. Now Noah Millman jumps in on Douthat’s side with some characteristic, and characteristically long-winded (sorry, Noah), perspicacity.

Democracies can vote for belligerent politics. The Palestinian Arabs recently had fairly free elections, and 40% of the vote went to Hamas. Now, the Iranians, if allowed to vote freely, are very unlikely to vote for Islamist parties. But who's to say they won't vote for Persian ultra-nationalism? Who's to say the great challenge of the years 2015-2025 won't be a Turkish-Iranian rivalry for influence across Central Asia — a region previously dominated by Russia (which is now in catastrophic decline) and whose peoples are mostly either of Persian or Turkic origin? Again: I'm not making an argument why democracy in Iran would be bad; I'm making an argument why democracy in Iran is not a cure-all. [. . .]

This is what Ledeen doesn't want to engage with: the fact that while a democratic Iran would be better than what we're facing right now, there's no reason to believe that a democratic Iran would necessarily be an American ally or that it would cease to pursue nuclear weapons. Democracy in Iran would be a good thing. But it would not solve all our problems — and pursuing that aim might have trade-offs with other policies that might be more urgent. That is a legitimate argument and must be addressed.

Now what really exercised many people was Mr. Douthat’s declaration that the Iranians are not “our people.” There Douthat strayed into treacherous waters. Mr. Millman parses the remark this way: “he meant some combination of the following two things: (1) Iran's national interests may conflict in important ways with America's, so we shouldn't assume that even a post-revolutionary Iran will be all buddy-buddy with us; and (2) Iran is not part of Western civilization, and so it is not unreasonable to assume that a primary motivation behind the Orange Revolution in Ukraine — the desire to join (or re-join) the West — may not really be operative in Iran.” It is this latter contention — that Iranians are not our people because they are not part of Western civilization — that really made people nervous.

But here we touch on a supremely important question — supremely important no matter how much we may wish to ignore it, suppress it, or pretend it is unimportant. It is the question of who we are as a people, of the content of our civilization, of who we understand ourselves to be, of, in short, the nature and destiny of our country and our civilization.

This is a question that, as a self-governing people, we cannot fail to answer to our satisfaction — even though we acknowledge that the question will never be answered perfectly or completely. Indeed, it is the business of this republic, her purpose even, to show the world that it is possible to answer it as a self-governing people. This is the purpose that is implicit in all our great documents and most of our great political literature. It is rendered magnificently in the Declaration of Independence in the phrase “we hold these truths”; it finds a more workmanlike, though still eloquent, expression in the Preamble to the Constitution: “We the People of the United States”; it flashes through the Federalist like the elusive glimmer of sunlight on bright steel in phrases like “the deliberate sense of the community,” or “the people themselves.” Lincoln takes up this tremendous topic with his astonishing genius in his Lyceum address. The answering of the question of who we are, and the refining and perfecting of our understanding of ourselves as a people organized for action in history — these are the business of the American Republic. They are our purpose as a nation.

We may, over the years, and certainly over the decades and centuries, answer the question in different ways. The refinement may actually take the form of change and innovation. Our political traditional does not, despite what Conservatives like myself may wish, set itself emphatically against change qua change. What may answer one way, then some years later turn gradually from that answer, perceiving it to be a blunder. We may cling tenaciously to one aspect of the answer, even against the tides of the wider world, perceiving its ineffable value. But what we may not do — not if we want to continue thinking of ourselves as a republic — is drive the question itself from public view. We may not make-believe that the question is answered finally and utterly, and brook no dissent from the answer. We may not — most emphatically we may not — contemn those who, whether intentionally or inadvertently, place the question before us in stark or startling terms.

This is not the time to propound my own view of who we are. The question is too huge for any one person. But I will offer a sketch of where our debate on the question has been deficient, by pointing to the a specific complaint of Mr. Millman:

In the Cold War, our opponents, to a considerable extent, wanted to become like us, and this was an important factor in the end-game of that conflict. Reagan's line, remember, was “tear down this wall” — let Europe be whole again. The people who rose up in Gdansk and Berlin and Budapest and Prague were rising up to declare that they were part of Europe and the West; to a considerable extent, Boris Yeltsin and his supporters were declaring the same thing, and Victor Yushchenko and his supporters are certainly declaring the same thing. In our current war, we face peoples who do not, fundamentally, want to be like us. They may want to learn from us, accommodate us, teach us, surpass us, convert us or destroy us. But they do not, generally, want to become us. The Kurds of Iraq, some of our best friends in the region, do not want to order their society along American — or Western — lines. That is an enormous difference from the Cold War, where the bulk of the people of Hungary and East Germany and Poland and Latvia who thought about such things — and certainly the bulk of those who actively opposed the Communist regimes — basically wanted to become just like the people of France and West Germany and Britain and Belgium (or an idealized notion of what those people were like, or had been like once, or what-have-you), and order their societies similarly.

This is an argument that must be confronted: not brushed aside or disparaged without reply. Some sizeable number of people — particularly people associated with the visible American Right — seem to be of the opinion that the content of our civilization is to be discovered, almost exclusively, by the political beliefs men hold. Our civilization is composed of those who believe in “democracy” and “freedom.” In short, the content is ideological in nature. But this is problematic. Is there no room among us for those who are not particularly thrilled with democracy as currently contemplated? or who think freedom itself, while a beautiful, precious thing, is decidedly a problem to be wrestled with — indeed one of the great problems of the human condition — not an uncomplicated solution? Perhaps even more importantly (because the intellectuals are not the same as the people): is there no room among us for those who have no political theory to speak of, who carry the American tradition not in their minds but, as Willmoore Kendall used to say, “in their hips”? Where is the place for the man of unpretentious intellectual aspirations, whose intelligence, quite potent in its way, is dedicated to things practical and material, in this scheme of civilizational constitution? I hesitate to speak in such harsh terms, but it seems to me that an ideological civilization is merely a civilization fit for intellectuals (or, worse, ideologists) not citizens.

And I suspect that it will surprise many simple Americans to hear that they are part of a civilization composed of political ideas alone.