EPTOn July 20 2017 02:06 IgnE wrote:
i'm not going to respond at length now but in short my point might be distilled to something like the following:
western nostaglia for 50s leave it to beaver pastiche from the likes of Publius has failed to adequately reckon with and accept modernity's passing. there is no way to return to the (fantasy of) the past. this problem is exacerbated by conservatives' general belief in markets and the creative potential of capital without properly understanding that the need for expansion, and the concomitant incorporation and articulation of the outside (i.e. those scary elements that threaten order itself) is what has propelled us into our contemporary imperial order. corruption, in the sense of "degeneration" and/or recrudescence (or if you prefer "creative destruction") is the necessary condition and modality of this imperial order. you cannot maintain empire, with its legitimacy bolstered by effective police action and a universalizing set of human rights, without that corruption. the only way to get rid of discomfort with the disintegration of the boundary line between us and them, between first and third world (if that is what you feel and what you mean by "integrity," or identical self-sameness) is to end the project of empire. that's all fine and good, as long as you understand that empire is the only substrate upon which capital accumulation can continue unabated. at least until other avenues of expansion open up. mars colonization anyone?
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On July 20 2017 01:40 xDaunt wrote:
I want you to know that I needed two cups of coffee before I tackled this. And at times, I felt like scotch may have been more effective.
In short, I think that you're missing the forest for the trees. At issue here isn't really a particular definition of the Enlightenment or how Western thought evolved following the Enlightenment. What's at issue is whether we should embrace the culture that gave birth to the Enlightenment: "Western culture." For decades, the intellectual left has been making arguments that undermine the status and prestige of Western culture. And these arguments have only grown more radical in recent years (hence the author sounding the alarm at the attacks on Trump's speech that necessarily incorporate various levels of demonizing Western culture). Thus while I agree with you that the average proponent on the right really doesn't understand what they're talking about when they loosely throw around terms like "Marxist" or "Neo-Marxist," there is more than just some truth to the fact that the Marxist schools of thought have been the primary launching pads for the current outbreak of Western self-hatred.
Lastly, I need to address the following:
You identified the problem (cultural clashes => conflict/war/bad things). You even tacitly admit that this problem is well-grounded in historical fact. But then you dismiss this problem with a wave of a hand by declaring that we're in a new epoch where none of this cultural difference shit matters anymore, and by implication, it won't matter in the future, either. I simply find that to be an incredible declaration. I have no idea where your confidence in this newfound state of world order permanence comes from. In fact, your repeated use of the term "imperial" or "imperialist" when referring to this order shows that you understand that this order is maintained through Western (re: American) unipolar force and power. What happens when we inevitably revert to a multipolar world? What happens when another unipolar power emerges that may have a very different idea of culture (not to mention cultural tolerance) than the West presently does?
The answers to these questions are precisely why Western culture should be defended and why it is foolish for the Left to antagonize Trump for doing so. As we know from the examples of Rome and every other great empire that rise and fell, cultural integrity matters. And when it's lost, it's usually not regained, to the peril of the people.
On July 19 2017 14:33 IgnE wrote:
+ Show Spoiler +
This article is interesting because it at least draws distinctions between the "extreme" left and right despite its tepid equivocation ("there is a strange convergence …") and despite rehashing Horseshoe Theory pablum. The problem is that its vision is far too limited (and I am not just talking about the unalloyed celebration of "liberalism"). The "racism" or, perhaps more properly, "Eurocentrism" of the Enlightenment is far too narrow a hook on which to hang the divide between left and right. If anything, this kind of analysis seems to have missed the epochal shift from the modern to the postmodern that Negri and Hardt point out in their book, Empire.
Negri and Hardt identify a struggle between two modes within the emergence of modernity that the Enlightenment ushered in. On the one hand is the revolutionary transition from "a dualistic consciousness, a hierarchical vision of society, and a metaphysical idea of science" inherited from medieval Europe to "an experimental idea of science, a constituent conception of history and cities, and [the posing] of being as an immanent terrain of knowledge and action." The Enlightenment brought about "an affirmation of the power of this world, the discovery of the plane of the immanence." This new found creativity ushers in a revolutionary subjectivity within modern people, that fundamentally changed the modes of life of the population.
On the other hand, uprooting and destroying traditional forms of life and connections to the past provokes conflict and war, or counter-revolution. The second "mode" of modernity "poses a transcendent constituted power against an immanent constituent power, order against desire." You get modern capitalism emerging in Genoa and the Italian city states, as well as the Reformation, civil wars, and the reestablishment of ideologies of command and authority: absolutism, parliament, and the rise of the modern nation state which sought to control, mediate, and harness the productive energies unleashed by Enlightenment thought.
Insofar as the contemporary left and right appeal to "modern" Enlightenment ideals, or in the context of this article, we could talk about "the West," I think they are talking about two separates modes of Enlightenment. On the one hand you have the opening up of the potentiality of the multitude in the plane of immanence, and on the other hand you have a modern appeal to a "people." The "people" being the reduction of the heterogeneities and singularities of the multitude to a single subjectivity: "the national people," which is capable of univocal communication and knowable, controllable, desires. The "people" legitimates sovereign authority in the presence of the prince, the parliament, the dictator, etc. The crisis of modernity is the "contradictory co-presence of the multitude and a power that wants to reduce it to the rule of one" or at least the imagined community of the nation-state.
It's hard to know how seriously to take the idiots who talk about "neo-Marxism," "feminism," and "post-modernism" as the premiere monolithic evils ailing us in the present. Mostly because even when they can convince the totally ignorant that they have a working knowledge of those concepts, they actually have no clue what they are talking about. But if I were to try and identify a common thread among those gripes from what we could loosely call the "alt-right" I think it would be their discomfort in the new, post-modern imperial epoch, which suspends history, deterritorializes and reterritorializes (thereby incorporating the Other), and legitimates itself through police action to maintain "peace" in the name of human rights and production vis-à-vis the market. The inside and outside of national borders can no longer be drawn. Likewise, there is no longer an ontological basis for differentiating humans. Biological differences "have been replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers." In other words, it is a racism without race, wherein racial difference is replaced by cultural difference and segregation. But this incorporation (and differentiation, individuation) only appeals to the winners in the global market, and the losers tend to be drawn to "fundamentalisms" that erase difference and attempt to redraw the lines. The specter of migration across fluid national borders is a serious threat to traditional lives and strains ordinary biopolitical administrative solutions. You don't have to look any further for evidence of the waning legitimacy of the imperial world order than the ineffectiveness of police action by the United States within the last two decades. It is effectiveness, itself, that legitimates those actions by restoring peace and upholding humanitarian principles, and every failure greatly undermines that legitimacy.
And so there's a conflation here, in this article you have linked, xDaunt, between "Western Enlightenment modernity" as the bevy of imperialist, war-prone, nation states that carved up territories and maintained strict lines between the capitalist market inside, and the colonial outside, and the "imperial global market led by the United States" which is based on a truly global sovereign imperative, breaks down borders, opens flows of capital, culture, and people, and incorporates the entire world into a single united market. The fundamentalist Islamists of ISIS are no more pre-modern than they are post-modern. Jihadist mentality of "being-against" is an active response to globalizing post-modern imperial sovereignty. They resist in the only way open to them. To put up strict borders and cut yourself off from that policing, organizing influence today is to turn your territory into a ghetto.
On the question of Enlightenment I am partial to Kant's answer in Was ist Aufklärung:
"Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason by in lack of resolution and courage to use it without distinction from another."
Insofar as "identity politics" attempts to overturn hierarchies by circumscribing individuals and groups within eidetic boundary lines, saying "I am essentially this [or these] kind(s) of entity," I think it is silly and short-sighted. One might say childish. Insofar as the wiser members displace hierarchies, recognize fractured subjectivities, and refrain from putting me or themselves in the very boxes that [we] want to dismantle/deconstruct, I don't even see what the big deal is.
![[image loading]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4b/Klee%2C_paul%2C_angelus_novus%2C_1920.jpg)
+ Show Spoiler +
On July 18 2017 09:36 xDaunt wrote:
I meant to post this editorial a few days ago, but have been badly tied up with work:
Source.
The author's main point is interesting and functionally indistinguishable from the arguments that I have previously made regarding the radical Left's overbearing use of identity and racial politics. What say y'all on the left?
I meant to post this editorial a few days ago, but have been badly tied up with work:
Show nested quote +
It’s anyone’s guess whether the latest round of Russia revelations will flame out or bring the administration toppling to the ground. But either way, the drama is only one act in an ongoing cycle of outrages involving Trump and Russia that will, one way or another, come to an end. That is not true of the controversy over the President’s remarks in Warsaw last week, which exposed a crucial contest over ideas that will continue to influence our politics until long after this administration has left office. And the responses from Trump’s liberal critics were revealing — and dangerous.
The speech — a call to arms for a Western civilization ostensibly menaced by decadence and bloat from within and hostile powers from without — was received across the center-left as a thinly veiled apologia for white nationalism. “Trump did everything but cite Pepe the Frog,” tweeted the Atlantic’s Peter Beinart. “Trump’s speech in Poland sounded like an alt-right manifesto,” read a Vox headline. According the New Republic’s Jeet Heer, Trump’s “alt-right speech” “redefined the West in nativist terms.”
Thus, the intelligentsia is now flirting with an intellectually indefensible linguistic coup: Characterizing any appeal to the coherence or distinctiveness of Western civilization as evidence of white nationalist sympathies. Such a shift, if accepted, would so expand the scope of the term “alt-right” that it would lose its meaning. Its genuinely ugly ideas would continue to fester, but we would lose the rhetorical tools to identify and repudiate them as distinct from legitimate admiration for the Western tradition. To use a favorite term of the resistance, the alt-right would become normalized.
There is no shortage of fair criticism of Trump’s speech: For example, that he shouldn’t have delivered it in Poland because of Warsaw’s recent authoritarian tilt; that his criticism of Russia should have been more pointed; or that he would have better served America’s interests by sounding a more Wilsonian tone when it came to promoting democracy around the world. And, yes, Trump has proven himself a clever manipulator of white identity politics during his short political career, so it is understandable that critics would scrutinize his remarks for any hint of bigotry. But by identifying Western civilization itself with white nationalism, the center-left is unwittingly empowering its enemies and imperiling its values.
How did progressive intellectuals get themselves into this mess? The confusion comes in part from loose language: in particular, a conflation of “liberalism” and “the West.” Liberalism is an ideology — defined by, among other things, freedom of religion, the rule of law, private property, popular sovereignty and equal dignity of all people. The West is the geographically delimited area where those values were first realized on a large scale during and after the European Enlightenment.
So to appeal to “the West” in highlighting the importance of liberal values, as Trump did, is not to suggest that those values are the exclusive property of whites or Christians. Rather, it is to accurately recognize that the seeds of these values were forged in the context of the West’s wars, religions and classical inheritances hundreds of years ago. Since then, they have spread far beyond their geographic place of birth and have won tremendous prestige across the world.
What is at stake now is whether Americans will surrender the idea of “the West” to liberalism’s enemies on the alt-right — that is, whether we will allow people who deny the equal citizenship of women and minorities and Jews to lay claim to the legacy of Western civilization. This would amount to a major and potentially suicidal concession, because the alt-right — not in the opportunistically watered-down sense of “immigration skeptic,” or “social conservative,” but in the sense of genuine white male political supremacism — is anti-Western. It is hostile to the once-radical ideals of pluralism and self-governance and individual rights that were developed during the Western Enlightenment and its offshoots. It represents an attack on, not a defense of, of the West’s greatest achievements.
As any alt-rightist will be quick to point out, many Enlightenment philosophers were racist by current standards. (Have you even read what Voltaire said about the Jews?) But this is a non-sequitur: The Enlightenment is today remembered and celebrated not for the flaws of its principals but for laying the intellectual foundations that have allowed today’s conception of liberalism to develop and prosper.
As Dimitri Halikias pointed out on Twitter, there is a strange convergence between the extreme left and the extreme right when it comes to understanding the Western political tradition. The campus left (hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go) rejects Western Civilization because it is racist. The alt-right, meanwhile, accepts Western civilization only insofar as it is racist — they fashion themselves defenders of “the West,” but reject the ideas of equality and human dignity that are the West’s principal achievements. But both, crucially, deny the connection between the West and the liberal tradition.
To critics, one of the most offending lines in Trump’s speech was his remark that “the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” Trump clearly intended this to refer to the threat from Islamic extremism — and, presumably, the politically correct liberals who he believes are enabling it. But there is another threat to the West’s survival in the form of a far-right politics that would replace liberalism and the rule of law with tribalism and white ethnic patronage.
The best defense we have against this threat is the Western liberal tradition. But by trying to turn the “West” into a slur, Trump’s critics are disarming. Perhaps the president’s dire warning wasn’t so exaggerated, after all.
The speech — a call to arms for a Western civilization ostensibly menaced by decadence and bloat from within and hostile powers from without — was received across the center-left as a thinly veiled apologia for white nationalism. “Trump did everything but cite Pepe the Frog,” tweeted the Atlantic’s Peter Beinart. “Trump’s speech in Poland sounded like an alt-right manifesto,” read a Vox headline. According the New Republic’s Jeet Heer, Trump’s “alt-right speech” “redefined the West in nativist terms.”
Thus, the intelligentsia is now flirting with an intellectually indefensible linguistic coup: Characterizing any appeal to the coherence or distinctiveness of Western civilization as evidence of white nationalist sympathies. Such a shift, if accepted, would so expand the scope of the term “alt-right” that it would lose its meaning. Its genuinely ugly ideas would continue to fester, but we would lose the rhetorical tools to identify and repudiate them as distinct from legitimate admiration for the Western tradition. To use a favorite term of the resistance, the alt-right would become normalized.
There is no shortage of fair criticism of Trump’s speech: For example, that he shouldn’t have delivered it in Poland because of Warsaw’s recent authoritarian tilt; that his criticism of Russia should have been more pointed; or that he would have better served America’s interests by sounding a more Wilsonian tone when it came to promoting democracy around the world. And, yes, Trump has proven himself a clever manipulator of white identity politics during his short political career, so it is understandable that critics would scrutinize his remarks for any hint of bigotry. But by identifying Western civilization itself with white nationalism, the center-left is unwittingly empowering its enemies and imperiling its values.
How did progressive intellectuals get themselves into this mess? The confusion comes in part from loose language: in particular, a conflation of “liberalism” and “the West.” Liberalism is an ideology — defined by, among other things, freedom of religion, the rule of law, private property, popular sovereignty and equal dignity of all people. The West is the geographically delimited area where those values were first realized on a large scale during and after the European Enlightenment.
So to appeal to “the West” in highlighting the importance of liberal values, as Trump did, is not to suggest that those values are the exclusive property of whites or Christians. Rather, it is to accurately recognize that the seeds of these values were forged in the context of the West’s wars, religions and classical inheritances hundreds of years ago. Since then, they have spread far beyond their geographic place of birth and have won tremendous prestige across the world.
What is at stake now is whether Americans will surrender the idea of “the West” to liberalism’s enemies on the alt-right — that is, whether we will allow people who deny the equal citizenship of women and minorities and Jews to lay claim to the legacy of Western civilization. This would amount to a major and potentially suicidal concession, because the alt-right — not in the opportunistically watered-down sense of “immigration skeptic,” or “social conservative,” but in the sense of genuine white male political supremacism — is anti-Western. It is hostile to the once-radical ideals of pluralism and self-governance and individual rights that were developed during the Western Enlightenment and its offshoots. It represents an attack on, not a defense of, of the West’s greatest achievements.
As any alt-rightist will be quick to point out, many Enlightenment philosophers were racist by current standards. (Have you even read what Voltaire said about the Jews?) But this is a non-sequitur: The Enlightenment is today remembered and celebrated not for the flaws of its principals but for laying the intellectual foundations that have allowed today’s conception of liberalism to develop and prosper.
As Dimitri Halikias pointed out on Twitter, there is a strange convergence between the extreme left and the extreme right when it comes to understanding the Western political tradition. The campus left (hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go) rejects Western Civilization because it is racist. The alt-right, meanwhile, accepts Western civilization only insofar as it is racist — they fashion themselves defenders of “the West,” but reject the ideas of equality and human dignity that are the West’s principal achievements. But both, crucially, deny the connection between the West and the liberal tradition.
To critics, one of the most offending lines in Trump’s speech was his remark that “the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” Trump clearly intended this to refer to the threat from Islamic extremism — and, presumably, the politically correct liberals who he believes are enabling it. But there is another threat to the West’s survival in the form of a far-right politics that would replace liberalism and the rule of law with tribalism and white ethnic patronage.
The best defense we have against this threat is the Western liberal tradition. But by trying to turn the “West” into a slur, Trump’s critics are disarming. Perhaps the president’s dire warning wasn’t so exaggerated, after all.
Source.
The author's main point is interesting and functionally indistinguishable from the arguments that I have previously made regarding the radical Left's overbearing use of identity and racial politics. What say y'all on the left?
This article is interesting because it at least draws distinctions between the "extreme" left and right despite its tepid equivocation ("there is a strange convergence …") and despite rehashing Horseshoe Theory pablum. The problem is that its vision is far too limited (and I am not just talking about the unalloyed celebration of "liberalism"). The "racism" or, perhaps more properly, "Eurocentrism" of the Enlightenment is far too narrow a hook on which to hang the divide between left and right. If anything, this kind of analysis seems to have missed the epochal shift from the modern to the postmodern that Negri and Hardt point out in their book, Empire.
Negri and Hardt identify a struggle between two modes within the emergence of modernity that the Enlightenment ushered in. On the one hand is the revolutionary transition from "a dualistic consciousness, a hierarchical vision of society, and a metaphysical idea of science" inherited from medieval Europe to "an experimental idea of science, a constituent conception of history and cities, and [the posing] of being as an immanent terrain of knowledge and action." The Enlightenment brought about "an affirmation of the power of this world, the discovery of the plane of the immanence." This new found creativity ushers in a revolutionary subjectivity within modern people, that fundamentally changed the modes of life of the population.
On the other hand, uprooting and destroying traditional forms of life and connections to the past provokes conflict and war, or counter-revolution. The second "mode" of modernity "poses a transcendent constituted power against an immanent constituent power, order against desire." You get modern capitalism emerging in Genoa and the Italian city states, as well as the Reformation, civil wars, and the reestablishment of ideologies of command and authority: absolutism, parliament, and the rise of the modern nation state which sought to control, mediate, and harness the productive energies unleashed by Enlightenment thought.
Insofar as the contemporary left and right appeal to "modern" Enlightenment ideals, or in the context of this article, we could talk about "the West," I think they are talking about two separates modes of Enlightenment. On the one hand you have the opening up of the potentiality of the multitude in the plane of immanence, and on the other hand you have a modern appeal to a "people." The "people" being the reduction of the heterogeneities and singularities of the multitude to a single subjectivity: "the national people," which is capable of univocal communication and knowable, controllable, desires. The "people" legitimates sovereign authority in the presence of the prince, the parliament, the dictator, etc. The crisis of modernity is the "contradictory co-presence of the multitude and a power that wants to reduce it to the rule of one" or at least the imagined community of the nation-state.
It's hard to know how seriously to take the idiots who talk about "neo-Marxism," "feminism," and "post-modernism" as the premiere monolithic evils ailing us in the present. Mostly because even when they can convince the totally ignorant that they have a working knowledge of those concepts, they actually have no clue what they are talking about. But if I were to try and identify a common thread among those gripes from what we could loosely call the "alt-right" I think it would be their discomfort in the new, post-modern imperial epoch, which suspends history, deterritorializes and reterritorializes (thereby incorporating the Other), and legitimates itself through police action to maintain "peace" in the name of human rights and production vis-à-vis the market. The inside and outside of national borders can no longer be drawn. Likewise, there is no longer an ontological basis for differentiating humans. Biological differences "have been replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers." In other words, it is a racism without race, wherein racial difference is replaced by cultural difference and segregation. But this incorporation (and differentiation, individuation) only appeals to the winners in the global market, and the losers tend to be drawn to "fundamentalisms" that erase difference and attempt to redraw the lines. The specter of migration across fluid national borders is a serious threat to traditional lives and strains ordinary biopolitical administrative solutions. You don't have to look any further for evidence of the waning legitimacy of the imperial world order than the ineffectiveness of police action by the United States within the last two decades. It is effectiveness, itself, that legitimates those actions by restoring peace and upholding humanitarian principles, and every failure greatly undermines that legitimacy.
And so there's a conflation here, in this article you have linked, xDaunt, between "Western Enlightenment modernity" as the bevy of imperialist, war-prone, nation states that carved up territories and maintained strict lines between the capitalist market inside, and the colonial outside, and the "imperial global market led by the United States" which is based on a truly global sovereign imperative, breaks down borders, opens flows of capital, culture, and people, and incorporates the entire world into a single united market. The fundamentalist Islamists of ISIS are no more pre-modern than they are post-modern. Jihadist mentality of "being-against" is an active response to globalizing post-modern imperial sovereignty. They resist in the only way open to them. To put up strict borders and cut yourself off from that policing, organizing influence today is to turn your territory into a ghetto.
On the question of Enlightenment I am partial to Kant's answer in Was ist Aufklärung:
"Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason by in lack of resolution and courage to use it without distinction from another."
Insofar as "identity politics" attempts to overturn hierarchies by circumscribing individuals and groups within eidetic boundary lines, saying "I am essentially this [or these] kind(s) of entity," I think it is silly and short-sighted. One might say childish. Insofar as the wiser members displace hierarchies, recognize fractured subjectivities, and refrain from putting me or themselves in the very boxes that [we] want to dismantle/deconstruct, I don't even see what the big deal is.
I want you to know that I needed two cups of coffee before I tackled this. And at times, I felt like scotch may have been more effective.
In short, I think that you're missing the forest for the trees. At issue here isn't really a particular definition of the Enlightenment or how Western thought evolved following the Enlightenment. What's at issue is whether we should embrace the culture that gave birth to the Enlightenment: "Western culture." For decades, the intellectual left has been making arguments that undermine the status and prestige of Western culture. And these arguments have only grown more radical in recent years (hence the author sounding the alarm at the attacks on Trump's speech that necessarily incorporate various levels of demonizing Western culture). Thus while I agree with you that the average proponent on the right really doesn't understand what they're talking about when they loosely throw around terms like "Marxist" or "Neo-Marxist," there is more than just some truth to the fact that the Marxist schools of thought have been the primary launching pads for the current outbreak of Western self-hatred.
Lastly, I need to address the following:
But if I were to try and identify a common thread among those gripes from what we could loosely call the "alt-right" I think it would be their discomfort in the new, post-modern imperial epoch, which suspends history, deterritorializes and reterritorializes (thereby incorporating the Other), and legitimates itself through police action to maintain "peace" in the name of human rights and production vis-à-vis the market. The inside and outside of national borders can no longer be drawn. Likewise, there is no longer an ontological basis for differentiating humans. Biological differences "have been replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers." In other words, it is a racism without race, wherein racial difference is replaced by cultural difference and segregation. But this incorporation (and differentiation, individuation) only appeals to the winners in the global market, and the losers tend to be drawn to "fundamentalisms" that erase difference and attempt to redraw the lines. The specter of migration across fluid national borders is a serious threat to traditional lives and strains ordinary biopolitical administrative solutions.
You identified the problem (cultural clashes => conflict/war/bad things). You even tacitly admit that this problem is well-grounded in historical fact. But then you dismiss this problem with a wave of a hand by declaring that we're in a new epoch where none of this cultural difference shit matters anymore, and by implication, it won't matter in the future, either. I simply find that to be an incredible declaration. I have no idea where your confidence in this newfound state of world order permanence comes from. In fact, your repeated use of the term "imperial" or "imperialist" when referring to this order shows that you understand that this order is maintained through Western (re: American) unipolar force and power. What happens when we inevitably revert to a multipolar world? What happens when another unipolar power emerges that may have a very different idea of culture (not to mention cultural tolerance) than the West presently does?
The answers to these questions are precisely why Western culture should be defended and why it is foolish for the Left to antagonize Trump for doing so. As we know from the examples of Rome and every other great empire that rise and fell, cultural integrity matters. And when it's lost, it's usually not regained, to the peril of the people.
i'm not going to respond at length now but in short my point might be distilled to something like the following:
western nostaglia for 50s leave it to beaver pastiche from the likes of Publius has failed to adequately reckon with and accept modernity's passing. there is no way to return to the (fantasy of) the past. this problem is exacerbated by conservatives' general belief in markets and the creative potential of capital without properly understanding that the need for expansion, and the concomitant incorporation and articulation of the outside (i.e. those scary elements that threaten order itself) is what has propelled us into our contemporary imperial order. corruption, in the sense of "degeneration" and/or recrudescence (or if you prefer "creative destruction") is the necessary condition and modality of this imperial order. you cannot maintain empire, with its legitimacy bolstered by effective police action and a universalizing set of human rights, without that corruption. the only way to get rid of discomfort with the disintegration of the boundary line between us and them, between first and third world (if that is what you feel and what you mean by "integrity," or identical self-sameness) is to end the project of empire. that's all fine and good, as long as you understand that empire is the only substrate upon which capital accumulation can continue unabated. at least until other avenues of expansion open up. mars colonization anyone?
Maybe some conservatives are preoccupied with the past and a return to the "glory days," but that's certainly not the point that I am making, which is strictly forward looking.
And again, you're missing the forest for the trees with the point that you're making. Let's just presume for a moment that you're correct in asserting that the dynamics of capitalism make cultural contact, mixing, and conflict inevitable, thereby creating the forces that threaten cultural integrity. All that you have done is define the need for some type of cultural defense. You're not saying that the Romans should have bent over sooner for the barbarians, are you? Such defeatism is absurd. And this absurdity becomes very apparent once you step outside of Western culture and see what other peoples think. The Chinese created the perfect slur for the people who adhere to this kind of defeatism: "baizuo" -- the white left.
