Saturday Commentary and Review #170
Macron's Massive Gamble, Former AfD Member Krah on European Crisis, Losing Turkey?, Those Darn Post-Liberal Catholics, Rediscovering Fun and the Need For It
Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.
It’s been an incredibly hot few weeks here in Europe, and the heat is not very conducive to thinking….or writing. But write we must, and that includes the SCR.
The heat here in Europe is not only a result of annual climate cycle, but also political. Starting tomorrow, we have three days of major voting on this side of the Atlantic. Tomorrow, the French go to the polls to vote in the first round of their parliamentary elections. On Thursday, the Brits do the same, but all in one day (and on July the 4th, funnily enough). The following Sunday sees the French vote in the second round.
The expectation that Labour is going to trounce the Conservatives in the UK has been held for some time. The Conservatives have had four straight governments, and too many Prime Ministers to be able to name if you were to be asked to do so. They have utterly failed at governing, and are threat of a complete wipe out, the likes of which haven’t been seen in the West since the Canadian Progressive Conservatives only managed to retain two seats in 1993.
France is a very different story. President Macron decided to call an early election in reaction to the horrible performance of his bloc in the recent European Union Parliamentary election, one in which Marine Le Pen’s RN won the most seats in France. This early call goes against tradition and is a massive gamble on the part of Le Président. Much speculation has gone into why he decided to risk his bloc’s standing in parliament, as a loss would leave the country in gridlock until the next Presidential election scheduled for 2027.
This speculation has been massively overshadowed by the political earthquake that it has caused. Centrists and mainstream types are in fear that Macron is handing power to Le Pen and the RN (whose parliamentary faction is headed by the young Jordan Bardella), thus breaking the long-held cordon sanitaire around it. These fears aren’t limited to the French centre and left; they also are felt throughout Europe and in places like NATO, where the RN is seen as “too Russia-friendly”. Their stance on migrants and immigration are at complete odds with Brussels and its liberal prime directive.
France’s left-wing immediately sprung into action, creating a Popular Front coalition, reminiscent of the one headed by Leon Blum in the 1930s. For them, an RN win would be the nightmare of all nightmares, but also provides them the jet fuel needed to set aside their internal petty differences for the larger cause. The French centre is in disarray, unable to rally around a person or a cause, unlike the last few times that RN has threatened to win a vote. We’re going to see quite a lot of riots in France should the RN perform well, and quite a lot of violence if they do manage to pull off a majority of seats.
Friend of this Substack,
, put together a good snapshot of the lay of the land. Some of this might be outdated as it was published over a week ago, but it is still very useful for our purposes:Not only had the Rassemblement National dominated the landscape, it had also entirely broken the traditional obstacles to its ascent. Namely: retirees, women, Brittany, and managers (“les cadres”). Furthermore, the often touted “youth vote” which had been destined for the mediocrity of the Green party, had largely defected to the far right.
On the dissolution of the French Assembly:
What Jordan Bardella was unaware of, was that dissolving the Assembly had already floated around the Elysée for some time. The French system of government, restored to its natural form by General de Gaulle in 1958, requires that the Head of State reign supreme. He must set the vision of the state, and to do so must have alignment between himself and the government. Hence, the proper functioning of the Fifth Republic demands that the President and his Assembly be of the same political inclination.
Macron’s increasing unpopularity and attempts to reform a debt-ridden state, however, yielded a disappointing result in the last election. He has been governing ever since with a very slim majority, relying on quiet defections from center-right politicians to pass his motions through. Additionally, his government made liberal use of Article 49-3 of the Constitution to shove bills through the Assembly without requiring a vote.
The idea of dissolving the Assembly had been discussed around December during the first rejection of the immigration bill. But the President had decided against it, as he thought it was not relevant to the mood.
But around May 20th, in a Parisian restaurant, the President and his close entourage (who call themselves “the Musketeers” — including Jonathan Guémas his head of public relations, Pierre Charon a senator for the Center-Right, vice-president of the Publicis PR agency Clément Léonarduzzi, and Bruno Roger-Petit his advisor on remembrance1) decided that the Assembly would be dissolved on the same evening as the results of the European election.
Only a small circle of people, no more than around a dozen including Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin (favorite to succeed Macron, and backed by the same financiers) and his closest advisor the Secretary General of the Elysée Alexis Kohler, was informed as to ensure no leaks. Given the rather porous nature of Parisian society, it is impressive that this held all the way until the very last hours.
A right-wing union? Not so fast!
The political landscape of France had been determined by a recurring dilemma. The Right could govern by a majority, but was divided. The Left was in the minority, but could unite.
Throughout his career as an essayist and reactionary journalist, Eric Zemmour had advocated for the end of this paradigm — the stamp of François Mitterand on French politics — which had begun with Jacques Chirac. In order to become President, Chirac had refused to even debate Jean-Marie Le Pen, and instead allied with the Left. Since then, it had become impossible for the Right to find common ground.
……
With the results demonstrated by the RN, the time was ripe. After the announcement, the head of the list presented by Zemmour’s party Reconquête, Marion Maréchal — Marine Le Pen’s niece, who defected over to Zemmour in 2022 —, addressed journalists and declared that she would seek an alliance with RN. An incredulous Zemmour could not resist a smirk, he had neither been consulted nor had agreed to this.
…but then this:
At 10 A.M., everything changes. Eric Ciotti, the President of the Center-Right party Les Républicains announces that he is open to an alliance with Jordan Bardella. The two camps begin negotiations.
Meanwhile, Zemmour is left entirely out of the loop. He is relentlessly texting Marion Maréchal asking for updates, to no avail. He later posts on his twitter account, that he will receive her later to “ascertain what she is looking for.”
An hour later, Jordan Bardella calls Marion Maréchal. He tells her that the deal is off. The executive committee of the party, led by Sébastien Chenu and Jean-Philippe Tanguy, have made the decision to go on without Reconquête. Now that they are receiving candidates from LR, they determine that they have no need of Reconquête’s votes who will mostly rally to them with or without an alliance. In France, the legislative elections are not only about seats, but also about funding. The State distributes to the political parties 1.50€ for each vote, per year, obtained during those elections.
Marion Maréchal returns to her camp at 4 P.M. The meeting does not go well, the two sides shout at each other. Marion blames Zemmour for sabotaging a potential alliance, who replies: “Then get the fuck out.” Marion, Guillaume Peltier, and Nicolas Bay, the three main figures who had defected from Rassemblement National in 2022, exit the building.
Ciotti acted on his own initiative, and barricaded himself inside of the party HQ building! Those within the party opposed to him held a meeting elsewhere and kicked him out of the party. But the following day, he re-entered the building as if nothing had happened, and a court order ruled in his favour, keeping him in his position and therefore the alliance with the RN as well.
A total circus.
Leo on Macron’s gamble:
I think that he’s taking an interesting risk. The center, the polite liberals, the social democrats, are disintegrating. The country is increasingly heading towards political polarization between the most fanatical elements of the Left and the Right.
Macron can either continue to govern with an extremely slim majority, and fight crisis after crisis as he has done for the last two years, or he can turn the table. And that is what he has done. He has placed the onus back on the political class, and on the voters.
If they are dissatisfied, they are free to rebuke him entirely and force him to work with the governing coalition of their choosing. This is a bet that General de Gaulle successfully played after the 1968 riots, but that didn’t go so well for President Chirac.
In dissolving the Assembly, he has also ended the almost perfect synchronization between the Presidential and Legislative elections, every five years following Presidential terms. This arrangement allowed the momentum from a Presidential victory to carry over to the Assembly, as the proper functioning of French governance requires.
Germany is Europe’s most important country, but France is its most dynamic, and contains the potential for political revolution.
More on this in my next essay (out soon).
The recent EU vote caused an earthquake not only in France, but in Germany as well. AfD performed very, very well, especially with young voters who turned out in larger numbers than before. Compared to France’s RN, Germany’s AfD is a much younger force, more radical, but less defined. It is still trying to find its bearings in a way, as many different factions reside within it, often at cross-purposes. To many observers, it is still more of a protest movement than an actual political party.
If RN manages to breach the cordon sanitaire in France, it opens the way for AfD to do the same in Germany, Europe’s most important country. Readers of this Substack know that AfD is under the “special monitoring” of Germany’s secret police and other intelligence units, meaning that it both has to tread very carefully, and is full of agents of destabilization on behalf of the regime. It faces a much stronger wall of resistance than the one that France’s RN is currently up against.
Up until recently, Maximilian Krah was AfD’s lead candidate for EU Parliament. He was kicked out for committing the unforced error of trying to put certain matters regarding WW2 into context. A dumb, dumb mistake, one that has removed him from the political scene for the time being. He recently was interviewed by Asia Times, and there is quite a lot of interesting content in it that I will now share with you.
On the youth vote:
The game changer was the young people. The youngsters made the difference. We saw a 12% increase among voters younger than 24.
The left allowed 16- and 17-year-olds to vote, thinking they would support leftist candidates. However, within that group, aged 16 to 24, we gained 12%. We are now the strongest political force among the under-24 demographic, with a total of 17%.
………
So, the message from Germany is that young Germany is moving to the right wing. It’s a big win and brings hope.
On the war in Ukraine and Germany’s feeble foreign policy:
It’s hard to say if the AfD has a cohesive vision, but I can share my own vision. For a peace deal, everyone knows the basic idea.
We could take the current front line and establish it as the new border for the next five years. After that, hold a plebiscite in the Russian-occupied areas to determine if they want to belong to Russia or Ukraine. It’s highly probable that they would choose Russia.
However, the war in Ukraine is about more than Ukraine; it’s about the global world order. If Russia doesn’t lose completely and even gains compared with the status quo ante, the current Western-led global order ends. Thus, the West cannot accept such a peace deal.
The conversation is about prolonging the war, supplying more ammunition, more weapons, and trying to prevent Ukraine from losing. Any end to the war would signify the end of Western global dominance.
This is why the elites in Brussels and Washington DC are committed to continuing the war and preventing any peace initiative.
When I spoke to Weltwoche, I emphasized that Germany should be a “Macht für den Frieden” (a power for peace). But Germany today is not a power at all; it is more like a weasel. There is no independent German policy thinking. When Donald Trump was president, all of Brussels and Berlin called for strategic autonomy. When Joe Biden came back to lead the world, everyone was happy because the political elites lacked the intellectual capacity for independent foreign policy.
To understand European policies, just look to Washington, DC. The fight we face is to save Western global dominance, which means American global dominance.
My vision is for Germany to understand it is the loser in this war and seek support from other European countries for an independent foreign policy. Many smaller European countries, like Hungary and Bulgaria, understand this, and even the Netherlands. But as long as Germany is the front-runner in a policy that harms itself the most, there will be no change.
A vision for a future German foreign policy:
Let the Chinese be Chinese, the Indians be Indian, the Africans be African and the Europeans be European. We must abandon the idea that the whole world must follow the same political and legal culture. Asia has its traditions, and they should govern themselves accordingly. The same goes for the Islamic world. Let Muslims follow their own order without trying to impose Western values on them.
So, the first step is to accept that major regions in the world should govern themselves by their own ideas of political and legal order. Then, foreign policy should be based on mutual interests.
The problem today is that the West believes its values are universal and enforces them through military and economic sanctions. Instead, I propose that Asians follow Asian rules, Muslims follow Muslim rules and Africans follow African rules while we start diplomacy based on mutual interests.
This idea aligns with Carl Schmitt’s concept of Großraumordnung (large area order) rather than Immanuel Kant’s idea of a universal global order. I align with Schmitt’s perspective, not Kant’s.
On the divided European right:
The problem is that the European right is divided. We have a move to the right. The strongest single group we have in the European election in the European Parliament now is the French Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen. We agree with them, as long as you talk about migration, the cultural war, the stifling socialist bureaucracy, this climate nonsense, etc.
But the most important question is foreign policy. And unfortunately, the European right is completely divided. You have a part of the European right, which in my view is the majority, that has a Cold War thinking, which has more to do with the 1980s than with 2024. So for them, international politics is not about the shift of power from the Atlantic to the Global South, etc. They still believe in the old rhetoric of war between the free world against the world of darkness. They are deep state agents when it comes to foreign policy, even more sometimes than the Socialists.
We have a move to the right when it comes to questions of migration, etc, etc. But the front lines are completely different when it comes to foreign and global policy. And there we don’t have a shift to the right. Unfortunately.
On the changing global order:
It seems to be a rather absurd proposition. I don’t think it’s a choice between America and China. And if there is only a choice between America and China, I would prefer America. The question is, do we have a choice between America and being more or less independent?
In the case of Germany, our economic model was based on getting cheap energy from Russia, using this energy to produce manufactured goods, and exporting them to the whole world, including China.
Now, in the brave new world that we find ourselves in, thanks to our American friends, we don’t get cheap energy from Russia anymore, because our pipelines were destroyed. So the prices of our manufactured goods are increasing, and they no longer are competitive. And we are not allowed to export to wherever we want, because of a global sanctions regime designed by the United States.
That means as a matter of economic necessity, we need to get back on good terms with the Russians, that we can import energy. And of course, we need open trade, because Germany is based on the manufacturing industry, and we produce more goods than we can use ourselves.
What we see today is the complete destruction of the German economy and the German manufacturing industry because of this new foreign policy approach of America. And I’m not willing to accept that.
The whole Western or American empire is in decline. The decline of Western dominance or American dominance is not a matter of five years. It is a process with periods in which this decline is visible and quite rapid. And there will be times in which there’s a counter-strike, and American and Western power will increase for a short period. But in the long run, I’m convinced that the world of the future is a world of multipolarity, which is not run by Washington, DC, and Brussels anymore. The demographic and economic data are clear.
In 1913, one-third of the global population lived in Western Europe and North America. Now, it’s just one-sixth. And the age pyramid in the Western world is horrible. The same is true of global GDP. When I was born in the mid-1970s, almost three-quarters of the global GDP was produced in the G7 countries. Now, we are on the same level as the BRICS. We only dominate in terms of military power. But as Talleyrand said, you can’t sit on bayonets.
On the “idiocy” of the current German ruling elite:
No, there is no thinking at all in Germany. It would even be flattering to describe our political elite as mediocre. I truly believe that the biggest fear of our political elite is the state of the climate in 100 years. And when it comes to foreign policy, and especially trade policy, they don’t question what it means for German GDP. They are driven by the idea that they have to serve a kind of global moral imperative.
The country is in the hands of idiots, of people with no understanding of economic development. We are not just bystanders when our industry gets ruined. We spend money to destroy our export industry. There is no understanding at all of the changes in the world and the competition with China.
The German elites follow phantom debates, which are focused on climate, on moral issues, on human rights – but are not focused on economic growth, on our share of international trade, on our influence in economic relations.
Krah’s views are shared by the non-mainstream left in Germany as well. You see this in people like Sahra Wagenknecht, or in SPD dissenters.
Turkey sits on the most important parcel of land when it comes to geostrategy: linking Europe with Asia, controlling the Bosporus, and within striking distance of the Suez Canal (a global trading choke point), its importance cannot be underestimated, and good relations with it are essential for any global or regional power. With a population close to 100 million and a very large military, it also has the ability to throw its weight around, something that it chooses to do frequently. Everyone goes to Ankara to try and woo the Sultan, and everyone is very careful to try and stay on his good side.
The bull-in-the-china shop Americans have a tendency of being not so diplomatically deft as others, which is why their relations with Ankara have soured since the Obama era. The worsening of the relationship is not entirely America’s fault as Turkey’s interests have diverged from the USA’s in many places, but the Americans could have handled it much better than they have done thus far.
There is a constant fear roaming in the halls of the foreign policy world in DC: “losing Turkey”. To these types, “losing” means that the USA cannot automatically assume that Turkey will be on their side in any pressing global issue. This does not mean that Turkey is going to switch sides and turn against the USA, a common mistake made by many amateur/independent observers/writers/analysts/etc. Let’s take a look at this analysis that not only says that Turkey is “lost” to America, but that the Americans are now accepting this loss as well.
On defining “loss”:
Following decades of fretting over “who lost Turkey,” Washington finally seems to have overcome its grief. Having passed through the stages of shock, denial, and anger, the mood is now approaching one of acceptance. Instead of berating Ankara or desperately seeking to win its favor, U.S. policymakers have belatedly abandoned their expectations of securing automatic Turkish cooperation.
Therefore, loss = Turkey not automatically taking the US side in important matters. This is a far cry from Turkey turning against the US-led West. After all, it is still a member of NATO in good standing.
Transactional future:
Ultimately, this greater emotional and geopolitical distance might be healthier for all involved. The U.S. government values its relationship with Turkey and continues to work to improve bilateral ties. However, the goalpost has shifted from previous decades: U.S. policy is to now engage with Turkey on specific issues of concern, rather than simply build policy around Turkey as a crucial and trusted partner. Freed from the expectation of being allies, and the sense of betrayal that expectation regularly created, both Washington and Ankara can focus on managing a purely transactional relationship: overcoming divergent interests where necessary, and building on shared ones where possible.
Post-Cold War shifts:
Since the end of the Cold War, analysts in the United States have fretted over losing Turkey — a euphemism for doing things that made Turkish leaders so mad that they chose to pursue interests divergent from those of the United States. For many in Turkey, this framing of the relationship was insulting. A sovereign state cannot be lost. If Ankara chose to pursue policies divergent from those in Washington, that choice was simply a reflection of Turkish leaders weighing their interests. Indeed, the U.S.-Turkish relationship was always asymmetric: Washington manages a web of global alliances, so its foreign policy depends in part on foreign countries choosing to ally with the United States, even when there are obvious points of policy divergence, because the added value of U.S. military protection outweighs times of political friction.
The relationship has been brittle for decades. The breaking point for Turkey, in retrospect, was the U.S. strategy in Syria to combat the Islamic State, followed by the Turkish decision to purchase the Russian-made S-400 missile system. This led to the removal of Turkey from the F-35 consortium in 2019 and the imposition of congressionally mandated sanctions in 2020. Washington continues to engage with Ankara about the S-400 issue, but it remains at an impasse. With the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War, the United States has offered to help Turkey transfer the system to Ukraine. Washington later dangled a return to the F-35 program should Ankara make a good-faith effort to work with the United States on transferring the missile system to a third party, or taking other steps to ensure its non-use. Yet to date, none of these efforts have yielded fruit.
Turkey’s intransigence on NATO expansion after the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War, and the amount of effort needed to win Turkish approval for Sweden’s membership, further underscored just how transactional the relationship has come. The deal that ultimately led to the sale of F-16s to Turkey in return for Swedish NATO membership shows that Washington can use its leverage with Ankara when specific interests are at stake. Policymakers will always be on the lookout for ways to build a new cooperative normal. But very few are trying to rebuild the old relationship anymore. Hope may spring eternal, but with every false promise of a reset, optimism and interest about the future of U.S.-Turkish relations have steadily dwindled.
A change in the Turkish perception of the USA:
Turkish leaders no longer view the United States as an irritating, but ultimately necessary, partner for its foreign policy. In fact, many in Turkey view the United States as a threat to the country or a hindrance to its interests. For years, many in Washington viewed Turkey as necessary to woo because it bordered many places U.S. politicians care about, and that geography trumped irritation with Turkish policy.
Turkey has taken advantage of the war in Ukraine to pursue its own interests, independent of both Russia and its American ally:
Following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many analysts thought that Turkey would eventually be forced to take sides between Russia and its NATO allies. Turkey, however, thought otherwise. Over two years into the conflict, Ankara continues to keep the Bosphorus closed to Russian and NATO ships alike, to trade with both sides, and to promote its potential role as a mediator for resolving the conflict.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s supporters have sometimes touted Turkey’s neutrality as a strategic asset for America, suggesting that Washington will benefit from Ankara’s ability to play the role of trusted intermediary with Moscow. But of course there are plenty of countries offering their services as mediators. What Washington wants from an ally is not a country to host negotiations, but a country whose political and military solidarity will enable those negotiations to be held on the most favorable terms possible. Erdogan’s early success in negotiating a grain corridor initially helped validate his role as a neutral mediator. But when the corridor agreement broke down and Ukraine’s allies were forced to find a different export route, the limits of Turkish influence were again made clear.
In the meantime, Washington has focused its leverage on trying to get Turkish companies to curtail their relations with Russia. Where Ankara will not cooperate in an official capacity, the threat of secondary sanctions, reinforced by multiple visits from U.S. treasury officials, has put pressure on private actors.
Meanwhile, Turkey has continued to take advantage of Russia’s weakness to advance its own interests in other areas. In the Caucasus, most notably, it supported Azerbaijan in establishing full control over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, where Russian peacekeepers did nothing as Azeri forces ultimately displaced the region’s Armenian residents. This setback for Russia has not done anything to advance American and NATO interests in the region — and Turkey’s preferred approach for the resolution of this conflict is to exclude Western countries from participating.
…and lastly, Gaza:
Even more so than the conflict in Ukraine, the war in Gaza has revealed the limited relevance of the U.S.-Turkish relationship in the face of a new regional crisis. In the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, Secretary of State Tony Blinken took a trip to meet with U.S. allies and partners in the region that notably skipped Ankara. Rather than a deliberate snub of Erdogan, the decision seems to reflect the fact that Turkey’s policies and positions had left it in a place where it was unlikely to be able to play a constructive role in resolving the conflict.
Erdogan’s vocal defense of Hamas has not only alienated Israel but also generated unease among Washington’s Arab allies. But despite this, Turkey was still not able to play the role of Egypt or Qatar in actually serving as an intermediary with the group. Similarly, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan initially suggested Turkey could play a guarantor role in post-conflict Gaza — a policy that has a passing resemblance to the arrangement in Cyprus. But it remains difficult to imagine a role for Turkish forces in the territory that would be simultaneously acceptable to Ankara, Jerusalem, and whatever other Arab capitals were participating in the effort.
Subsequently, Turkey has leaned in an even more explicitly pro-Hamas direction. In local elections in March, Erdogan’s party lost votes to a further right Islamist party that had criticized him for not taking a firmer stand against Israel. In April, Erdogan hosted Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Ankara. More recently, at a meeting with his Greek counterpart, Erdogan announced that more than 1,000 Hamas members had been treated at Turkish hospitals, a claim he (sort of but maybe didn’t) later walked back.
As a state that sits on several geopolitical faults and that has a massive army and large economy, the Turks will continue to do what they have always done best: seek the best deal for themselves at the bazaar.
It’s time for your quarterly hit piece on American Catholic intellectuals who continue to insist on remaining Catholic and not become liberals:
But what ultimate goal do those on the radical right share? That’s harder to discern, since when addressing the present they almost always speak in the past tense. Contemporary life is compared to a half-imagined lost world that inspires and limits reflection about possible futures. Since there are many pasts that could conceivably provoke a militant nostalgia, one might think that the political right would therefore be hopelessly fractious. This turns out not to be true. It is possible to attend right-wing conferences whose speakers include national conservatives enamored of the Peace of Westphalia, secular populists enamored of Andrew Jackson, Protestant evangelicals enamored of the Wailing Wall, paleo-Catholics enamored of the fifth-century Church, gun lovers enamored of the nineteenth-century Wild West, hawks enamored of the twentieth-century cold war, isolationists enamored of the 1940s America First Committee, and acned young men waving around thick manifestos by a preposterous figure known as the Bronze Age Pervert. And they all get along.
The reason, I think, is that these usable pasts serve more as symbolic hieroglyphs for the right than as actual models for orienting action. That is why they go in and out of fashion unpredictably, depending on changes in the political and intellectual climate. The most that can be said is that the further to the right one goes, the greater the conviction that a decisive historical break is to blame for the loathsome present, and that accelerating decline must be met with…well, something. That’s when things get vague.
Rhetorical vagueness is a powerful political weapon, as past revolutionaries have understood. Jesus once likened the Kingdom of God to “leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.” Not terribly enlightening, but not terribly contentious either. Marx and Engels once spoke of a postrevolutionary communist society where one could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and write angry manifestos at night. After that they let the matter drop. Maintaining vagueness about the future is what now allows those on the American right with very different views of the past to share an illusory sense of common purpose for the future.
On the Catholics in this cohort:
To my mind, the most psychologically interesting stream of American right-wing thought today is Catholic postliberalism, sometimes called “common-good conservatism.” The “post” in “postliberalism” means a rejection of the intellectual foundations of modern liberal individualism. The focus is not on a narrow set of political principles, such as rights. It is on an all-encompassing modern outlook that postliberals say prizes autonomy above all else and that is seemingly indifferent to the psychological and social effects of radical individualism. Such an outlook is not only hostile to the notion of natural or socially imposed moral limits to individual action, which are also necessary for human happiness. It has also gradually undermined the preliberal intellectual foundations of Western societies that once made it easier to protect the common good against the claims of selfish individuals. The Catholic postliberals would like to establish (or reestablish) a more communitarian vision of the good society, one in which democratic institutions would in some sense be subordinate to a superior, authoritative moral vision of the human good—which for many of them means the authority of the Catholic Church.
and
The book that first crystallized the postliberal mood was Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, which created a great stir when it was published in 2018 and received an endorsement from Barack Obama. The description of postliberal thinking I offer above is largely drawn from this book. Deneen focused in particular on how the idealization of autonomy has worked as an acid eating away at the deepest cultural foundations inherited from the Christian era, which he believes supported shared customs and beliefs that cultivated stable families, a sense of obligation, and virtues like moderation, modesty, and charity. Ross Douthat summed up his argument well:
Where it once delivered equality, liberalism now offers plutocracy; instead of liberty, appetitiveness regulated by a surveillance state; instead of true intellectual and religious freedom, growing conformity and mediocrity. It has reduced rich cultures to consumer products, smashed social and familial relations, and left us all the isolated and mutually suspicious inhabitants of an “anticulture” from which many genuine human goods have fled.
How persuasive you find this description will depend on whether you share Deneen’s bleak view of the way we live now.
Most on the postliberal right do. But they also bring into the picture concerns that typically animate the left, such as the political influence of capital, the privileges of an inbred, meritocratic elite, the devastation of the environment, and the dehumanizing effects of endless technological innovation—all of which Deneen interpreted as the fruits of liberal individualism. The postliberals see themselves as developing a more comprehensive view of the common good that integrates culture, morality, politics, and economics, which would make conservatism more consistent with itself by freeing it from Reaganite idolatry of individual property rights and the market.
Click here to read the rest.
We end this weekend’s SCR with a call to “recover our sense of fun to enjoy life”:
We have a fun problem. We have left peak fun behind and maybe lost the ability to even understand the importance of fun. It’s not just pajama parties, snappy suits, witty repartee and daredevil stunts, but the crucial link to a broader category of activities that includes: JFK declaring that we would go to the moon; writing a 577,608-word novel with hundreds of footnotes; Inventing flight; Creating Disneyland.
Fun is the Dionysian act of unleashing temporary chaos upon the world — of using what was given to Prometheus — the fire, the passion, the celebration of a momentary spark of genius. Fun is any action intended to temporarily defy mortality, including the self-assertion and lack of fear exemplified by Elon Musk in making electric cars a thing and John Belushi smashing a folk singer’s guitar against a wall in Animal House. (“Sorry,” he smirked).
Over the last decade, a censorious culture has emerged that has created unprecedented self-consciousness in society and even widespread fear and ill will. It has created a culture of looking over one’s shoulder as one’s jokes are scrutinized as and one’s likes are investigated for departures from bien pensant thought.
Click here to read the rest.
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It’s been an incredibly hot few weeks here in Europe, and the heat is not very conducive to thinking….or writing
A lot of writers take vacation during the dog days of summer - often recycling old content - I don't think any of us would mind you taking some well deserved time off to recharge ya know!