The Proposition

It's a sad measure of the decline of American politics in the 21st century that people now look to George W. Bush as a model of principle and integrity. But some people will simply say that President Trump is so bad, or such a threat, that Dubya now sounds like a welcome voice of reason by comparison. He earned plaudits last week for a speech denouncing "blood and soil" nationalism in an implicit rebuke to Trump and his alt-right supporters. In effect, Bush upheld the idea, popular among liberals and many conservatives, that the U.S. is a "propositional" nation, based more on ideas than ethnicity or any ethnically specific or exclusive culture.  Since he launched the War on Terror in 2001, his ideological justifications for redeeming "evil" nations by "liberating" them have been challenged by dissidents on the right, starting with the Pat Buchanan-type "paleoconservatives" whose criticisms were often written off as amoral isolationism. The alt-right and the Trump movement have renewed the challenge and are similarly labeled, with less reluctance to ascribe their isolationism to bigotry. They still don't believe that it was Americans' right or responsibility to liberate either country, and many still doubt whether the 21st century U.S. should be any other country's role model, but they share neocons' suspicion  that the anti-interventionist right argument is based on bigoted assumptions about non-westerners' capacity for individuality and citizenship as we understand it, if not an inhumane indifference to whether non-western people live or die. 

As for the "propositional" nature of the U.S., it's at least superficially indisputable, as the Founders staked independence from Great Britain on ideological justifications that weren't necessarily reducible to culturally-dependent "rights of Englishmen." Any revolutionary regime is a propositional nation in that sense, though the U.S. obviously was a less radical departure from ancestral traditions than the Leninist revolutions of the 20th century, the most successful of which -- as of 2024, when the People's Republic of China will have outlasted the Soviet Union -- eventually reconciled itself to much if not most of its national cultural heritage. But while the U.S. may be inescapably dedicated to certain ideas that, as ideas, can never be absolutely exclusive to one culture, the responsibility to promote liberal democracy abroad promoted by Dubya and accepted by his successor, despite Barack Obama's own criticism of Dubya's wars, simply does not follow.  The anti-interventionist right, including the alt-right, is immune to that temptation because its members are materialist conservatives. For them, the nation is never so much an idea as  it is the people (or certain people) who actually live within its borders here and now, whose material interests -- some, more controversially, would add cultural interests -- should count for more than ideology in American foreign-policy making. If they seem naive about certain nations others see as threats, it may be because they embrace an ideal of nationality according to which the U.S. should aspire to normalcy rather than exceptionalism, and they assume that most other nations are normal in that sense.

Criticizing Dubya on the Daily Caller website, Scott Greer condemns the neocon belief that the U.S. "cannot exist just like other nations in serving its citizens and protecting its sovereignty." One need not be a neocon to question whether the governments most concerned with their sovereignty in the face of international scrutiny are the ones that best serve their citizens. But you cannot be a neocon, apparently, or perhaps not even a liberal, and question whether those governments' performance is any of our business, much less question whether our own national character depends on it being our business. A nation dedicated to individual liberty is a nice idea, but the worth of individual liberty always will depend on individuals, not institutions; and making nations safe for individual liberty at all costs, at the expense of every other consideration, may not be in individuals' best interests in the long run.