Today in my reading on the BBC news website (I know, why would a free-market conservative read it?) I came across this article: France’s Macron urges EU to shun nationalism http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-43794856. This opening line struck me:
“there seems to be a European civil war” between liberal democracy and rising authoritarianism.
One of the reasons why so many people across a range of age groups are deserting traditional media is that they are tired of simplifications and platitudes in reporting and analysis. Rather than ask a deeper philosophical question about the problems and limits of democracy, lines like the above have the potential to dupe gullible readers into thinking that all nationalists are fascists or that democracy is inherently good.
Christianity has a concept of sin – a concept that ought not to be controversial. Simple observation and a cursory glance at 20th century history tells us that people are capable of evil – great evil. Western civilisation’s traditional doctrine of the rule of law was developed in the knowledge that man has certain inalienable rights given to him by God. The state may not behave arbitrarily against these rights – and neither may the people. A war on man’s rights – albeit a democratic war – is a war against the Creator Himself.
When parts of Europe clamour to have our rights defended, not to see them destroyed by democracy or authoritarianism, this clamour is made in the name of liberty, a concept we used to hold dear. One man’s freedom can mean another man’s bondage, however. The arguments made by many that society should accord them more things, really mean taking something away from somebody else. Each suggestion of this should not be met with servile, spineless acquiescence, but a rational examination of the motivation and justification for such a suggestion.
In taking rights away from prisoners, society is acting to uphold justice and the doctrine of individual responsibility. Everything comes at a cost; all human action is transactional. When a criminal breaks the law, he pays the price. This is what the ancient Greek expression for retribution literally means: paying the price. The justification for imprisoning convicted offenders is vindication and deterrence: evil acts should be publicly denounced as evil and people should be discouraged from doing them.
In light of the above, we must ask ourselves whether the same reasoning applies to matters such as membership of the European Union or strict border controls or state provided education. To take the first example, membership of the European Union affords a nation certain liberties, but it also deprives that nation of liberties. The nation can no longer exercise control over its borders in respect of European Union citizens; the nation cannot impose tariffs on goods imported from the European Union or decide to impose no tariffs at all on goods imported from outside the European Union. Once a Directive has been passed, an EU nation has no discretion on whether to implement it or not. Matters decided by the Court of Justice of the European Union cannot be referred to independent arbitrators. The list goes on.
In considering these restrictions, we must ask whether they are justified, and, to the extent that they affect individual rights, whether the democratic majority has the authority to infringe on the rights of individual human beings where no blameworthy act has been committed. If one wishes to argue that the will of the majority is what makes a course of action right rather than a feature intrinsic to that action, we may ask why we should accept such an axiom. Intuition seems to tell us that things are objectively right or wrong, irrespective of the wishes of the majority. Maybe it’s time for the liberal intelligentsia to listen to the reasons given by people along the spectrum of nationalists rather than accuse them all of being authoritarians. Perhaps many – or even most – of them simply wish to defend their rights against onslaught from radical democrats and tyrannical officials.
All Along the Watchtower 
To your last sentence, I think they are awaking from their stupor, like a bunch of gluttonous guests to a feast where they were plied with copious amounts of wine and food. When it runs out and they see that the bill is due to each and every one of them for the grand party . . . they awaken to find that they had been duped into an expense that is far more than they would have been agreeable to pay for such a sumptuous festivity.
I think the EU has turned out to be a means to a Global End that robs cultures of their individuality and their common inheritance. They are all thrown together and expected to abide by whatever is decided by those put in charge, whether or not it is in the best interest of a particular culture, society, nation or what have you.
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To rework Bill Hadyn’s line in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”: the EU is killing Western democracy. But, as you say, the people are fighting back. I am encouraged by Hungary’s and Italy’s recent elections. This system cannot go on forever – but the end will be painful.
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It will be indeed. Nothing worse than fighting a wild beast that has been mortally wounded.
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Democracy is, as is often said, like two wolves sitting down for dinner with a sheep.
That is the reason the US is not really a democracy, but a republic whose direction is determined in a more or less democratic fashion is this – nothing is more important than the rights God gave each of us, and democracy is fully capable of trampling those rights in the name of the majority. That is in violation of the Creator’s laws. and the law’s legitimacy is determined by how it upholds the rights of the smallest minority – the individual.
That is not to say that rights do not entail responsibility, they always do, and much of the trouble in our society today is the adoption of libertinism, the supposed existence of rights without responsibility. That is antithetical to proper government and will kill freedom faster than any authoritarian creed yet known.
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“the law’s legitimacy is determined by how it upholds the rights of the smallest minority – the individual”
That’s a keeper. Your own?
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Thanks. I’m not sure, actually. In those words I think so, but I adopted it least least 30 years ago, so maybe somebody else said it quite similarly.
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Sounds like James Madison to be honest. I’d look at one of the Federalist Papers like 55 or 10.
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Certainly inspired by the founders, so it could well be, although I haven’t fully read them since college.
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My degree focus in history was the Federalist Age of American history right after the Revolution. The idea appears to be a combination of Federalist Essay #10, #51, #55 all attributed to Madison.
Federalist #10
By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.
Federalist #51
First. In a single republic, all the power surrendered by the people is submitted to the administration of a single government; and the usurpations are guarded against by a division of the government into distinct and separate departments. In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself. Second. It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.
The second method will be exemplified in the federal republic of the United States. Whilst all authority in it will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.
Federalist #55
In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.
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Dead on target, but then Madison usually was. My specialty (although I never managed the degree) was American Military History, so not as in depth with the founders, although it was in the air.
BTW Madison’s Plantation (can’t remember the name off the top of my head) is more or less restored and functioning as a bed and breakfast, someplace I think I wrote about it, and linked to their blog. Looks really good, though.
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It’s in Orange, VA, if I remember right, When we were touring the area a few summers ago it got nixed for Washington’s Mount Vernon and Jefferson’s Monticello.
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Mount Vernon I was to, in high school, I think, with my parents in any case. Monticello is still on the list, strange that I haven’t managed the Shenandoah, Must get done.
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The funny I always run into with people is they assume a unified cultural America; they’ll say something like “Travel the world and get to know other cultures.” First off, as large as the United States is it takes almost a lifetime to travel to see a lot of it. Second, the regions from the Southern California, Northwest, Mountain West, Midwest, Southwest, Texas, Southeast, Midwest, Great Lakes, North East… If I named them all, are culturally diverse which is the difficulty in governing the country.
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Yep, America is at least as diverse as Europe, which makes sense since it is continental in size. I was saying the same thing to some Brits the other day. The you add in that our people came from all over the world as well. Never been anything like this experiment, and its actually worked pretty well. 🙂
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So did the Republic of Rome until Julius Ceasar. Then came the prolonged fall under the corrupt dictators. 🙂 I guess we can’t ever be complacent about such things.
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That is why Washington, a hero of mine, chose Cincinnatus as a model. The danger is always there though, as you say, that those with military command (imperium) will abuse their power. This is why, unusual as I am among Brits, I approve of the 2nd Amendment. Citizens must have a means of addressing tyranny, which includes violence as a last resort. This is why I am also in favour of a return to the gold standard with banks able to issue their own promissory notes.
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I’m starting to wonder if the natural age of a successful republic is at its best around 500 years. We’re starting to get close to that now. 🙂
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Nope, Ronnie said it plain, “Freedom isn’t in our blood …” 🙂
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No it sure isn’t. Each generation has to fight to keep it so.
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Dr. Alvin Schmidt has a good work on the evils of ‘multiculturalism’ and uses the Roman Empire as example. The Thesis is that once a nation has two predominant languages split is inevitable.
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Given that most people implicitly believe in objective morality – despite protestations used to justify particular vices – it follows that it should be possible to reject aspects of a culture that are contrary to virtue. Multiculturalism in the form it currently has is essentially a species of relativism. Rome, of course, is a complex case because it was an empire. But I would agree that a serious contributing factor to the fall of the West was the failure to make the Germanic tribes integrate. They were set up as foederati (allies) rather than used as auxiliaries. The auxiliary route in the older times was a way of making someone buy into the Greco-Roman cultural and economic system. Whatever flaws that system had, it was a necessary precondition to the finer forms evolved in subsequent Western civilisation.
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That is a a problem of course. My own thesis is that after hundreds of years of laws on top of laws and regulations on top of regulations it becomes so bogged down in legalisms that it can’t operate efficiently. The other problem is that after all that time a large group of the population will become fat, dumb and happy while the rest will become envious to be that themselves. So they rebel and wish to do away with those who have thrived in hopes that this will fix their problems. I just think there is a point where things become unfixable without fighting the war for liberty all over again.
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Jefferson wrote something in the nature that a nation should more or less reset after 80 years or so. I don’t remember the exact quote but it will counter the problem with too many laws.
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The only problem with that is that the adhesive of a nation will always be in continual flux. It could change from republic to socialist to communist in a short span of time.
I really think that there is a ‘time bomb’ built into any nation (religion for that matter) that allows for the Constitution or Bill of Rights to be scrapped for another or reinterpreted at whim. It has to be exceedingly hard to change these things or it will not last long at all.
As soon as a government starts giving special privileges or special advantage one group or another, to even the field, or to right an injustice they have begun a process of dividing the whole and it will never stop. We then have what we have now, constituencies, that wield powers that should not have. If they are not happy with the adhesive of the Constitution (or the Dogmas of the Church) then they should find another land of their own liking and form their own government, whether it be based on race or religion or language or what have you. If you are not happy with the government in the form it was established, then why are you wanting to be a citizen or member of it in the first place?
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I think this is something we also need to discuss re: Western material culture. Drinking Coca Cola does not make one a Westerner for political, philosophical, or economic purposes. Plenty of socialists like Coca Cola – that does not make them part of Western civilisation – that makes them hypocrites.
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Indeed so. We have begun the long process in Western Civilization of allowing the tail to wag the dog. As soon as you do that every nut job is interested in making a nation (or religion) into one of their own making . . . one that gives advantages to them or is in their own image. Cohesiveness is never to be achieved in such matters. As an example, the ‘black lives matter’ baloney has no need to exist. We already have a Constitution that legally protects the lives of all its citizens.
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Indeed. I am getting sick of this special pleading – both the US and the UK need to reduce the power of the state so that it can make concessions to these partisan groups. They are tearing apart the fabric of our societies, and, at a theoretical level, many of these ideologies constitute a war on Truth itself.
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And there we have it. The EU had a time bomb implanted in its constitution. It did not state that it was based on Christian values or rights of men. The pope warned them against this and it was destined to fail. Ours will as well if we keep chipping away at it. No adhesive can last forever when everybody is pulling on it.
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Agreed – I wish the Pope would openly denounce the behaviour of these systems. He may fear that it will bring opprobrium on Catholics, but Catholics are not supposed to be worldly in the first place – they are supposed to reject the ungodly -isms of man and the fallen spiritual entities. A Catholicism that has to go underground would be more authentic with the spirit of martyrdom in my opinion. Catholicism should be seen as a precious pearl, something we must expend treasure to obtain.
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And now you are seeing the battle Catholics are now waging within our faith. We have a Pope that shows us little of what Catholicism has been and tried to retain all these years. He is a political pope at best and an anti-pope at worst and I think, speaking for myself, that the last is most likely. So as a Catholic I must put on the armor of God and fight the good fight and oppose the man as long as God is willing.
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You have my sympathy. Although I am not a Catholic, I can empathise with what I see as the subversion of the Catholic “constitution” by the post-VII authorities. There seem to be efforts to make Catholicism into the worst version of Protestantism. If I had a choice between an Anglo-Catholic church and a faddy Catholic church, I’d attend the Anglo-Catholic one (unless I had already converted to Catholicism).
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Ah well, Nicholas. God did not promise us that this life would be a utopia . . . only the next. But He did promise that His Church would prevail. If we are to abandon Her now we are merely throwing into His enemies. So its time to man-up as they say and come to the aid of the Church.
And yes, Catholics do not do Protestantism very well though it seems that is what we have been trying to do unsuccessfully since Vatican II.
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Another thing that needs be discussed is the idea (which we hold as true) that the Government is to do nothing that is not considered ‘for the good of the public’. For this is not an exact science. Who makes the decisions and is their viewpoint the correct one even if they believe it is? Its a source of a lot of the problems that get on the books and stay on the books for years; prohibition was one of those things and, in my view, the regulation of plants such as opium or marijuana. How can you pass a law against growing what is a natural plant which God made? It makes no sense. I’m sure many, even conservatives will disagree with me on the drugs but agree on the alcohol. But that’s OK. I would be happy to answer their objections if it turned into a discussion. But the ‘public good’ is definitely in the eye of the individual and not always clear in any sense.
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The “tyranny of the majority” was also discussed by John Stuart Mill, who anticipated that it would be an objection to his arguments in favour of utilitarianism. The Founding Fathers had a variety of influences, of course, but an important one was the idea of rights attached to citizenship, famous in the case of Roman citizenship (cf. St Paul’s comment about being flogged without a hearing).
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That, of course is a problem to grapple with. How many ‘rights’ do you afford a non-citizen. Do they get a free education, welfare, healthcare etc.? Can they fight in our armed services? Will they be loyal or will they subvert the republic?
I think that like the English found out during the American Revolution, hiring non-citizens (the Hessians) to fight their wars did not work out too great. I’m thinking that we are in a sense doing the same thing right now with illegal aliens by granting citizenship to those who serve in our military. It seems like a good Idea at first glance but the final consequence may not be what we intend nor what we expect. They may simply be gaining a vote to be aligned with the party that uses them as a constituency to gain power. It becomes a corrupted venture. Might even be better to simply pay them like the Brits did to exempt themselves from being drafted into service. 🙂
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I actually believe in the idea of not giving full citizenship to resident aliens, but I’d be accused of racism or totalitarianism by most people for saying that. I agree with your analysis.
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Indeed. It is counter productive to a society.
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This is also a reason why I would like the UK to have a written constitution like the US, because I am frightened that democracy may one day be used to destroy our most precious rights and traditions. Even now, freedom of speech is being sorely persecuted.
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I think you have already lost it from the American perspective. And I watch with shame as the Progressive Liberals try to do the same here in the U.S.
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In fact, if I am visiting a foreign nation or living there, I expect nothing from their government. If I stand in need of human charity I will seek our a church for help.
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I’m actually OK with it, the way we do it – seven years probation so to speak, and a citizenship test, which means many naturalized citizens know more about American citizenship than many natives. And yes there are parallels in our churches to that situation.
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I would add a caveat to that however, NEO. I’m OK with it as it now stands for cultures that hold a Judeo-Christian ethos or are indifferent to it, like Buddhism or Hinduism etc. The Muslim culture itself is a concern that needs a full throated discussion by American Citizens before we allow them to have a path to citizenship. They have been the arch-enemy of Jewish, Christian, Buddhist and Hindu cultures since their inception and have never assimilated well in any culture other than their own. Sure some of them have put up with other religions peacefully as long as they are second class citizens but if they are the minority their purpose is to become the majority and to hold to their own legal system (Sharia . . . as over 75% of them would rather have sharia than the court systems in Western Europe . . . I’m sure the same applies here as well). I don’t think we should roll the dice when history says that we are endangering ourselves and common sense about the recent terrorist activities seems to validate history.
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I completely agree with this analysis, Scoop. The integration of Islam is the issue: a watered-down version that is compatible with Western values is just that – watered-down and inauthentic. To ask them en masse to abjure certain fundamental beliefs would be like asking a Catholic to say contraception is okay. Better to be honest about the incompatibility between our systems.
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Exactly. You can’t put all the zoo animals in the same cage and expect them all to get along. There are ones that do get along and those that don’t. Muslims don’t seem capable of mixing with any other religious culture but their own.
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Many have wondered if it is a fulfilment of the prophecy about Ishmael: his hand against everyone and everyone’s hand against him.
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It would not surprise me in the least. All of the enemies of Judaism seemed to stem from some sexual impropriety . . . which fostered a future group that opposed them. Why should it be any different with the Ishmaelites?
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As I wrote on AATW before, some time back, I also believe the orphan character of Ishmael was passed to his descendants. It is a curious thing that Mohammed was an orphan and that he substituted Ishmael for Isaac in his perversion of Biblical history and covenants.
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Indeed so. He simply tried to legitimize the illegitimacy of his heritage. I wouldn’t have expected anything less.
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And that brings us back to the problem of libertinism – the individual run amuck, Our founders found a balance, and a pretty good one and copper-bottomed it with a constitution that is very hard to amend. So what happened, people changed the very meaning of words to make it mean something else.
Since we all argue the 2d so often, it’s very obvious there. The accepted definition of militia since at least the English Civil War has been all able-bodied male between 18 and 60, more or less. Wel regulated is as close to a non-sequiter as exists in the constitution, meaning only that it should be under the control of its officers, and have a mission instead of freelancing terrorists. But many have tried over the years to make the plain English mean something else.
And I’ll buy the musket only argument when the NYT is printed on a hand press and distributed by horse-drawn wagon. Which begs the question anyway because rifles and multi shot weapons were available before the constitution was written.
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You could also argue for privately financed armies on the free market. Citizens of a given terrain create an army, much like a state version, but they review it periodically and alter the contracts when soldiers behave in a manner unsuited to the local ethos or the principles of private property and integrity of the person. This is a problem with state-run police, etc: it is very hard for the public to immediately correct bad behaviour or resist crazy policies sent from Washington / Whitehall.
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I must admit that, as a nationalist, democracy doesn’t really come into it for me. The principle is the preservation of the cultural integrity of my nation Ireland (and other nations) and some authoritarianism seems worthwhile for that. As, for instance, they have in Canada, where broadcasters are required to provide a certain amount of Canadian content.
How far my nationalism may be in tension with my Catholicism is something I’m grappling with. If it is, my Catholicism has priority.
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As it should be. be careful comparing to America though. We really are different. We have assimilated many cultures (Irish far from the least). We have been able to do this because we are based on an idea, not a culture. It’s an intangible difference in day to day life, but at the bottom, it is a difference, and quite important. As I noted in a post last week, even fairly radical Moslems tend to drift from their religion here, if we properly guide them. But we too are based on Judeo-Christian beliefs, mostly those that came out of the Anglo-Scottish enlightenment. Not for nothing did DeGaulle consider us also as Anglo-Saxons.
But for us as well, God comes first, and we strive to be on the Lord’s side rather than proclaiming that God is on our side, if you take my meaning.
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