Do you see people as primarily individuals or primarily as members of groups?
The liberal perspective is individualist. Each person is born with inalienable rights. I’m a nationalist. I think we are primarily members of groups and our rights will depend upon our group’s circumstance.
Fans of liberal democracy fear majoritarian rule because it discriminates in favor of the majority.
As a situationist, I see circumstances where the openness and individualism of liberalism produces a more adaptive society and other circumstances such as the threat of invasion where a xenophobic police state is better suited to the challenge.
If you are a majoritarian, you likely think that every society has the right to say to its minorities that we expect you to live up to the following demands:
* No behavior against the best interests of the society;
* No breaking the law;
* No honor killings;
* No rape nor pimping nor prostitution nor child abuse;
* No child brides;
* No living off welfare;
* No subverting the country’s mores;
* No asking for affirmative action;
* No asking for the majority to accommodate you;
* No display of a foreign flag more prominently than the flag of your host nation;
* No lobbying on behalf of a foreign nation.
I expect individuals and nations to primarily look out for their self-interest and to take steps to preserve their way of life. It is reasonable to expect that many majorities (such as Hindus in India) will tire of minorities making civil rights demands upon them and instead return to making demands on minority groups that they abide by the nation’s laws and norms.
A nation has a right to say what goes within its borders. Let’s say you have a group who practice a dangerous blood ritual, say, bare baby penis to mouth sucking (MBP). And they refuse to stop despite many cases of herpes transmission. You then prosecute everyone who practices it.
I would do the same for the encouragement of terrorism. Seize the building where it takes place and sell it off and send the leaders to jail and exile members of the family of the terrorist. It’s time to get corporate.
I would like all non-profits and all religions and all houses of worship to lose their tax exempt status. I would also like to see an end to all lobbying for foreign governments.
If somebody is convicted of spying against your country, hang them or electrocute them, just like Eisenhower did with the Rosenbergs. After that punishment, Americans got the message.
If a group has a long history of spying and industrial espionage, they deserve more scrutiny than, say, Koreans and Japanese in America who don’t have the same record. Korean-Americans and Japanese-Americans have been great citizens.
Most American Jews love America. Jews are probably the most pro-American of all minority groups in the country.
On the other hand, you can’t expect minorities to have the same intense loyalty to a nation as its majority citizens. That doesn’t mean they won’t make a substantial contribution to its quality of life. There are advantages to having different perspectives and different gifts in your midst. Sydney, for example, is a multi-cultural city and a low-crime high-trust city.
When groups feel responsible for each other in the face of collective punishment, it increases espirit de corp. You’re all in it together. It increases in-marriage, bonding, social cohesion, and the practice of your own culture. You are less likely to assimilate.
As an American, I want other Americans, especially other Americans of power, influence, wealth, and talent to see themselves as on my side, the American side. That doesn’t seem too much to ask. I particularly want Americans of influence who are by nature conservatives to train their innate urges toward loyalty to overlap with my loyalties toward my fellow American citizens.
In contrast, if, say, Noam Chomsky doesn’t feel terribly loyal toward American citizens, well, I don’t mind all that much because he’s not by nature all that conservative…
In contrast, there are a lot of more naturally conservative Jewish-Americans whom you would definitely want on your side, not on somebody else’s side. They like being loyal. But these days, nobody expects them to be loyal to their fellow citizens.
I would like to see our society engage in more social construction to get naturally conservative Jews like the Brookses to be more loyal to their fellow American citizens and less loyal to their foreign co-ethnics.
In particular, I favor criticism. Being criticized rationally for your poor behavior tends to encourage you to improve your behavior. But criticism of Jews for Jewish-typical failings such as excessive ethnocentrism is a career-killer today.
It’s like calling an angry black woman an angry black woman, except that angry black women tend to be more angry than powerful. In contrast, when Gregg Easterbrook wrote one sentence of criticism of Jewish movie moguls in 2003 in, of all places, Marty Peretz’s The New Republic, Easterbrook was immediately fired from his sportswriting job at Michael Eisner-controlled ESPN that accounted for half of his income. This is even though Easterbrook’s older brother Frank Easterbrook is a heavyweight federal judge. But nobody fears nepotistic vengeance by people named Easterbrook, while Eisner’s actions certainly served pour encourager les autres.
It didn’t always used to be this way. For example, as a child of the 1970s, I’ve often thought about Henry Kissinger. His career and personality have always been controversial, but I think it’s safe to say he is a man of parts. Further, I’m very glad in retrospect that Henry Kissinger was on our side, the United States of America, rather than on the side of the Soviet Union or of Israel.
My impression from reading between the lines in Kissinger’s immense memoir of 1973-74, Years of Upheaval, is that Kissinger had always been very concerned during his younger days about the possibility of accusations of dual loyalties, and that he resolved to overcome them by … not having dual loyalties, by just being loyal to the United States. And to his own fabulous career, of course, but back in the post-WWII era, loyalty to Americans in general tended to help you in your career.
Kissinger’s single loyalty drove the nascent neoconservatives wild with rage, but the neocons weren’t quite as organized and influential back then. Overall, back in the 1960s-1970s, the fact that the only thing simple about Kissinger was his single loyalty greatly benefited his career domestically by allowing him to become the right hand man of the experienced and cynical Richard Nixon.
And, more strikingly, it allowed him to play the role of honest broker in his shuttle diplomacy negotiating the disengagement of Israel’s army from the armies of Egypt and Syria after the 1973 war. That Anwar Sadat (and even Hafez Assad) came to see to see this Jewish-American as representing the interests of the United States rather than of some complicated mixture of American and Israeli interests proved highly useful to the United States (and even to Israel).
In today’s atmosphere, however, the idea that Henry Kissinger had to carefully police his own loyalties to prove, not unreasonably, to gentiles his loyalty to the United States sounds shockingly retrograde and anti-Semitic.).
