Who Hates The West?

Oh John, why do you waste your time thusly? But while we're on the subject, the extent to which Reynoldsism -- the doctrine that "the left" (whatever it is) has been captured by an irrational and pathological hatred for western values -- is a dishonest, absurd, and manipulative piece of propaganda is the least of its problems.

The thing here is that when you tease out the argument Glenn's trying to make, the consequences are completely absurd. The anti-west faction of the west turns out to include the majority of the citizens of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, The United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The citizens, in other words, of every countries normally understood to be inhabited by western persons except for the United States and Israel. Nor have nations which have adopted western norms of human rights and governance (Turkey, Japan, South Korea, India, Taiwan, etc.) seen their populations embrace the pro-west point of view. Indeed, outside of the Old Confederacy a majority of Americans are in the anti-west faction. The territories of Latin America, strongly influenced as they are by western culture, have turned against the west, have uniformly turned against the west.

Now if this is right, it constitutes a very serious problem indeed. A problem whose scale goes so far beyond anything insurgents may or may not due in Iraq that obsessing over the details of Ted Kennedy's views seems irrelevant. The enemy is everywhere, apparently, and western man is doomed. The "transnational progressives" of warblogger fame have already won the battle. The only question is whether the TP faction will beat the Islamists or whether the Islamists will beat us. Or, perhaps, the ChiComs will inherit the earth after we've wiped each other out. The pro-western point of view has simply become a terribly small minority within its zone of cultural influence and has no hope of prevailing. Even the Pope isn't really anti-war -- he's on the other side.

How could something like this have even happened? Most Americans have never even taken a humanities course at an elite university. But some of us have. Add to that the New York Times readers and the insidious influence of the BBC World News on continental opinion and maybe you can see.

But of course nothing of the sort has happened. Let me pose for Glenn a contrary view of events that one often hears offered up by Europeans. On this view, it's the United States and Israel who've abandonned western values and gone -- loaded up with half-assed geopolitical notions and inspired by obscurantist religious doctines -- charging off on a bizarre and incomprehensible imperial campaign. I don't think this view is quite right, but I think it has a number of things going for it. For one thing, it identifies western values with the values affirmed by the overwhelming majority of westerners. Second, it locates the demographic center of rejection of the west among populations -- American southern whites and Israeli sephardic Jews -- that are legitimately marginal to the main tradition of western culture. Opposition to current American national security policy is, in this view, embodied in institutions -- from the United Nations to the Westphalian state system to the Catholic Church to the human rights establishment -- created by westerners and rooted in the historical processes operating at the core of the western world.

As I say, I think this view is overstated. But it at least is more-or-less in contact with reality, even if lacking in some nuanced understanding of how and why policy is shaped in Washington, DC and the extent to which domestic factors continue to predominate in American politics even during times of global crisis. The other view, however, is little more than a paranoid delusion, the near-precise inverse of the overheated view that Bushism is the leading edge of American fascism.