Who Rules? A Review
Sovereignty, Nationalism, and the Fate of Freedom in the 21st Century
Signs of Decline, Dissolution of Forms, and the World State
Who Rules, edited by Roger Kimball, is a volume devoted to providing a diagnosis of the ills that plague the United States and the West more broadly (I encourage you to look over the volume to learn more about the contributors; for the sake of the review, I will say little about who they are and let their ideas stand for themselves). This slender book is composed of short conference presentations that each have a conversational tone and all of which dive right into the heart of things without delay.
Near the end of the volume, Chris Buskirk brings our attention to a depressing but accurate list of signs of decline: low birth rates, lower church attendance, many men and women find themselves alienated from each other, two paychecks are now required for a home to be financially viable, millions are addicted to drugs and pornography, there is stagnation in technological development, violent crime and suicide rates are going up, out of wedlock births are on the rise, and everyone can see that our educational system is in shambles. Worst of all is that the conservative politicians who should not only be positioned to see these evils and to do something about them, appear impotent.
These signs impel us to dig deeper into their causes. We are thus led to ask the question that the volume is devoted to answering: if our citizens are facing such serious problems, who on earth is ruling us and what do they want?
As Kimball himself notes, the thread that ties the volume together is how each author brings to light various actors and movements that are attempting to dissolve the distinctive forms that provide structure, order, and moral elevation in political life. Three of these crucial forms under attack are citizenship, nationhood, and sovereignty. To be a citizen is to participate in ruling over the community of which one is a part. In the US, citizens are supposed to engage in the habits of heart and mind that make them capable of self-rule. These self-ruling citizens share in the nation, which is to say, a shared way of life of a people. A way of life reaches deeper into the human soul than law can, stamping a people and making them distinct from others. Sovereignty is the legal or formal means by which a people secures its capacity to determine its own way of life.
Michael Anton proposes another thread that ties the volume together. He powerfully argues that the loss of these forms identified by Kimball points towards the formation of a universal homogenous state, which is to say, a world ruled under one government. He claims that this is the most fundamental idea at the bottom of Leftist thought; the rest of their thoughts are epiphenomena of this underlying idea. As much as this idea may disgust those who are on the Right, Anton insists that we have to understand how inspiring and uplifting this vision can appear to millions of those on the Left, the middle, and even to many so-called conservatives. “Give peace a chance!” The dissolving of distinctive forms that Kimball points out prepares the ground for the universal homogenous state.
Citizenship
We turn first of all to the question of citizenship. Victor Davis Hanson notes that identity politics attacks the idea of citizenship from the bottom inasmuch as it encourages people to identify with their ethnic group, making them effectively pre-political. While some move toward pre-citizenship, the more privileged move toward post-citizenship—citizens of the world. They have to be citizens of the world, because they are doing everything in their power to erode any discriminating criteria concerning those residing in the United States. The idea of diversity is on the lips of global citizens who want to fundamentally transform the US regime into a Jacobin style democracy where whatever the majority of citizens want on a given day becomes the preferred law—without reference to rights, tradition, or any other customary restraint. And one might suspect that the many pre-citizens will be directed to understand their true interests by their more privileged elite post-citizens; leaving the middle class out to dry, as Hanson points out.
David Azerrad launches a spirited—to say the least—attack on identity politics. He argues that the progress of social justice necessarily comes at the expense of our natural rights. What is worse, is that we lose our rights in a vain effort to achieve goals—like racial statistical parity—that cannot be achieved. He points out that identical twins do not even have equal outcomes, so how can we expect different groups, who value different things, to experience equal outcomes? Azerrad moves from race to sex, pointing out that feminists and transgender advocates seem to be trying to prepare us for a bizarre kind of omnisexuality. He bitingly suggests that we need re-education in androgyny in order to prepare ourselves to be global citizens. So, the attack on form extends all the way down to biology. And, as John Fonte shows in his essay, governmental power is relocated to unaccountable so-called bureaucratic experts in order to serve the ends of social justice, which threatens the possibility of democratic citizenship by making power untouchable by the citizen. As citizens are feminized and without recourse to rule, they effectively begin to feel like mere subjects and indeed slaves.
The Nation and Sovereignty
John O’Sullivan argues that nationalism has to be a shared way of life over time. It cannot be mere assent to a creed. For that mere assent entails seeing the government as something that protects the rights of individuals within an arbitrary shared geographic location that starts to look like a multicultural patchwork. The American nation is under the threat of dissolution: open borders, mass immigration, multiculturalism, and the failure to distinguish between citizen and non-citizen all point toward the dissolution of any kind of national solidarity. We see a pointer towards Anton’s argument about the world state: the existence of separate and distinct nations makes global wealth distribution and equity difficult. O’Sullivan asks, what does the Left thinks holds nations or communities together?
James Piereson argues that the US was forged into a modern nation state between the Civil War and WWII. He thinks that the precarious accomplishment of nationhood is in great peril; our nation is at risk of dissolving into a loosely disconnected multi-ethnic empire bound together by force and accident. The primary source of unity that we might avail ourselves of, the Founding Fathers, Declaration, and Constitution—the deepest sources of civic nationalism we can draw from—are under attack and finding themselves discredited in the eyes of many who have spent virtually no time reading them, but much of their time sneering at the so-called hypocrisy of the authors.
Fonte shows that the attack on sovereignty comes from what at first might seem an unlikely source: the promoters of democracy. They cast any and all resistance to transnational consolidation of power and decision as illiberal, populist, and nativist. Any conservative to the Right of Bill Kristol is effectively lumped into a basket of deplorable authoritarians. What these promoters of democracy do not seem to see or perhaps they do see but do not want us to, is that they seek to erode the necessary conditions of self-rule. One cannot have a democracy without a nation or without clear borders. The word democracy now stands in for obsequious subservience to globalism, deracination, and forced rootlessness for all.
Concluding Thoughts on the Way Forward
We will conclude with a look at Angelo Codevilla’s essay. This essay is the densest and most rewarding essay of the bunch; it is clearly a distillation of long and careful thinking. He argues that the Declaration of Independence provides the standard that we can look to in order to govern ourselves as a people once more. The two statesmen to whom he suggests we take guidance are George Washington and John Quincy Adams. They provide the best pathway for America First thinking—as Codevilla rightly points out, they did not have to say that they were putting America first as it goes without saying that America’s lawfully elected leaders should always put their people before others. Our Progressive ruling class sees this sort of thinking as an obstacle to mankind’s progress. These elites have devalued attachments to God, family, locality, and the nation in the name of perpetual peace and the equality of peoples. But, in spite of these difficulties, Codevilla thinks that there are fundamental cracks within the progressive agenda that provide hope for the return of sober rule. Something that has hamstrung progressives in recent days is a disastrous misapprehension of means and ends. This failure explains why we lose every war now. So progressives and neo-conservatives want to turn the Middle East into a land of liberal democracy—Codevilla replies: do you have any idea what kind of means are required to reach this end? He also notes that perpetual peace is not really a goal that is spoken of anymore. The covering up of these and many other failures has put the media on the defensive and many citizens on alert.
Now, there are perhaps many on the New Right who are skeptical of using the Founding Fathers and their documents as guides for the way forward. But, imagine a United States with leaders who have the backbone to enforce all important laws exactly as they are written? It sounds painfully simple to say that merely enforcing all of our laws is where we need to start; but, it would be a powerful and indispensable starting point for re-establishing the American way of life. Imagine leaders who would, in the name of our natural rights, end illegal immigration, punish criminals, and put down fiery insurrections before they ruin the lives of hard working Americans. There are America First leaders in office, and who will soon be in office, who see the contemporary situation clearly and who will find out who they really are when the crucial moments arrive. The present volume under consideration is designed to assist such leaders and their constituents grasp the depth and immediacy of the crisis we all face. One might have wished for more positive suggestions from the authors, but their articulation of the problems is admirable and well worth paying careful attention to.
—Brian C. Wilson
@MTClassical