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I had a couple more thoughts about Sam Moyn’s book, which I wrote about on Thursday.
First of all, I want to be fair: I have to admit the chapter on Lionel Trilling, excerpted here in The Boston Review, is quite good.
One thing that surprised me a little was how much Moyn regrets the Cold War liberal turn against romantic nationalism. For him, it is part of the shackling of the spirit that the whole tradition represents. But for some reason, Moyn is fairly allergic to modern manifestations of what one might call liberal patriotism. The stentorian denunciations of anti-Trumpism make him cringe, but behind it lies an idealism about the American republic and civic virtue, even if we grant that it can be a bit dowdy and ingenuous at times. and the stance he derides as “tyrannophobia” is nothing if not imaginative: it pictures the world as divided into tyrants and their bold foes. He’s expressed qualms about support for Ukraine’s efforts to fight off Russian aggression, which, especially as its received in the West, is probably the clearest expression of liberal patriotism in the contemporary world. Being squeamish about Ukrainian nationalism just because some Nazis may lurk on the fringes seems precisely what Moyn would not have us be, not to mention being overly featful about some grand European or global conflagration. Wouldn’t those fears of totalitarianism and total war make us wilting Cold War liberals? All of these things—the rhetoric in defiance of tyrants, the idea of “the republic in danger”, the levée en masse and a democratic people taking up arms against an autocratic enemy—are echoes of the revolutionary era and the faint romantic tones that prosaic liberal democracy can still muster. On his own account, Moyn ought to lend his voice to cheer them on.. But when they appear he shrinks away. The neocons make noises about becoming social democrats again. Instead, he prefers the company of Compact and the anti-liberals there. Apparently, their chosen forms of nationalism and populism embarrass him less.
And if you are a proponent of political romanticism why not indulge in a little anti-fascism? Isn’t it yet another continuation of the Jacobin tradition, of Dreyfusard patriotism? The radical left-wing brief against anti-fascism and its Dreyfusist forebears was that it used sentimental appeals to rally the workers to the defense of democracy when they should have been laser focused on class struggle. For them, it replaced revolution with detestable reformism, something that Moyn thought was a laudable part of liberalism. If you are a liberal and want to return to more robust planning and welfarism, why not look to the great anti-fascist coalitions of the New Deal and the Popular Front? I don’t ask these questions rhetorically: I have some ideas why, but actually want to know the answer.