IN the autumn of 2003, Lukacs prepared a twenty-page post-script for the republication of Outgrowing Democracy under a new title, A New Republic. The presidency of the "dwarf" G. W. Bush gave him the opportunity to proclaim anew his disgust with Republicans, and to delineate a further track of degeneration from Reagan to the dwarf.
Republican governance was still based on projected illusions—with the implication that as time went on it took even less skill to fool the "rubes." Example? In comparison with the consummate professional actor Ronald Reagan, who knew how to give the perfect informal salute to his troops, Bush was performing in a military amateur theatrical. As for the motives behind the Iraq and Afghan wars themselves, Lukacs offers an odd-seeming analysis, its syllogistic expression roughly proceeding as follows: the Republican party is a populist party; whatever it does, it does for a base appeal to popular sentiment; wars make presidents popular; therefore the Republican party went to war. (It seems he doesn't take the Islamist threat any more seriously than he took the Soviet threat.)
Nevertheless, in his disgust, Lukacs also attacks Democrats: liberals are cowards, he says, for not resisting the nationalist populism of the Republicans, out of fear they will seem unpatriotically un-nationalistic. He proceeds to a complete condemnation of both sides, as falsely so-called "conservatives" and falsely so-called "liberals," always nesting the terms in quotation marks. Neither faction lives up to the dictionary definition of its respective self-chosen title. After taking Americans generally to task for hypocritical attitudes towards the "environment"—a ridiculous term for what he prefers to call Nature—he delivers the coda of his symphony:
"So many 'conservatives' and 'liberals' were split-minded, representing a political or ideological schizophrenia. So many 'conservatives' were uninterested in conservation; their professed love of their country went along with their indifference of [sic] preserving the land: they may have been (at least in public) defenders of 'family values,' opponents of abortion, but at the same time proponents of technological 'progress,' including the manufacture and use of American weapons of the most destructive kind. So many 'liberals,' doctrinaire proponents of human dignity, were at the same time proponents of free and easy abortions or even of euthanasia; they believed in the benefits of more and more schooling, including sex 'education,' while at the same time favoring the legalization and the public approval of every kind of sexual practice. 'Conservatives,' believing in 'private enterprise' rather than in privacy; 'liberals' in civil and public 'rights' rather than in personal responsibility; 'conservatives' in 'Americanism' at the expense of knowing much of the world and its history; 'liberals' in internationalism and 'multiculturalism' while understanding little or nothing about other peoples; 'conservatives' favoring every kind of mechanical advance instead of protecting traditions and the world of nature; 'liberals' believing in breaking off from the past instead of recognizing perennial human nature; 'conservatives' loving liberty less than hating liberals; 'liberals' fearing conservatives more than loving conservation—such a confusion will not long endure, not to speak of the condition that, latest by the end of the American second century, the 'conservative' and 'liberal' designations were losing most of their meaning." (p. 422)
The appeal to the dictionary reminds me of summer interns at a liberal political magazine who get their one big chance to write an article and use it to castigate conservatives for not "conserving" a liberal status quo. The attempt at wordplay (conservative-conservation, private-privacy) is not only sophomoric but irritating in a paragraph of unachieved, and indeed misconceived, parallelisms. In fact, the writing everywhere expresses Lukacs' huge aspirations towards cleverness, wit, and polish, and everywhere it crashes. It's unfinished and unedited, as though Lukacs had fallen deeper into self-indulgence or as though his publishers never expected the book to be read and would not invest in editorial services. A reader might half-sympathize with the sentiments the writer is trying to express, but this reader should be suspicious of his own generous attempts to help out the writer by imagining the connections, definitions, and full expression that are lacking. The writer may not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
This kind of bad writing also defaces his 1990 memoir Confessions of an Original Sinner. I bring up that book here because of the substance it lends (a little, at least) to his "conservative" vs. "reactionary" distinction, which originates in his attempt to understand the difference between the men of the right who did or did not align with Hitler. The "reactionaries" are the heroic few: Churchill, who was the last leader standing with any integrity after Chamberlain's appeasement policy failed and the Cliveden set's Nazi sympathies were discredited; Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators; Bernanos, who was a believing Catholic, unlike Maurras and Barrès who mythologized Catholicism for political myth and, so to speak, prepared the French right for Vichy. This list should include Eric Voegelin. They are indeed admirable men. So Lukacs' "reactionaries" were the men of conscience, the odd men out, who did not temporize for the sake of mere anti-communism, and fought the good fight and won or strove and suffered unto death. Lukacs thinks they tended to have some kind of living religious faith. And the conservatives? If Lukacs calls you a conservative today, he means you are just the type that would have supported Hitler. (To him we are all Pat Buchanan.) Lukacs' "reactionaries" are examples of ethical development, while his "conservatives" are cases of ethical atrophy or decline, self-seekers or corner-cutters. And remember, communism was never a genuine threat to anybody, the way Nazism was...
In the new epilogue to Outgrowing Democracy, Lukacs' general contradictoriness still abounds. On the one hand he loves the material comforts of the prosperous bourgeois "surface of life" (a phrase I first heard, expressing the same meaning, as uttered by Robert Nathan); on the other hand he laments the greed that makes la dolce vita possible, the greed that trusts in highly conceptual systems of investment that are beyond the comprehension of anyone but professional mathematicians and thus, as wholly intangible entities, must be taken on faith— the greed that also blinds the supposedly nature-loving Americans to their hypocritical treatment of land and water. His disapproval of American provincialism, ignorance of the world outside America's borders, and the apparent decline of American education are consistent, however, with a general hatred of mass culture and a snobbish disapproval of mass media where the hot image triumphs over the cool word. He is unafraid to be taken for a Luddite and a stick in the mud, and proud of himself for being a man of common sense who believes in gold coins and bank pass-books rather than paper money and mutual funds. He must feel vindicated by the Bush-Obama financial collapse. The Credit Default Swap disaster is proof that something is fundamentally wrong, but what? Is it Wall Street or is it capitalism? A historian should see that the thing that is wrong is the same thing that has been wrong at least as far back as the South Sea Bubble of 1720: financiers are no better than they should be and always need careful regulation. Men are too prone to believe in their symbols and counters.
As for his disapproval of declining American education, why does this collegiate educator offer no serious analysis? A man of culture should care a little more to explain how cultural destruction is a macrocosmic problem, in relation to which schools are the microcosm. He might admit, where liberals can't, that the breakdown of discipline and "work ethic" in schools has everything to do with the breakdown of the family; he might decry the education establishment's absurd attitude that teachers simply need to be paid more, that we must simply erect more costly buildings, and that the Federal Department of Education needs more bureaucratic power and programs to administer—as though these things would make up for the perceived decline of American character which manifests itself in America's children. But there are unrealistic and impossible expectations too: is not the "inflation" of college grades and degrees consistent with the inflation of college systems and college population? How can universities—which have always been élite institutions—magically transform the masses into an élite?
This is precisely the vulnerable point where he would be entitled to puncture American self-illusions and optimism. The assumption that the mass is infinitely educable is the part of the general assumption of infinite and inevitable progress (the heart of liberalism) which he wants to debunk. And yet he shares in it, to the extent that he believes in bourgeois democracy and hence in a society that forces everyone into conformity with a bourgeois mode of life. The "culture" of bourgeois society is a cult of success; the "culture" of the lower orders may be judged a cult of failure, resting on indiscipline and untimely self-indulgence. It's the kind of intolerance or confusion in the face of difference that leads to a "war on poverty" waged by liberal do-gooders or the "war on the poor" with which liberals charge conservatives. (And I am a critic of the welfare state as much as anyone, but this is indeed a war on the poor if one promotes free abortion and contraception as a eugenic solution to the underclass.)
The complexities of these issues may be beyond Lukacs' competence, but he takes responsibility for dealing with them when launching his broad attack on American political and social attitudes. Apparently he is no Charles Murray, who in Coming Apart argues that a newly rising haute bourgeoisie is completely indifferent to the moral collapse of those underneath, and does not care to preach on the value of its basic disciplines to anyone else. However much Murray may be a bourgeois triumphalist by taste and sentiment, he makes a practical argument that the growing class division (if that's what it is) is changing the American political system in undesirable ways.
I must add that the great historian of "historical consciousness" ought to be conscious of a cultural information explosion which also stymies contemporary educators. A curriculum has finite capacity. With the ongoing deterioration of cultural consensus, there is no center and no standard from which to determine what is essential to the curriculum. For me the most immediate concrete example of this decentralization leading to decadence would be the death of the concept of 'canon' in the teaching of literature. The mind rebels when considering the problem of teaching history from multiple ideological "points of view" for the respective legally defined and privileged minorities—an expansion and diffusion as well as trivialization. The decentralized and collapsed curriculum of America's schools is an immediate manifestation of a decentralized and collapsed American culture. Lukacs is enough of a snob and stick in the mud to want education the old way, but I don't see him mounting any defense of it against liberal pluralism. Maybe liberal pluralism is his defense against the Jingos.
There is one hypothesis in the new epilogue worth considering. Lukacs summarizes the course of nineteenth-century European mass politics as an intensifying polarization between nationalists on the right and socialists on the left. (The Fascists and Nazis tried to defeat communism by squaring the circle and confecting an ideology of nationalistic socialism.) His hypothesis is that this European polarization has come to America at last in the late twentieth century, with the Republicans as the nationalist party and the Democrats as the socialist party. Because he deplores nationalism and fears it, this development is to him a loss of American essence (and innocence?) and the loss of a future for utopian bourgeois democracy. In a way, I find it a reason for hope, which is not the same as optimism.
As economic advancement is no longer perceived as inevitable for the mass of Americans, and as Americans find themselves objects of utter hatred and targets for total annihilation by third-world religious fanatics, their mood has become less generous towards the world and towards the legally privileged poor of their own country. And in this way America is becoming less the "city on a hill" and more a mere country like other mere countries, concerned about its own survival and immediate interests and creepingly aware of the possibility of genuine failure and its finality. This means that reality is asserting itself against America's millennial illusions.
America's new bitterness is not quite like "Old Europe's," which is a bitterness about being overrun several times in recent centuries by enemies one must still live next door to—a bitterness which resolves, to borrow Unamuno's concept, into the "tragic sense of life." That essentially pagan "sense" which can also be the mood of Christian doubt in a dire phase, may be the attitude of a peasant, a pagan under the skin, who admits that his hereditary feud with neighbors of another blood or faith will never be settled except by his own side's permanent defeat; or it may be the attitude of an agnostic, post-Christian conservative thinker, for whom Western civilization is the same as Western art, and who foresees an impending collapse for Europe resembling the fall of Constantinople, when the Cathedral of the Holy Wisdom was turned to a mosque and all the images defaced or destroyed. It could also be the mood of a more-or-less orthodox American Christian who suddenly realizes that he has taken his country's founding myths for granted all his life, confusing the destiny of the human race with the putative "destiny" of his own country, just as Pelagius confused the destiny of Christianity with that of the Roman Empire. It could be the first step in taking to heart the message of St Augustine. It would mean accepting mortality and finitude: like individuals, nations can die, even America. It would mean accepting that other countries can have an ethical life, even if they are not modeled on America, an ethical life that America has sometimes transgressed against.
I am not recommending the "tragic sense of life" as a permanent philosophy, but rather as a mood through which one must pass before there can be anything more sane and sensible. Beware, however, that America is a Protestant country, and Protestantism cannot bear with anything pagan. Catholicism understands that the pagan is the natural, and that the salvation story is about how God rebuilds the supernatural upon the fallen natural. The loss of faith in liberal Protestantism could be the beginning of wisdom, although it has generally been a hazard: the usual course of of the liberal spirit, when experiencing disillusion with America-as-messiah-nation, is to re-image America as a demonic force. This was the course of the New Left in the 1960's, which could not conceive of America as a mere nation among other mere nations, one sometimes transgressing against the ethical life of other nations, but as an ideological anti-Christ. (Meanwhile, for the patriotic fundamentalist, if America is no longer God's right hand, it must mean the end of the world.)
America is culturally European; it was a European project ever since 1492. So there must be some point where this concept from a European thinker, the "tragic sense," begins to have relevance, even though we have no peasants, no basilicas, no deep bitterness on the scale of "Old Europe." One could say that America's national "mission" was to escape the tragic. And indeed, despite the habitual use of the word "tragic" in news accounts, America has faced no genuinely national tragedy, only particular disappointments with deep but private wreckage. According to its hegemonic official culture, the American Civil War had a happy ending, nothing but pure vindication, even if people did die; inasmuch as the Southern way of life was destroyed, it was only the destruction of a private interest built on injustice. So tragedy remains alike beyond the ken of the Yankees who won the war and of Confederates who only keep alive a cult of resentment against Yankee interference. And so on, with the rest of American history. The suffering of the patriot army at Valley Forge was only a sacrifice to obtain national glory; it was not tragic. The evil that was done to African slaves through slavery or to American Indians through extermination and forced containment does not fit into a "tragic" interpretation of history because the victims were beyond the cultural sphere of the perpetrators and not perceived as human; when at last they were perceived as human, their descendants were given a new place in the myth of progress and a share in its optimism. So if there ever is an American "tragic sense," it will be quite a new thing.
For now there is bitterness about costly wars for international order (the national "mission" internationalized, dedicated to the abolition of tragedy) in which nothing was won; but that bitterness is only about failed enterprises in a country that is not supposed to experience failure. There is no common pain running through all orders of society. There is only fear of being "downsized" as a super-power, and no one sees the cause as resting in our stars or ourselves or any tragic flaw but rather in the ambition and greed of specific bad actors of politics and business. Particular modes of disillusionment are now current. Conservatives, who can no longer believe in the open invitation issued to the world's "wretched refuse" by the gnostic Green Goddess of Enlightenment in New York harbor, will tend to devolve into unthinking nativists, cynically accepting that life is no more than Hobbesian strife or Darwinian competition. Liberals, who believed in a more equitable distribution of an ever expanding economic pie, are settling for the shared socialist misery of a shrinking pie, divided under the authority not only of an ever larger and more powerful bureaucratic state, but of an international environmentalist dictatorship—an alternative to the untidy Hobbesian-Darwinian scramble, a international order in which the sovereign super-state claims a right of transgression against the ethical life of nations, a monopolistic right.
So there is still no tragedy, only gloom, and no wisdom—a downsizing of the American dream, but not yet an awakening from the dream, which could itself be tragic. It could also be risky. This is where I find hope, which is not the same as optimism. My hope rests in the destruction of an ideology of optimism.
The American founding myth is in danger, and while more dangerous ideological myths could replace it, a modern republic would be better off having no myth at all than something "hoked up" by demagogues and presumptuous pundits (such as William Kristol's myth of "national greatness"). Character would be better than myth. The only true ground for character would be belief in the nature and destiny of the human person. And the only ground for that belief is the life of the spirit.
In a post-mythical America, national identity would be based on history: the history of a mythical covenant that was outgrown, perhaps also on a collective act of repentance—for the times when the national "mission" only added to the sum of human misery, especially when worthy allies were betrayed (even when they should never have been allies, because we should not have involved ourselves in their struggles), and especially when we accepted villains as our allies. Repentance cannot salvage the myth, like a declaration of bankruptcy leading to corporate reorganization. Repentance only makes a life after sin possible. As an episode in the life of the spirit it depends on grace.
Flawed and mediocre thinkers often make highly illuminating case study subjects. Nevertheless, at this point I declare the Lukacs file closed.
