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Books The Enduring Nation A new edition of Yoram Hazony’s defense of nationalism attempts to achieve a more ecumenical vision. The Virtue of Nationalism (Updated Edition) By Yoram Hazony, Basic Liberty, 311 pp., $19.99  Although this development is not likely to happen, Daniel McCarthy states in the National Interest that Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism “should cause liberals to rethink their repugnance for nationalism.” Hazony explains in meticulous detail why national identity and national states are essential for freedom and true self-government. The author makes his case clearly and dispassionately and shows why the globalist and multicultural alternatives being pushed by our ruling class are total dead ends for those who wish to live in a free society.  If I were writing such a masterpiece myself, I might have devoted some space to Hegel’s praise for the constitutional state that the philosopher saw emerging in early 19th-century Europe. Hegel regarded this auspicious development as the final stage of the World Spirit’s journey through human history.  But I won’t grouse about such omissions. Hazony’s main points are entirely correct: Popular self-government is inseparably bound up with national identity. There is a long history for this connection; and any attempt to substitute the union of democracy and nationalism for globalist, multicultural regimes has brought about a disastrous undoing of self-government. Hazony is also right to recognize the Anglo-Protestant foundations of the original American regime founded in the late 18th century, and his focus on Hebrew scripture as a source of Western national identities is entirely on the mark.  He makes references to the 18th-century Baltic German thinker J. G. Herder, a Lutheran pastor who denounced imperial governments as a “curse” and who defended the “national spirit Volksgeist” that animated historic peoples. Herder was among the first Christians to read the Old Testament mainly as the founding document of an historic nation, the ancient Hebrews. It requires absolutely no stretch of imagination to see what Hazony describes as “the Protestant order of Europe,” which now lies in shambles, as very much based on a notion of peoplehood going back to the Bible. The author is also correct that the abolition of national identities has gone together with the continued war against our cultural past. From one of Hazony’s additions to the original edition of his book, it seems that he is reassuring his Catholic readers that he does not view nationalism and nation-states as a strictly Protestant thing. After all, the Poles and Irish have both been fiercely nationalistic but also devoutly Catholic. Further, if Protestants were habitual readers of the Old Testament, then Catholics as well as Protestants, Hazony tells us, encountered the same biblical passages at some point. Hazony believes the Catholic clergy were generally less inclined than the Protestant one to embrace national states because of their one-time “dream of a universal empire” founded on the papacy and Holy Roman Empire. This vision was drawn from the Romans and “dominated the political projects of dominant Catholic and ecclesial leaders for much of European history.” But this vision, Hazony believes, has long ceased to matter. Arguably Protestantism did contribute more significantly than Catholicism to national consciousness in Western countries. The nationalists in 19th- and early 20th-century Hungary were (like Louis Kossuth and Ferenc Deak) predominantly members of Hungarian Protestant churches; Catholic Hungarians in the 19th century generally supported the Hapsburg empire and its rulers. Among Czech nationalists, Protestants, including Hussites, were disproportionately present from the early modern period on. In 19th-century Germany, Lutheranism and nationalism were indissolubly connected. One can go on belaboring the obvious here, but it seems hard to argue with what seems to me a likely correlation. Protestant national churches, vernacular translations of the Bible, and opposition to Catholic empires all fueled European nationalist movements. Although national movements did develop in Catholic countries, sometimes—as in the cases of Italy, revolutionary France, and Ireland well into the 20th century—those causes flourished in opposition to the Church. Catholic nationalist movements did emerge in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but these were mostly counterrevolutionary and clericalist in nature. I doubt these are the movements that Hazony has in mind in his book, although some of these counterrevolutionary coalitions, for example in Spain in the 1930s, may have been eminently defensible, considering what they were fighting against. While the papacy declaimed against nationalist movements for centuries, Protestant reformers appealed to nationalist sentiment in carrying out their religious projects. In 16th-century Sweden, the Vasa dynasty quite deliberately appealed to Swedish national culture in enacting a Lutheran Reformation to the benefit of the monarchs. Obviously in the case of Holland Protestant belief brought together patriots against rule by Catholic Spain; moreover, an English national sense was aroused by opposition to both the Spaniards and the papacy. Please note that I’m not arguing that only Protestants could become nationalists; rather I’m stressing the tighter and more natural relationship between Protestantism and nationalism. I’m also not suggesting that national state solutions are always the best ones in every situation. In Central and East-Central Europe in the 19th and early 20th century, the Catholic Habsburg Empire provided more benevolent rule than the national states that replaced it. Today it seems natural for me to support national states fighting against globalist tyranny. But I can’t say this political arrangement, however attractive it now seems, has always been the best one for all times and places.   Hazony attributes the First World War, which unfortunately did see an eruption of an expansive form of nationalism on both sides, to a pervasive imperialist spirit. Although undoubtedly true, the disruptive nationalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is not an argument against nation states as such.  The victors in the Great War did not blame that long, bloody conflict on nationhood, which they resoundingly affirmed at least for their side. The winners pinned the paternity for that cataclysm on autocratic, militaristic empires (that is, on the losers) and created even more nation-states, an enterprise that the losing German side had also briefly undertaken. In any case, the national principle was not defeated in the First World War, but had to wait for the post–Second World War era and the rise of globalist ideology to be rejected. This has been the work of our globalist, multicultural elites ruling over the remains of the civilization that gave birth to the nation-state as one of its many achievements. The post The Enduring Nation appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics The Challenge of Finding the More Than 7,000 Children Biden Lost The open-borders madness of the last administration came at a human cost. Credit: 1st Footage/Shutterstock The loss of even one child is a tragedy. The loss of over 7,000, some potentially to sex traffickers, due to Joe Biden’s immigration policies, is a national shame. As part of its open borders policy, the Biden administration failed to investigate more than 7,300 reports of human trafficking involving child migrants, reports from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) show. HHS is working through over 65,000 backlogged reports from the last administration, including reports of unaccompanied migrant children who may have been trafficked by gangs or sexually abused. In one notorious case, “a young girl who arrived at the border in the custody of individuals claiming to be her family was bruised, disoriented, and in pain. Medical examinations revealed that she had been raped, yet she was sent back to her abusers because no verification was done to confirm her guardianship.”  “This is such a stain on our nation,” said a whistleblower with HHS. The second Trump administration has taken up the issue of the lost children, with a small starter number of 36 prosecutions to date. HHS determined over 100 child sponsors from just a single intake site were suspicious enough to warrant further investigation. In a letter to Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) asked for “an immediate update on government wide efforts to find and rescue children who were placed in harm’s way” by President Joe Biden’s policies. Together they represent, according to HHS, “a systemic failure of the Biden administration,” which resulted in “children’s lives being put at risk.” What did Biden do to knowingly place so many children at risk? His stated goal was simply offering hard-working migrants a chance at a better life—at the cost of their children, apparently. With no legal avenue for them to immigrate, Biden just did away with any effective border enforcement, allowing migrants to walk north and blend into the estimated 11 million illegals already in the U.S. For those who wished to quasi-legalize their status, vast numbers of economic migrants requested asylum. Asylum applicants must demonstrate that, if sent home, they would be persecuted on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group. The definition of those protected grounds has varied based on American domestic politics. But asylum never has been and was never intended to stretch to economic situations affecting almost everyone in a given country. “Wanting a better life” has never been grounds for a claim under any president. Economic immigrants without legitimate claims to asylum have long taken advantage of slow processing. A Mexican man caught on the border who says he came just to work may be sent back almost immediately. Yet, should he make a claim to asylum, the U.S. is obligated to adjudicate his case, however frivolous. The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act requires those seeking asylum be detained while their cases are processed. But for political reasons, the Biden administration simply released most asylum seekers into American society. Asylum-seekers become eligible to apply for work authorization if their case is left pending for more than 150 days, as almost all do (as was the case for the antisemitic Egyptian terrorist fire-bomber in Colorado). Trump has since ended this system. He also negotiated for many asylum seekers to wait out their cases in Mexico instead of working while in the U.S. The problem has always been what to do with the kids. While many children at the border are with parents, others arrive with human traffickers, some on their own. “Children” can include everyone from infants to 17-year-old “boys,” and the dangers of housing vulnerable children among adults should make it obvious why the law is written as it is. While on its face “parents with their own kids” sounds like a nice solution, terrible things can happen when children and adults are detained together.  Under Trump, parents arrested at the border are criminally charged with illegal entry. Due-process laws do not allow children to be kept with the parent because the child is not being criminally prosecuted. The answer under Trump was to put “kids in cages,” that is, to detain children separately from their parents under federal control as their parents’ cases played out through the legal system. Democrats and the media accused Trump 1.0 of running “concentration camps” on the border, ignoring America’s long history of holding children for their own safety. Bill Clinton’s 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act set new records for immigrants of all ages detained. George W. Bush’s 2005 Operation Streamline was a zero-tolerance plan to prosecute all illegal entrants. But to avoid the logistics and negative optics, the program made exceptions—not written into the law—for adults traveling with children. Nature finds a way, and more and more economic migrants arrived with somebody’s child in hand as a get-out-of-jail-free card. Fewer kids in cages, but more illegals, and more children at risk. The Obama administration in 2014 established then-legally permitted family detention centers to hold parents and children—potentially indefinitely—in cages as a means of deterring others. There were also children held alone in cages when they arrived without parents, or in the hands of human traffickers, or when their parents were criminally dangerous. The program ended only because of a 2016 court decision ordering the release of most of those families and largely prohibiting family detention facilities. Adult men, women, and children would be held separately. Abetted by the media, Biden’s strategy was simply to ignore all this precedent and allow children, accompanied or not, to enter the U.S. freely. Little vetting was done of the “guardians” many were matched with in an effort to get the maximum number of people across the border with the minimum of political fuss. It does not take a degree in government (or criminology) to see how bad actors would quickly recognize and exploit such a system for their own needs. The result is the massive, backlogged clean-up project Trump’s HHS faces, years after the feds lost sight of so many vulnerable children to ensure their own policy “succeeded.”  One hopes the majority of missing children were eventually reunited with their illegal alien relatives, and only a few were drawn into the underworld of child labor and sex trafficking. But until HHS corrects Biden’s shameful lack of oversight, no one really knows. The post The Challenge of Finding the More Than 7,000 Children Biden Lost appeared first on The American Conservative.

"Fuck me! This ain’t right".

"Things got weird".

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