Medved’s propositionalism

Some had wondered if it’s correct to describe Michael Medved as a neoconservative rather than as just a plain conservative. In fact, Medved voices the standard neoconservative view of America. A reader writes:

On his show today, Michael Medved, in describing the American founding, said ours is a nation founded on ideas—not some affinity for a particular tribe or culture. Anybody of any race, color, or creed can be a good, even great, American.

Not exactly the stirring interpretation of Independence Day you would expect from a conservative. But then again, as you’ve pointed out, Medved is a neoconservative.

What defines America for Medved is not any cultural or historical or constitutional character of its own; what defines America for Medved is its wide-open rules of inclusion, an inclusion that embraces all races and all religions. Thus, according to Medved, there is nothing stopping a believing Moslem (who follows a creed antithetical to everything about America) from being a good or great American. Neoconservatism, which is a form of liberalism, can only relate to America insofar as America is seen as the carrier of the ideology of universal race-blind and religion-blind individualism. Neoconservatism seems conservative, because it celebrates the nation rather than attacking it as the left does; but the nation it celebrates is not a nation but an empty shell for the advancement of the individual rights of all the individuals belonging to all the races and creeds that constitute humanity. This project must marginalize and replace the actual people and culture that formed America in the first place.

But the problem is not limited to neoconservatives. Let us remember that most mainstream conservatives today also tend to define America in terms of a set of abstractions, and thus their thinking is closely akin to, though not identical with, that of the neoconservatives.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 02, 2005 06:44 AM | Send