Is McCain a multicultural Caesar?
A reader writes:
There’s something I wanted to get off my chest.
I think McCain’s dictatorial temperament connects to his multiculturalism and his interventionism (all which you have referred to at the end of this entry), in that his ambition is to to reign over an aggressive multiethnic (multinational, really) empire, truly a Caesar, though maybe a Bonaparte is more accurate, since he considers himself the true embodiment of the national will. I don’t mean to sound unhinged—I don’t think he’s secretly plotting anything, nor do I see him as a traitor. But it’s the content of his patriotism that worries me—he’s sincerely in love with America-as-empire, not America-as-republic, and I mean empire in a more concrete sense than in the overly broad definitions of some of the more enthusiastic anti-interventionists.
Having a fully bilingual America, for instance, with Puerto Rico as a state, or even trilingual with Quebec as a state, and even separate school systems for different language communities, would be fine with him, probably better than the relative monoculture we have now.
And if Cleveland, say, were nuked, I could see a President McCain going beyond even Wilson in WWI in suppressing civil liberties, maybe even appropriating money on his own authority, since he clearly sees the Constitution as subordinate to his Will. Like Caesar, McCain seems to view our governing institutions as not up to the task of managing our expansive empire, and thus they must be superceded, though maintained in form.
McCain has so much in common with the Progressives (who had a similar impatience with the supposedly archaic strictures of the Constitution) that it might even be accurate to describe his as a “liberal fascist.”
Am I letting my loathing for the man cloud my judgment? I’m afraid I sound like one of these Truther crackpots raving about Halliburton and the like, but I fear that the left’s fevered imaginings about Bush are actually accurate with regard to McCain. Am I off my rocker?
LA replies:
These are very insightful thoughts/guesses/fears that you have. Frankly, I had not taken such thoughts nearly as far as you have, but your thoughts and mine are in the same general direction.
We are agreed that his “patriotism,” which is sincere, is directed toward things that represent the undoing of the nation. For example, opponents of open borders are, to him, anti-Americans, and that’s why he hates them so much. As we would hate a traitor, he hates opponents of amnesty. And in feeling that way, he feels himself to be supremely patriotic. If he were to seek to turn America into the multicultural empire you envision, he would also see that as a supremely patriotic project, and opposition to it as anti-American and hateful.
Your idea of the concrete empire toward which his thoughts are directed represents an imaginative leap. We cannot know that this is true. But it makes intuitive sense and is plausible.
As for your scenario of possible dictatorial, super-Wilsonian measures he might take, I’ve never thought in these terms, and we have no way of knowing if your guess is true. But, given his beliefs and character, it is not an unreasonable guess.
It is not crazy.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 06, 2008 09:43 AM | Send