Patriotism transmutes individual selfishness into national egoism. Loyalty to a nation is a high form of altruism when compared with lesser loyalties and more parochial interests. It therefore becomes the vehicle of all the altruistic impulses and expresses itself, on occasion, with such fervour that the critical attitude of the individual toward the nation and its enterprises is almost completely destroyed. The unqualified character of this devotion is the very basis of the nation's power and of the freedom to use the power without moral restraint. Thus the unselfishness of individuals makes for the selfishness of nations.
Reinhold Niebuhr Moral Man and Immoral Society 1932
How can you be a republican and absolutely abhor nationalism as I do? Just like that mate, just like that. I disagree that it becomes the vehicle of all the altruistic impulses. I would argue instead that non-altruistic impulses become transformed by regular association rather. Niebuhr calls this vicarious selfishness. This lunch I was also reading an essay about James K. Galbraith's The predator state: how conservatives abandoned the free market and why liberals should too which argues that the counterbalancing forces of big labour, big business and big government have collapsed. They have, he argues, been replaced by a new class
"endowed with vast personal income, freed from the corporation [who] set out to take over the state and run it - not for any ideological project but simply in the way that would bring to them, individually and as a group, the most money, the least disturbed power and the greatest chance of rescue should something go wrong".
And to distinguish why I find this more persuasive than Naomi Klein's Disaster capitalism by analogy: he distinguishes between Cheney and Wolfowitz. Wolfie is a fool. A mad fool and a powerful one, but no more than a fool. An ideologue. He claims to have been SDS (I've never seen him mentioned in histories of the SDS, but whatever) so he was a party line man from the beginning. Whatever the party. And committed to ideological purity. Someone like, ****** for example in Ireland, who went from being a trotskyite official IRA loyalist all the way out to a pathetic apologist for a corrupt taoiseach at the end of his career (and got rewarded with a seat in the second chamber by the morally compromised man himself). Cheney couldn't care less. Rumsfeld could lie unblinkingly on TV about how al queda had massive underground caverns with air conditioning, entertainment centres, libraries, swimming pools etc. on air because he didn't. really. care. At all. About you. About what was best for the world. Cheney's unbridled and unhidden cynicism is breathtaking. And it is they, rather than their ideologue stooges who rule the world. Galbraith's argument that corruption and cronyism (of the state and its interventions in markets) are central to the way capitalism is working now are, no doubt, horrifyingly persuasive to the majority of people in the West. Klein's examination of the disaster capitalism / shock treatment ideologically driven imperative seems now only to be a special case of a greater truth. One needs only to look at the building industry in Ireland if one seeks examples and confirmation closer to home. Look at the financial industry that lived off it. Look at Anglo-Irish bank and their threats to the government of disaster prior to their generous underwriting. The state paid for their risk taking. This is not the "free market" nor is it "capitalism" it is the tools of socialism used for the ultra-rich, the very powerful. And pay great heed to Anglo-Irish's imprecations to the ordinary people that they had better tighten their belts and not seek pay rises in the future. And that public services would have to be cut.
What needs to be cut is the umbilical chord from the state feeding vampires the taxes of the people.
* I am honour bound, by the way - next time I meet him - to bitchslap this macho runt. He wrote after Susan Sontag died that his one regret was that when they met in Sarajevo he didn't put her over his knee and spank her. I believe Sontag was a monster to deal with. But she was a great intellectual and essayist rather than an intellectually stunted hack and apologist in search of power.
She would have kicked his sorry short arse for him too.
