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“The final collapse of liberalism, when it comes, will be coterminous with the collapse of the American empire, which is a difficult outcome for tenured American conservatives to root on.” Exactly. tabletmag.com/scroll/286052/…
“The capture of the American state and its conversion into a Christian, or even Catholic post-liberal or illiberal entity would be an event as profoundly momentous as the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity.”
The United States of America cannot change, it can only be replaced.
It’s important to remember that small dissenting states like Hungary remain profoundly vulnerable to coercion. The availability of Chinese money has undermined one coercive instrument, but we see in the anti-China ‘trade war’ that America has many more at its disposal.
If a major liberal state like Germany or France became ‘illiberal’ or ‘post-liberal’ it would almost certainly be subjected to every weapon in the US coercive arsenal. Eastern Europe is just being left for the EU to deal with right now.
It’s not merely that small dissenting states in Europe are less attached to liberalism or have other historical resources to draw on, but they don’t really have to face any profound existential questions in dissenting. They can define themselves against the mainstream.
Americans (and Anglos more generally) have no choice but to think in universalist terms. There’s no ‘other’ to fight against. Any invented other (globalists, China) will merely serve to amplify liberal imperialism (as we see now).
This is why American ‘nationalism’ is untenable. All nationalist rhetoric is simply co-opted to serve a more aggressive and militaristic form of liberalism. The only option is to develop a new universalism and replace the whole system with something new.
Put another way: Orban has to figure out how to survive in the liberal international order - difficult in practice, but it’s easy enough to organize around such an external threat - whereas a putative American Orban needs a vision for an new post-liberal international order.
