A reader, EuroSwede, sent me a link to a speech given by the Dutch politician, Geert Wilders, to a conference in Germany. The speech is therefore in German, but there are English subtitles.
Wilders leads a party in the Netherlands, the PVV, which has recently increased in popularity - it is now supported by about 1 in 3 Dutch people and is projected to be the largest single party after the next election.
It is not easy to categorise Wilders' politics. He has definitely broken with mainstream liberalism, especially in his defence of patriotism and his opposition to open borders. However, he also identifies the core Western values as being equality and freedom as a liberal might do.
The problem is that if you keep equality and freedom as the guiding principles, unless you explicitly redefine them away from their liberal meaning, then you will eventually find your way back to a liberal rejection of patriotism as not allowing people the freedom to define who they are by their own choices, or as violating equality by including some and excluding others because of an "accident of birth".
Even so, it is a great, inspiring speech and you will most likely want to listen to the whole twenty minutes of it. I really do hope that the Dutch give their support to Wilders in the upcoming elections.
ReplyDeleteWhile violence is a concern, the prime reason we don't want non-Whites and Muslims is because we have the right to have our own countries.
The West, including Canada and America, is not and never was intended to be, a place for "all races and nations". To claim that it is, or was, is a direct attack on the identity, legitimacy, and existence of the Western people.
The West does not owe every human being born an existence in the West. It is exclusionary yes, but at a basic level wouldn't you agree that a People's right to self determination places an onus on would-be citizens to make the case to their intended nation why they are worthy of citizenship.
ReplyDeleteYes. The problem is that liberals take as their starting point a vision of human life in which you have an agglomeration of individuals each pursuing their own unique, individual ends. So for liberals there is no good being lost when traditional nations and cultures open their borders to the "other" as these are just more people in pursuit of their individual ends - it makes no difference.
DeleteBut if you don't have this ideological starting point you are likely to see things very differently. You are likely to see the larger communal tradition you belong to as important to your identity, to your social commitments, to your sense of belonging, to your connection to the past and the future and you are also likely to see it as an inherent good, as a unique expression of human life with its own transcendent essence, that draws out your love and commitment - and a desire to contribute to it positively and to preserve it.
In that case, you are then going to look at things very differently. There will then definitely be something to be lost through open borders. So politics, for a non-liberal, means balancing or ordering a range of goods, which includes upholding the existence of that larger communal tradition, that ethny, that individuals belong to and which is so significant in the life of people.
In preserving the distinct communal traditions of humanity a certain amount of "exclusion" is necessary, not only for us, but for others as well. And most countries happily see it this way as it serves an important good.
It's a little bit like family life. We exclude others from the definition of our family - the only way not to do this would be to dissolve family itself, just as liberals aim to dissolve the traditional nations of the West.
"or as violating equality by including some and excluding others because of an 'accident of birth'."
ReplyDeleteIs that Liberalism? It sounds more like Leftism to me.
It's the common moral framework of liberalism. The left is more into equality of outcomes rather than of opportunity compared to the liberal right and the liberal left is more into identity politics than the liberal right, but they both hold to the idea of "freedom as individual autonomy is the overriding good".
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