AGHAST? TRY AGLEE:

Europe 1, American Right 0: Conservative pundits aghast at European voters’ EU snub don’t want to grapple with what those voters might be saying about unchecked capitalism. (Jim Sleeper, 06.16.05, American Prospect)

“Ranting like yours against capitalism is so over,” a vaguely neoconservative friend and writer of learned essays chided me last winter as I ranted, indeed, against proposals to privatize Social Security. Recently, another writer-acquaintance, David Brooks, chided French and Dutch voters for rebuffing “higher living standards” (more jobs and consumer goods) by refusing to ratify the European Union’s proposed constitution, in an effort to defend their outmoded social-welfare networks and their ineffable “quality of life.”

But if resistance to global capitalism isn’t as “over” over there as EU elites thought, couldn’t its cheerleaders be missing something over here, too? I don’t mean a demand for socialism, thank you, but, far more modestly, stirrings of a civic republicanism that has often had to save capitalism from itself, both here and abroad. Maybe the European majorities -- not just the French and Dutch but also the Danes and the Brits, who’ve kept out of the Euro currency -- are sending signals worth heeding. How can my opinion-maker friends tout “democracy” abroad but call it backward-looking whenever it rears its head? Yet they’re pouncing so defensively on every doubt about the global cornucopia of competitiveness that you begin to wonder if there’s something they’re trying to hide.

Actually, I think I know what that is. But first, consider the signals from abroad. Shouldn’t patriotic American conservatives, of all people, loathe the EU’s unelected, post-nationalist, corporatist bureaucracy, whose sway Brooks once mocked as “Belgian cultural hegemony”

Wha'happen? Is there anyone on the Right who isn't doing a victory dance over the corpse of Europe?

Posted by orrinj at June 18, 2005 8:32 AM