The Reactionary Fever Dream that is the Clash of Civilizations

I suspect that the number of Lawyers, Guns and Money readers who were avid listeners to my other podcast, Whiskey & International Relations Theory ranges between three and zero. Nonetheless, after a three-year hiatus we’ve started our second season — and episode one might actually be of some interest to youse people.

My co-host, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, wrote his first book about the concept of “western civilization.” PTJ argued that “the West” served as a crucial “rhetorical commonplace” that helped enable the Marshall Plan, NATO, and German reconstruction. The book also did a deep dive into the development and evolution of the idea of “Western Civilization” and its diffusion to the United States. In other words, he knows the book better than virtually anyone else, and he’s one of the scholars most qualified to discuss it.

Here’s an edited excerpt, derived from Apple’s autogenerated transcript:

PTJ: And you mentioned Vance earlier. I mean, if Huntington’s a Spenglerian, Vance is in many ways even more of a Spenglerian because Spengler’s forecast of the future of the West was precisely that it was going to be an argument between American money and European statism, and that that was going to be the final conflict of the West. The final sort of dialectic was gonna be the argument between those…. American money for Spengler was about plutocrats buying their way into government….

DHN: It’s about oligarchy versus aristocracy…. It’s the Aristotelian degeneration?

PTJ: And according to Spengler, this is why every civilization dies in a conflict like this. And this is ours. … [T]he idea is ultimately that this is the conflict that you run into when the civilization sort of spent its natural energy, then you just have this kind of [fight in its] final forms.

DHN: So because Americans don’t have a natural aristocracy, they don’t really have a genuine meritocracy of honor and obligation. They actually just have people who get rich quick and then throw their money around in a gross nouveau riche way and try to buy power rather than being properly acculturated to earn and operate it…. [Y]ou could argue this is at the heart of the emerging tensions in the American reactionary right.

PTJ: Right, no, but just to finish the part of the early 20th century story, then what’s fascinating about this, of course, is that because of the way that the Cold War starts to play out in the 40s, capitalism becomes a marker of Western civilizational identity as opposed to its degeneration.

DHN: It becomes somehow fused, if you were, with Christianity.

PTJ: Bingo, bingo. There’s a very specific story as to how that happens, involving guys like Carl Hayes and sort of intellectuals that were kind of putting this together and saying that actually like Jesus was a capitalist. So you have that kind of fusion, anti-communism, therefore, capitalism must be a good thing.

The podcast is long-ish, clocking in at 90 minutes. But if this kind of thing interests you, check it out.