Oikophobia—Revisited

Kurt Schlichter is a conservative writer who is not afraid to take strong positions against leftist ideology. When he voices his views, progressives label his comments as alt-Right and bigoted. But Schlichter is not what the trained hamsters in the media call "alt-Right." He is not a racist or a bigot, but he is unafraid to attack the Left with ferocity and humor.

Here's Kurt Schlichter on Donald Trump's clearly stated position that the West has given far more to humanity than it has taken:

Let me throw down this marker: The West is superior to the rest of the world in every significant way, we should aggressively back our allies over our enemies, and the guiding principle of our foreign policy should always be America’s interests. No apologies. No equivocation. No doubt.

What are your questions?

Well, if you're a normal American, you won't have any questions - these truths are self-evident. But if you're a progressive, you're gonna have a little sissy snit fit like so many libs did in the wake of the President’s triumphant Warsaw speech. There’s one thing that always sets them off - uttering the truth/heresy that not only is Western civilization the best and most advanced culture in the history of humanity, but the United States of America is its greatest manifestation.

The immigrants and refugees get it. Which way are they always headed? North, to the comparative paradise of the Western world, or south, to the hellscape of the Third World? That's a gimme. They are never headed south, and everyone knows it. Yet the left still insists that we stop believing our lying eyes and start believing the liberal Fifth Column of multicultural liars infesting America’s alleged elite.

Except our eyes aren’t lying, and now we have a President who won’t lie either. It makes them nuts.

Schlichter's comments are driven by the Left's reaction to Donald Trump's speech in Poland—a speech that defended the West and suggested that our values and accomplishments should be vigorously defended. Many on the Left, not surprisingly, had a different view, calling the speech an "alt-Right, white nationalist" screed. Heh.

Rod Dreher responds:

You can say this for Donald Trump: he’s great at useless provocation, but sometimes his provocations are helpful by what they force his opponents to reveal. The Warsaw speech was stunning in this way. I’m glad I read it before I read any of the left-liberal comment on it, else I might have thought it had been drafted by Dr. Goebbels ...

... An American president, standing in the capital of a nation that suffered in the last century the domination of two tyrannies — Nazi and Communist — that tried to eradicate its culture, a nation whose Catholic faith kept its spirit alive and led to its rebirth — proclaims that there are things unique and valuable about Western civilization, and that we should remember those things, affirm them, and defend them.

The shocking thing here is that this is controversial at all. It shows how decadent we have become.

Dreher goes on to quote a variety of leftist commentators whose unhinged accusations of "white nationalist rhetoric" or "white nationalist dog whistles" would have you think that Trump was a card carrying member of the KKK.

As Dreher correctly states, Trump Derangement Syndrome causes members of the Left to allow their masks to fall. For just a moment, we get to see behind those masks, and what becomes painfully obvious is a sometimes vicious contempt for the countries they live in and the majority of the people who populate them, for the established culture and prevailing laws in those countries. But why do so many leftists feel that way?

A number of years ago, James Taranto of the WSJ popularized an obscure word—oikophobia.

To provide context, some may recall the uproar in 2010 when Muslims tried to place a mosque near the site of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack. At the time Taranto wrote:

If you think it's offensive for a Muslim group to exploit the 9/11 atrocity, you're an anti-Muslim bigot and un-American to boot. It is a claim [made by the left] so bizarre, so twisted, so utterly at odds with common sense that it's hard to believe anyone would assert it except as some sort of dark joke. Yet for the past few weeks, it has been put forward, apparently in all seriousness, by those who fancy themselves America's best and brightest, from the mayor of New York all the way down to Peter Beinart.

After examining the manner in which many progressives defended the mosque at the time, he wrote:

The British philosopher Roger Scruton has coined a term to describe this attitude: oikophobia. Xenophobia is fear of the alien; oikophobia is fear of the familiar: "the disposition, in any conflict, to side with 'them' against 'us', and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably 'ours.' " What a perfect description of the pro-mosque left.

Scruton was writing in 2004, and his focus was on Britain and Europe, not America. But his warning about the danger of oikophobes--whom he amusingly dubs "oiks"--is very pertinent on this side of the Atlantic today, and it illuminates how what are sometimes dismissed as mere matters of "culture" tie in with economic and social policy:

The oik repudiates national loyalties and defines his goals and ideals against the nation, promoting transnational institutions over national governments, accepting and endorsing laws that are imposed on us from on high by the EU or the UN, though without troubling to consider Terence's question, and defining his political vision in terms of universal values that have been purified of all reference to the particular attachments of a real historical community.

The oik is, in his own eyes, a defender of enlightened universalism against local chauvinism. And it is the rise of the oik that has led to the growing crisis of legitimacy in the nation states of Europe. For we are seeing a massive expansion of the legislative burden on the people of Europe, and a relentless assault on the only loyalties that would enable them voluntarily to bear it. The explosive effect of this has already been felt in Holland and France. It will be felt soon everywhere, and the result may not be what the oiks expect.

There is one important difference between the American oik and his European counterpart. American patriotism is not a blood-and-soil nationalism but an allegiance to a country based in an idea of enlightened universalism. Thus our oiks masquerade as--and may even believe themselves to be--superpatriots, more loyal to American principles than the vast majority of Americans, whom they denounce as "un-American" for feeling an attachment to their actual country as opposed to a collection of abstractions.

Yet the oiks' vision of themselves as an intellectual aristocracy violates the first American principle ever articulated: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . ."

This cannot be reconciled with the elitist notion that most men are economically insecure bitter clinging intolerant bigots who need to be governed by an educated elite. Marxism Lite is not only false; it is, according to the American creed, self-evidently false. That is why the liberal elite finds Americans revolting.

Kurt Schlichter describes a problem that James Taranto identified 7 years ago. Rod Dreher notes its present day manifestation. Maybe the Left should add just one more "phobia" to the long list of epithets that they hurl at others—"oikophobia." And then ... they should apply it to themselves.