Mark Levin sees a tension between nationalism and the Enlightenment/Judeo-Christian tradition.

MARK LEVIN: One of the dangers of so-called national conservatism, which has a rather, I don’t know, committed but relatively small following, in my humble opinion, not to put it down, I’m just saying, is that it overlaps with the left. It overlaps with the left. It de-emphasizes individualism. Number one. And number two, it emphasizes, I’m trying to give it a legitimate thumbnail sketch without getting into the deeply, but we can at some point, that each nation state is a separate nation state and that really ought to be the focus, that every state has the right to be what it wishes. See, I have a different view of this. And it’s not globalism. I mean, talk about globalism. Look at all these people investing in Qatar and Saudi Arabia and all the rest of it. Talk about the globalists. Look at all the foreign money that props up some of these podcasters and some of their websites. So I don’t want to hear about globalism with them. Having alliances with countries that have similar or the same interests has been a crucial American objective from the start. It’s crucially important. And there’s nothing wrong with it. There’s nothing wrong with it. But of course we believe in American sovereignty. And one of the reasons we build alliances is to protect America’s sovereignty. Now we should have learned these lessons in the last hundred, hundred and twenty years in these different world wars that we’ve been involved in, as well as other big wars. But apparently some people have not. Nor have they, they learned the lesson on how you avoid big wars. It’s by being the biggest superpower, period. And by having alliances with other countries, including forward bases, so that our territory, our country isn’t hit. Our territories aren’t hit, even on the outskirts and in the Pacific and so forth, as they were by the Japanese. And so they try and contrast individualism and thereby kind of trash in the Enlightenment and the fusion of the Enlightenment with the Judeo-Christian belief system and values, in my view, by talking about the necessity of this nationalism idea. And in terms of strong borders, we emphasize that. In terms of traditional religion and culture, we emphasize that. But they’re very isolationist oriented. Because again, their view is each country has a national identity. But I agree each country has a national identity. They don’t believe that we should be getting involved in these international institutions. I don’t believe we should be getting involved in these international institutions. We have a Constitution. That’s our governing document. Not anything that comes out of the UN or anybody else for that matter. For that matter. And I support traditional family structures. We support traditional family structures. I think the protectionism, the protectionism, the economic protectionism and economic interventionism is too close skating to the line of the left. I think what we need is a strong and consistent, if not relentless, argument for the free market process. And yes, rugged individualism. Not to the exclusion of the civil society. Of course, we believe in this civil society. We do. And we believe in patriotism and national loyalty and so forth and so on. But we also believe in federalism. That’s one of the great, one of the great aspects of our society. The states existed before the national government. And that was a good thing. Because it created an entirely different approach, an experiment to the organization of government, which has served us well over the, you know, 250 years we’ve been in existence in one form or another. So not into grabbing to what are pseudo-new, they’re not even that new, but the pseudo-new ideologies. You know, national conservatism and so forth and so on, which is an excuse for isolationism in many respects and is an excuse, excuse for crushing federalism much as Woodrow Wilson wanted to do. And it’s an excuse for central government interventionism in the economy. I would suggest to you we have plenty of that and enough of it to the tune of 40 trillion dollars. I would suggest to you that we need the opposite. We need deregulation, further tax cuts, the shrinking of the central government. We’re not going to survive this economically in the economy. Should it go down, we’ll take down the entire society. You saw what happened just during COVID. It didn’t take much. Your civil liberties were under attack right across the board. And in the blue states they were the worst, in the blue cities they were the worst of the worst. It didn’t matter what the science said, it mattered that certain people said what the science said. I think that’s a fair way to put it. And so that’s something we’re going to be battling, I suppose, in the Republican primary, the upcoming primary. There is this movement, as I said, and they want to be paid in as the sort of the patriots, as the patriotic movement. They’re not the patriotic movement, in my view. They’re not. I believe they basically have taken the Pat Buchanan ideology and they’ve kind of dressed it up somewhat, dressed it up somewhat. And I understand they have used the Edmund Burke Foundation as one of the points to project from. And I’m a big Edmund Burke fan, but I think I’m more Edmund Burke than some of these other people, quite frankly. And again, I’m not attacking them, they have their view and we all mean the right thing. And I’m just very concerned, you know, it was Mises who said, we all sound like Marxists now in this endless effort at intervention. I don’t care who’s at it at this point, unless the purpose of the intervention is to deregulate, is to slash taxes, is to reorganize the priorities of the government away from redistribution in a welfare state. And we can have some of that, obviously, but we can also reorient a lot of it in a way that supports our military, our infrastructure, all the things the government is supposed to do, not the things the government’s not supposed to do. And I would need a better understanding of the extent to which we are to abandon the Constitution for this interventionism. I love the way some of these guys point to the, you know, Federalist Papers, which suggests to me they haven’t actually read them beginning to end. Of course, I’ve damn near memorized them beginning to end. They’ll pull out a sentence or a paragraph here from from one of the essays, and they were essays, and they think that proves their point. It doesn’t prove their point at all. Not in the least, from what I’ve read and what I’ve heard, best as I can tell. Now this Neo-Marxism that they talk about and they write about is certainly in the Democrat Party. It’s not in the Republican Party, but I get the feel for this in National Conservatism. And look, National Conservatism is, as I say, it’s not a new idea. There are different degrees to it. Some are more aggressive, some are softer. But you may have heard of a man named Theodore Roosevelt who wrote an entire, effectively a treatise on the subject. In fact, I have it among my many many many many books, probably thousands at this point, and I cited it in my book, Rediscovering Americanism. You know, this word Americanism wasn’t used all that much until I wrote that book. Now again, everybody’s saying, we gotta defend Americanism. That’s good that people say that, don’t you think? The question is, what do they mean by it? What do they mean by it? Americanism.

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