I just finished Ian Buruma’s “Letter from Amsterdam.” Buruma covers roughly the same ground as Christopher Caldwell in “Holland Daze.” Whereas Caldwell focuses on the intellectual landscape, Buruma, Dutch by birth, brings first-hand narrative reporting to bear, along with a closer look at Mohammed Bouyeri, Theo van Gogh’s twenty-six-year-old assailant. The best part involves Buruma’s visit to a social-studies class. The students’ wide-ranging discussion reads as admirably free of cant.
One of the black students made fun of the Muslims’ preoccupation with “identity” and said, “Moroccan, Egyptian, Algerian-who the fuck cares. They’re all thieves.” The others laughed, even some of the Muslims.
Fortunately, no cataclysmic rumble ensued-a hopeful sign in itself. Buruma’s article closes with a paean to Dutch liberalism:
After the war, and especially since the nineteen-sixties, the Dutch prided themselves on having built an oasis of tolerance, a kind of Berkeley writ large, where people were free to do their own thing. Liberated, at last, from the strictures of religion and social conformity, the Dutch, especially in Amsterdam, frolicked in the expectation that the wider world would not disturb their perfect democracy in the polders. Now the turbulent world has come to Holland at last, crashing into an idyll that astonished the citizens of less favored nations. It’s a shame that this had to happen, but naxefveté is the wrong state of mind for defending one of the oldest and most liberal democracies against those who wish to destroy it.
Here one is struck by the elisions, and the stark contrast with Caldwell’s take. Describing the same “oasis of tolerance,” Caldwell notes “that most Dutch people don’t like it,” and that large majorities describe their country as “too tolerant.” The “oasis” derived from the retreat of church authority, and an elite consensus to the effect that libertarian orthodoxy would take its place. The extent to which Dutch democracy has been “perfect,” in Buruma’s description, has been precisely the extent to which it has not been democratic.
And so Buruma’s implicit call for a hardheaded liberalism, shorn of its naxefveté and committed to defending “Berkeley” against the barbarians, is necessarily an appeal to elites. The burghers, after all, never embraced “Berkeley.” Just as the youth revolt in Holland was seen as a “rebellion against church authority,” the ongoing populist revolt represents a rebellion against the “perfect democracy.”
I HAVEN’T GOT TIME FOR THE PAIN: A few weeks ago, Buruma wrote on Iraq, arguing against “perfect democracy,” i.e., rigorously secular democracy, and for at least the possibility of “Islamic democracy.” Drawing on the writing of Reuel Gerecht and Noah Feldman, Buruma makes a persuasive case. So persuasive a case, in fact, that he might consider applying it to Holland:
It is always tricky for an agnostic in religious affairs to argue for the importance of organized religion, but I would argue not that more people should be religious or that democracy cannot survive without God, but that the voices of religious people should be heard. The most important condition for a functional democracy is that people take part. If religious affiliations provide the necessary consensus to play by common rules, then they should be recognized. A Sharia-based Shiite theocracy, even if it were supported by a majority, would not be a democracy. Only if the rights and interests of the various ethnic and religious groups are negotiated and compromises reached could you speak of a functioning democracy.
That negotiation and compromise were preempted by elite consensus in Holland now seems clear. Democracy failed. To say that it’s only now under threat, now that the exclusion and alienation of an immigrant class has reached a crisis point, is to ignore the deeper tensions.
Which is one reason why the liberal disdain of populist conservatism is misplaced. That secular liberals will seek to defeat populist conservatives in argument is a given. But marginalizing concerns over “moral values,” the approach fatefully taken in Holland and elsewhere in Europe, has had ugly consequences all its own. Be careful what you wish for.
This all leads back to Iraq, and Buruma’s sharp and to my mind short-sighted opposition to regime change, but I’m too wordy as it is. And Tylenol PM has me confused. I will say that I’ve had a terrible flu, and that “Street’s Disciple” is excellent.
— Reihan
The Dish 