Daily Archives: August 11, 2021

The dream of a Bible theme park died in Florida last week, after 20 years of innovation and renovationnot to mention cash infusions, cost cuts, and rate hikesfailed to make the Holy Land Experience financially sustainable.

The 14-acre park in was once conceived as Christian competition for Walt Disney World. Evangelical visionaries imagined a family entertainment experience that could pull at least a portion of Orlandos annual visitors from the mouses magic kingdom to the kingdom of God.

But it never quite worked. The reenactments of resurrection, scale miniature model of first-century Jerusalem, animatronic John Wycliffe, and the Trin-i-tee mini golf course were never enough. While the living biblical museum attracted attention, controversy, and not a few visitors willing to pay the $17, then $29, and ultimately $50 ticket prices, the Holy Land Experience couldnt find a firm financial footing.

For the last few years of its existence, it had annual operating deficits of about $5 million, with no one willing to step up to cover that as a ministry cost.

Religious anthropologist James Bielo, who studies places that materialize the Bible, said the Holy Land Experience was arguably the most famous of the biblical replicas in the US, even though it always struggled to survive.

The ones that stay on the landscape are kind of the exception, he said. Holy Land recreations typically pop up in a kind of visionary fit. Someone gets excited, they pour a lot of resources into it, theres a big opening, but in five, 10, 20 years, its gone.

Bielo has cataloged about 50 parks that have ceased to exist, including a drive-through Bible garden, a Book of Job park, a Golgotha Fun Park, and a biblical history wax museum.

The Holy Land Experience came to an end on August 2, when it was sold to a Seventh-day Adventist health care company for $32 million. There is no indication the Adventists are interested in attempting their own version of a theme park.

AdventHealth has not announced specific plans for the site but said in an official statement it will make a significant investment in redeveloping the property to bring enhanced health care services to the community. The company currently runs 29 hospitals in Florida, as well as health care facilities in eight other states.

The Holy Land Experience started as the brainchild of Marvin Rosenthal, a Jewish convert and ordained Baptist minister who called himself a Christian Hebrew.

Rosenthal was raised in Philadelphia and converted to Christianity after his mother, who ran a candy store, started reading the New Testament. He saw her life transformed and wanted what she had.

After graduating from Philadelphia College of the Biblenow Cairn UniversityRosenthal was ordained as a Baptist and started an independent ministry focused on end times theology and the need for Jews to accept Jesus.

In 1989, Rosenthal and his family moved to Florida and started the ministry Zions Hope. When Zions Hope sold some property to the state for the construction of a highway, Rosenthal was moved to invest the profits into a replication of the Holy Land, which would allow people to experience Israel as it was in Jesus time

We hope all visitors will come and see the majesty of God. Or at least go home and dust off their Bibles, Rosenthal told a Florida newspaper. Ive come to appreciate how helpful it is for people not only to read about some of the great truths of the Bible, but to see some of the great places, the environments, the sounds, the touches, the smells.

The 14-acre park was building on a tradition of Holy Land recreations, according to Bielo. They come from a variety of Christian perspectives, with some more evangelistic and others more educational. The first in the US was built by liberal Christians in Chautauqua, New York, in 1874.

Other locations followed, from New Jersey to Arkansas to California, and there was something of a boom of Holy Land miniatures and roadside attractions with the expansion of car culture and summer road trips in the mid-20th century. There were at least 10 new biblical parks built in the 1950s, eight more in the 60s, and another seven in the 70s.

The Holy Land Experience was the first opened in the 21st century. Rosenthal, however, said the experience would take visitors out of time.

They will leave the 21st century behind and embark on a journey that is unequalled anywhere in the world, he told reporters in 2001. It will be an experience that is educational, historical, theatrical, inspirational, and evangelical.

The theme park cost $16 million to open, and Zions Hope contributed additional funds to cover expenses. Rosenthal estimated annual operating costs of more than $3 million and said he thought he needed 180,000 to 200,000 people paying a $17 cover charge (plus $5 for parking) to make ends meet.

The grand opening received national publicitysome generated by Jewish activists who said the Holy Land Experience was designed to covert Jews.

Irv Rubin, chair of the Jewish Defense League, compared the theme park to the Holocaust: There are two ways you can murder Jews, he told the media. Physically, like Auschwitz, and spiritually, the way of Marvin Rosenthal.

Rubin was arrested, a short time later, on charges that he conspired to bomb a mosque in California and the office of US Congressman Darrell Issa. (Rubin died by suicide in 2002 while awaiting trial in a Los Angeles prison.)

As the controversy over Rosenthals messianic Christianity faded, it was replaced by a clash over taxes.

Local authorities insisted the Holy Land Experience, as a theme park, should pay about $160,000 per year in taxes. Rosenthal and his attorneys countered that it was a religious nonprofit and should be tax exempt.

The struggle continued in the courts until 2006 when then-Governor Jeb Bush signed a law that carved out an exemption for theme parks that displayed biblical manuscripts and waived admission at least one day a year. The Holy Land Experience, which had a special exhibit with a Gutenberg Bible, a replica of Pilgrims Progress author John Bunyans jail cell (with the original key), and an $80,000 animatronic Bible translator John Wycliffe, started offering free admission one or two days per year.

Despite the tax break, however, and about a quarter of a million annual visitors, the Holy Land Experience could not break even. It just cost more to run than Rosenthal calculated. By 2007, the park was $8 million in debt and required regular gifts from the family of Robert Van Kampen, the millionaire-investor-turned-Bible-collector who died in 1999.

The theme park was saved from its dire financial predicament by Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN). Cofounders and televangelists Paul and Jan Crouch bought the Holy Land Experience in 2007. They planned to use it as a studio and a set for new television productions, promote the tourist attraction at little cost to Christians who watched TBN, and cut expenses to make the park financially sustainable.

In the first year, they laid off about a quarter of the staff and outsourced some of the more expensive maintenance, including cleaning and landscaping. They increased the number of visitors by about 25 percent, freshened up some of the attractions, and added new ones. Visitors could now get their picture taken so it looked like they were walking on water with an actor portraying Jesus. And they could play putt-putt around Bible-story dioramas at the mini golf course dubbed Trin-i-tee.

During the first TV show broadcast from the Holy Land Experience, Paul Crouch explained how it would be like a faith-based version of Universal Studios and called the theme park our latest miracle. Jan Crouchwho took on the day-to-day operation of the park as her personal projectcried with joy until her mascara ran.

Financially, however, the Holy Land Experience still required lots and lots of cash. In 2010, TBN put more than $40 million into it. In 2011, another $23 million. In 2012, TBN stopped raising money with telethons, after much criticism of the fundraising practice, and cut support to the theme park to about $2 million per year.

At the same time, ticket sales started falling. From a height of about 250,000 visitors, it dropped to 180,000 paying adults in 2013 and then just continued to decline. Tax records show nearly $9 million in ticket sales in 2014 dropped to $8.5 million the next year, and down to $7.1 million the year after that, when Jan Crouch died.

The parks financial straits did not improve with new TBN management after the Crouches. Ticket sales dropped to $5.5 million in 2018 and then plummeted in 2020. Attendance was down by about 50 percent before COVID-19, and then the park was shut down by the pandemic.

Orlando is a kind of fantasy heaven, where imaginative dreams become reality, wrote Mark I. Pinsky, former reporter for the Orlando Sentinel. Less well known is that Orlando is also a place where ambitious dreams sometimes die hard, especially when entertainment and Christian religion are combined.

After 20 years of trying, the Holy Land Experience could not stop losing money. It could not find firm financial footing.

The Holy Land Experience had long been criticized for trivializing faith to appeal to the masses. Timothy Beal, author of Roadside Religion, said the actual physical place lacked personality and soul. Burke Long, author of Imagining the Holy Land, said the theme park was an example of something deep in the American culture that prefers the fake to the authentic.

But in the end, the Holy Land replica in Orlando wasnt preferred by enough people to sustain the cost of the dream of a Bible-based theme park. In August 2021, it closed for good.

See more here:

The Holy Land Experience Never Made It to the Financial Promised Lan... | News & Reporting - ChristianityToday.com

Welcome to Corridors. I'm your host, Nick Taylor-Vaisey. This week, a spate of federal appointments is the latest sign of well, you know what's coming. We meet one of Canada's newest senators on her home turf. And Erin O'Toole and Jagmeet Singh have quietly spent the last month crisscrossing the country.

OUR SPIDEY SENSES ARE TINGLING Sure, there's nothing remarkable about judges being appointed in the dead of summer. Justice Minister David Lametti endured a fraught spring in the House of Commons. Maybe there was simply pent-up demand to fill vacancies on the bench. But governments like to show off all their productivity when it's time to hit the campaign trail.

So maybe that explains Lametti's midsummer spree last Friday that delivered four new judges in Alberta, four to the Federal Court, two in Newfoundland and Labrador, two in Ontario, and one each to New Brunswick, Saskatchewan, the Tax Court, and the Federal Court of Appeal.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also shook up the senior ranks of the public service. He named a new federal lead for "proof of vaccine credentials" and promoted key pandemic performers (see Arianne Reza, a PPE and vaccine procurement workhorse).

The federal order-in-council database lists 35 other appointments to various tribunals, advisory boards and crown corps all dated Aug. 4.

That hubbub in officialdom, the kind of stuff governments aren't allowed to do during election campaigns, followed Trudeau's latest Senate appointments. A July 29 press release introduced the nation to five new senators including Alberta's Karen Sorensen, who resigned a gig she loved as mayor of Banff to jump into the Ottawa bubble.

If an election doesn't get called soon, it'll be downright weird at this point.

HOW TO MAKE A SENATOR POLITICO caught up with Sorensen on the streets of the iconic town, surrounded by craggy peaks and teeming with tourists in a reopened province, where she worked at town hall for three terms as mayor and two as a councillor. She's likely the only parliamentarian ever to list a home address in a national park.

Karen Sorensen is former mayor of Banff, new senator from Alberta. | Courtesy the Senate of Canada

Why apply? Sorensen says she first applied for an Alberta seat in 2019, when she was partway through her final term as mayor. She'd been approached by "various parties" provincially and federally, but wasn't attracted to partisan life. The lure of an independent Senate seat was "the real selling feature."

The vetting: Sorensen learned last fall that the government was finally sorting through applications. She was on vacation in Victoria in July when two women from the Prime Minister's Office gave her a ring. They asked "lots of questions about my personal life, my financial life, my social life." (She had to admit to three speeding tickets in university.)

The PM's minders also quizzed her on such policy issues as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and gun control. "They weren't looking to see if you lined up [with the government], and I would stress that. " It was more of a knowledge test, she said, because senators deal with such diverse public policy.

The call: A PMO organizer texted Sorensen, who was then renting a cottage on Salt Spring Island, on July 22 with another request for a conversation. They settled on the next afternoon, and Sorensen and her husband were in a parking lot near an Abbotsford brewery when she got on the line with Trudeau.

He joked that he wondered where people from Banff took vacations, explained his views on the importance of the Senate, offered her the gig, and told her she couldn't tell a soul until it was public. (She told her husband and mother.)

"We hung up the phone, and my husband said to me, 'Want to get a beer?'"

The backlash: Alberta Premier Jason Kenney lashed out at Sorensen's appointment. His province holds Senate elections and expects the feds to call on the winners. Sorensen had this to say about the premier's sniping: "The Senate appointment process is designed to move towards a less partisan and a more independent Upper Chamber, which I support. In my opinion, this helps the Senate provide the intended 'second sober thought' to proposed legislation and representing regional and minority interests."

What's next: Sorensen is in boot camp this week, sorting out IT issues and learning everything she can about the various Senate parliamentary groups. She's not planning to move to Ottawa full-time, like most senators. Her husband is a financial planner in Banff, where every resident is eligible to live there only under strict criteria.

FOLLOW THE LEADERS Justin Trudeau gets loads of press for his cross-country pre-election jaunts. The power of the purse is always newsworthy. A prime minister who carries the federal checkbook makes headlines. But Erin O'Toole and Jagmeet Singh are hitting the road from coast to coast all the same. And they're taking photographers.

He's running: The Tory leader is, er, fond of the mid-jog photoshoot. He went for a Sunday run with MP Alain Rayes in Saint-Hyacinthe, Que. On Saturday, he traced a scenic route through Old Quebec with Alupa Clarke, a former MP who chaired O'Toole's leadership campaign in the province (and later scored a taxpayer-funded C$72,000 contract). O'Toole's Quebec swing included stops in Brome-Missisquoi, where the Conservatives are a longshot, and Chicoutimi-Le Fjord, where Richard Martel is the incumbent.

O'Toole came to Quebec from Atlantic Canada, where he set a pace around the waterfront in Saint John with Tory candidate Mel Norton, the city's former mayor. He chatted with fishermen in North Rustico, P.E.I., where longtime Liberal Wayne Easter isn't running and the local Tory candidate is a banking exec and triathlete (cue another photo-op). July also saw O'Toole visit St. John's (he laced up there, too), hit up the Calgary Stampede, made the rounds in British Columbia oh, and put on his sneakers in Regina.

Focus groups must love this stuff. Of course, O'Toole's not the first runner to make his exercise routine part of his personal brand. Recall Kathleen Wynne's "Never Stop" ad from 2017. That trick didn't work for Wynne in her eventual showdown with Doug Ford. O'Toole's success will be measured by what he runs on. Pavement won't be enough.

O'Toole is now back in Ontario, where he Monday pledged high-speed internet for every Canadian by 2025. He made the promise in Belleville, where the Tories lost a squeaker in 2019. He was in Oakville yesterday, where Liberal Anita Anand will be hard to topple.

Jag-meeting the nation: The NDP leader was in Kamloops, B.C., at the end of July, where he met the chief and council of Tkemlps te Secwepemc and spoke from the site where hundreds of unmarked graves were recently discovered. Singh toured an emergency operations centre in Penticton with incumbent Richard Cannings, and met with Joan Phillip, his party's standard-bearer down Highway 97C in Merritt. The pair was joined by Grand Chief Phillip of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs.

Why B.C.? New Democrats are hoping to make gains where their issues might play well, and climate change and reconciliation are priorities for west-coasters. The NDP is already competitive in the region, and subtle vote shifts could pay dividends.

Singh took two years to visit New Brunswick, an oversight that forced him to deliver a no-nonsense apology at the outset of the 2019 campaign on a visit to Bathurst. Well, Singh was there on Monday introduced at a presser by local legend Yvon Godin, a New Democrat who held Acadie-Bathurst for 19 years before the leader hopped to P.E.I. for two days of events.

Singh fired off a letter to Trudeau Monday that dared the PM not to call an election.

NOMINATION CENSUS POLITICO's Zi-Ann Lum is keeping count as Canadas major parties secure their candidates. Here are the standings, with any change since last week in parentheses.

Conservative: 289 (+14)Liberal: 240 (+15)NDP: 165 (+39)Greens: 114 (+17)Bloc Qubcois: 41 (+1)

With an election call possible any day now, each party slowly builds a full slate of candidates some faster than others. | Nick Taylor-Vaisey/AP Photo

Tweeting about election speculation? Nick and Zi-Ann's DMs are open.

THIS JUST IN A Chinese court found a Canadian entrepreneur guilty of espionage Wednesday in a case at the nexus of nearly 1,000 days of frayed relations between Ottawa and Beijing. The court in Dandong sentenced Michael Spavor to 11 years in prison. The ruling includes a deportation order, though the timing of when that would apply is not clear. Early this morning, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken joined Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in condemning the decision. POLITICO's Andy Blatchford is following developments.

NORTH STAR Yukon's top doctor is jumping into politics. Brendan Hanley is running for the Liberals in a riding recently vacated by longtime fixture Larry Bagnell, who eked out a win in 2019.

The governing party has been busy behind the scenes. Jenna Sudds, Ottawa's deputy mayor, scored a controversial appointment in Kanata-Carleton to replace incumbent Karen McCrimmon. Both outgoing MPs made their futures clear only days ago.

Watch for another name to fill the void left by Adam Vaughan in downtown Toronto (the Star has a lead on that one).

BANG AND WHIMPER Hundreds of cars lined up at the Peace Arch crossing in Surrey, B.C., on Monday the first time eased restrictions allowed Americans entry through Canadas land border in 17 months (fully vaxxed travelers only). The flash of 90-minute wait-time traffic came and went, a sign of hope for B.C.s tourism industry. By Tuesday, the crossing was mostly empty.

Pacific pandemic privilege(s): Eased land border restrictions come as Covid cases are rising in the province. In interior cities such as Kelowna, a region where tourism is big business, outbreaks account for at least half of B.C.s cases. In parts of downtown Vancouver this week, business looked normal. The province dropped its mask mandate on July 1 so some restaurants dont require servers to wear masks while serving indoor diners.

THE MOD CLUB Nobody knows where it'll happen or exactly when or how much the feds are ponying up, but the manufacturer of a leading mRNA vaccine manufacturer says its first foreign plant will be built in Canada. Innovation Minister Franois-Philippe Champagne and Moderna CEO Stphane Bancel made the announcement Tuesday in Montreal.

The money quote: Bancel delivered a gift to Liberals about to strike out on the campaign trail. "Whether it's a small outbreak, or a big pandemic, like the one we just saw God forbid Canada will be ready. We'll be ready on Canadian soil to make, in a matter of months, a new vaccine for a new emerging virus to protect the Canadian population." Champagne might well be popping a bottle of his namesake bubbly tonight.

This week, Corridors asks: Is now a bad time for a federal election, especially given spikes in Covid cases and rampant wildfires in some parts of Canada?

NDP strategist Kathleen Monk says while no one wants an election, the PM wont be penalized for calling one. | Courtesy of Kathleen Monk

Kathleen Monk, principal of Monk + Associates and NDP strategist: Jagmeet [Singh] wrote a letter [asking Governor General Mary Simon to refuse Trudeau if he asks her to dissolve Parliament]. On all the political shows, I was asked a million times about it. And Liberal Twitter went crazy. I felt people couldn't see the forest for the trees. They were just trying to divert to this process point.

I'm just like, guys, have you talked to a normal person ever? All these people in the interior of B.C., they're not thinking about this at all. People are just seeing family for the first time.

I don't think [Trudeau] will be punished for it. I think that that's also the benefit of going in August. It's seven to 10 days of How could you dare call an election? And then it drops. And we're just talking about issues at that point. I think nobody wants an election, but I don't think he'll be punished for calling it.

Karen Sorensen, senator for Alberta: I guess I would push back and say, well, and then whats the next thing? It has been a crazy time, but our experience here is there are fires burning every summer. Maybe we need to address that. The pandemic isnt over. Do you want to wait another six months or a year until thats looked after?

When is the right time? If its not those things, its a flood, or the oil industry collapsing and people are going out of business. Look back in history. Was there ever a good time to have an election?

It feels now like more of the country is suffering for really different reasons. But when it comes down to things like fire and flooding, have an election and lets start paying attention to those issues.

Who's up: The Liberal child care agenda

A vacationing Trudeau ceded the floor to Ahmed Hussen, the social development minister, for this week's blockbuster announcement in Manitoba: C$1.2 billion in federal cash for 23,000 new full-time spaces in five years. A provincial government not afraid to treat Ottawa with hostility simply copied and pasted the federal press release. It's a big win for the Liberals, who've now inked child care deals with eight premiers including one from "The Resistance." Only three holdouts remain: Jason Kenney, Scott Moe and Doug Ford.

Who's down: Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister

Manitoba signed onto the federal child care plan on Monday. On Tuesday, Premier Brian Pallister said he won't seek another term in office. He didn't say when he'd step down, but wanted to leave plenty of time before the next election expected in 2023. "I believe this will provide sufficient time not only for party members to choose a new leader, but for Manitobans to get to know that new leader and new premier." Pallister was the second-least popular preem in the country last month. His approval rating has languished in the mid-30s all year.

Corridors is a new weekly newsletter for MPs, lobbyists, executives, activists and any readers who are interested in whats going on around Parliament Hill. Every Wednesday we will look at the people pulling the levers of power in Ottawa and the questions that are influencing decisions on Parliament Hill and in the provinces. Join the conversation! You can email us at [emailprotected], [emailprotected], [emailprotected], [emailprotected].

The Hubs Sean Speer talks to Conservative MP Mike Lake on persistence, public policy and happy hour Zooms. His advice to incoming MPs: Read the room, and the whole room. Not just the Liberal, Conservative or NDP room, but read the room that is Canada.

How are voters feeling about this election? To quote pollster Darrell Bricker: As the kids like to say, meh.

It isnt going well between Trudeau and Joe Biden. In fact its barely going, Paul Wells writes in a Macleans feature on the PMs role in the world.

The premier episode of Curse of Politics is here thats the spinoff podcast starring The Herle Burly Political Panel.

We also enjoyed the latest episode of the Backbench especially around the 27-minute mark when former Liberal MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes shared some advice she offered to Conservative MP Garnett Genuis.

McKenna: Net zero isnt a 'get out of jail free card' for polluters. Privacy watchdog investigating Liberals over use of facial recognition technology. Canada opens border to fully vaxxed Americans, U.S. is not there yet. Time to get scared: Worlds scientists say disastrous climate change is here. Senate passes bipartisan infrastructure bill but what comes next won't be easy.

In LEGO, a tribute to Conservative MPs who got private members bills adopted by Parliament in 2021. | Courtesy of @PoliLego

Spotted: Conservative MPs Len Webber, Richard Bragdon, Kevin Waugh, Larry Macguire and Matt Jeneroux in LEGO. Hedy Fry on TikTok to celebrate her 80th birthday Ralph Goodale, high commissioner for Canada in the UK, sporting colors from home Niagara Falls in blue in honor of former Ontario premier Bill Davis. (And in case you missed it, Sarah Polley's Twitter thread on Davis is lovely.) CBC reporter Meagan Fitzpatrick back in Washington for a few weeks ... Perry Bellegarde celebrated with a surprise retirement gift, a portrait by visual artist Ricky Fraser.

Want to connect on LinkedIn? Find Nick here.

Birthdays: Happy early birthday to Liberal MP Scott Simms. Hes 52 on Thursday. Sen. Mohamed-Iqbal Ravalia will be 64 on Aug. 15. Former NDP MP Irene Mathyssen turns 70 on Aug. 16, the same day prime mixister George Stroumboulopoulos celebrates 49 and former opposition leader Stockwell Day turns 71.

Movers and shakers: Eleanore Catenaro, ex of the PMO, has joined Perreault Writing Co. with Brttany Perreault, who worked on Trudeau communications from 2014 to 2020 The Qubec Government Office in New York is on the hunt for a temporary commercial affairs attach.

Media mentions: The journalism school at Carleton shared a roster of new instructors, a list that includes Garvia Bailey, Jennifer Chen, Charelle Evelyn, Chris Goldrick, Stefan Keyes, Amar Khan, Katherine Laidlaw, Gabriela Perdomo, Hannah Sung and Fangliang Xu.

Rassi Nashalik, the first host of CBC Norths first daily Inuktitut news show, is being inducted into the CBC News Hall of Fame. James Wattie is leaving CBC Toronto with destination TBA. Pratyush Dayal just joined CBC Saskatoon.

Farewells: Linda Frum will retire from the Senate at the end of the month. Former prime minister Stephen Harper was among those who praised her service and philanthropic contributions.

Last week first: Thirty-three years ago, Wayne Gretzky was traded from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings. The arena where he led a dynasty, the Northlands Coliseum, sat in the former riding of Edmonton East in 1988. Five parties repped that district over the next dozen years: Progressive Conservatives, New Democrats, Liberals, Reformers and the Canadian Alliance. Kudos to Michael Read, Nate Manis, and Alice Funke for naming them all.

This week's question: Swing ridings will get all the glory when the next federal campaign is on. Name the nailbiter to end all nailbiters: the riding with the smallest margin of victory in the 2019 election. Three hints: It's west of Thunder Bay. A Conservative came out on top. And it's a bit "moody" as far as constituencies go.

Send your answer to [emailprotected]

With thanks this week to Zi-Ann Lum in Vancouver and editor Sue Allan.

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It would be weird not to have an election - Politico

Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel, by Omri Boehm, New York Review Books, 2021.

In 1974, a small group of American Jewish leftists who considered themselves Zionists, named Breira, called for a two-state solution as a path to resolving to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The idea of a Palestinian state standing alongside a Jewish state was not unprecedented; nearly three decades earlier, it had been endorsed by the UN General Assembly through the 1947 Partition Plan. But at the time of Breiras emergence, this position was viewed as so radical that, by 1976, the group was effectively crushed by the American Jewish establishment.

Shortly afterward, in 1978, the organization Peace Now was formed in Israel, offering liberal Zionists an ostensible movement toward a two-state solution. Like Breira, Peace Now was also considered out of the Israeli mainstream in its early years, and most liberal Zionists did not sign on. But by the 1980s, the two-state solution slowly made its way into the belly of the liberal Zionist base. By the end of that decade, it became its dogma, and by the 2000s, its raison detre.

Today, it is not provocative to say that the liberal Zionism espoused by groups like Breira and Peace Now is in a deep crisis. Not only has reality seemingly left the ideology behind, but the ideology itself has not really offered any new ideas in 30 years. The two-state solution is effectively dead, yet to abandon it is to cut out the very core of liberal Zionist identity much like Chabad coming to terms with the fact that their beloved rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, is not the messiah. And so, the dogma continues because it must, because that is how dogma functions; it is impervious to facts on the ground.

All of this and more is addressed at length in Omri Boehms new book, Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel. Boehm argues that slogans such as Jewish and democratic and two states have become empty clichs, devolving the conversation around Israel into a shouting match between chauvinistic Zionists and the anti-Zionist left. For Boehm, liberal Zionists have largely been sidelined because the ideology they promote cannot square with the reality we see. For all their claims to liberal values, they are in fact defending an illiberal state, and cannot quite come to terms with that.

Peace Now activists protest outside the opening of an ancient road at the City of David archaeological site in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, June 30, 2019. (Photo by Flash90)

Boehm, an associate professor of philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York, was raised in a small town in northern Israel that was established as part of a project to Judaize the Galilee, which he describes as enable[ing] the government to confiscate the land of Arab Israelis [Palestinian citizens of Israel], check the natural growth of their villages, and disrupt territorial continuity between Arab Israeli towns. A scholar of early modern continental philosophy (specifically Spinoza, Kant, and Decartes), Boehm, who considers himself a Zionist, has also written on Jewish topics and issues related to Israel-Palestine.

The purpose of Haifa Republic is to offer an alternative to a liberal Zionism that Boehm believes is moribund in large part because it cannot find a foothold in a world where the two-state solution has turned into a nostalgia for an idea whose time has passed. Yet Boehm suggests that liberal Zionism can still be salvaged if it abandons its two-state dogma and returns to its roots not its post-1967 roots, but rather those before statism became the dominant vision for Jewish self-determination. In effect, he argues for a solution closer to what today would be considered a binational confederation, an idea that was not only popular among liberals before World War II, but at times tacitly supported even among reactionaries like Zeev Jabotinsky.

In his book My Promised Land, Ari Shavit, who fashions himself a liberal Zionist, presents a stark choice that many of his ideological compatriots have neither quite absorbed nor admitted: either reject Zionism because of Lydda (a city whose Palestinian citizens were expelled en masse and some executed in 1948), or accept Zionism along with Lydda. Boehm takes this challenge seriously: Zionism, he argues, needs to be transformed or it can never survive in any liberal form. That is the spine of Haifa Republic: re-envisioning Zionism as a binational project which, he claims, was its original intent.

For Boehm, Israel as presently construed (and here he does not only mean as an occupying power) can never achieve liberal ends because it is no longer a liberal project, but an ethno-nationalist one. The Jewishness that Israel seeks to protect is not culture or religion, but Jewish ethnicity, Jewish blood. That is what makes it a nationalist, but hardly a liberal project. While the Palestinians living under military occupation after 1967 are categorized as enemies, Palestinian citizens inside the countrys pre-1967 borders are also constitutively other; they may be citizens of Israel, but as non-Jews, they are not the states priority.

Palestinian citizens of Israel and activists protest against the Jewish Nation-State Law in Tel Aviv, Aug. 11, 2018. (Tomer Neuberg/Flash90)

The inherent incoherence of liberal Zionism, Boehm argues, is that it can only support an illiberal state (accept Zionism along with Lydda) and thus is constantly undermining or attenuating its liberal commitments. The ideologys great fallacy is that 1967 represents the original sin behind Israels present reality, and that the occupation is its central existential problem. But Boehm shows that this is simply not the case. For example, he cites a Dec. 2, 1940 diary entry from Yosef Weitz, a high ranking official in the Jewish National Fund, which states:[1]

Among ourselves it must be clear that there is no room in the country for two peoples if the Arabs leave it, the country will become wide and spacious for us the only solution [after World War II ends] is a Land of Israel, at least a western Land of Israel, without Arabs. There is no room here for compromises.

Boehm also cites Moshe Sharett, Israels first foreign minister who, during a Jewish Agency meeting on May 7, 1944, openly spoke about transferring Palestinian Arabs from a future Jewish state, noting, Transfer can be the crown jewel, the last stage of the political developments, but by no means the starting point.[2] The Haganahs secret Plan Dalet, which gave military officers the right to cleanse, capture, or destroy Palestinian villages at their discretion, is a key part of that legacy.

Israeli historian Benny Morris similarly made this clear decades later in an interview with Shavit for Haaretz in 2004: Of course, Ben Gurion was a transferist, Morris said, without uprooting the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here. In another Haaretz interview with Adi Ofir, Morris compared Israels situation with the American genocide of Native Americans in the nineteenth century hardly a standard commonly evoked in the 2000s, especially by those who experienced genocide themselves. Even with that comparison, Morris would come to defend these egregious policies as unfortunate but necessary evils for Israels creation.

None of these facts are new or contested anymore, and it is worth noting that Palestinian scholars and historians have been making these same arguments with documentarian evidence and testimony for decades, though are often summarily dismissed. Boehm nonetheless cites these sources to make a fundamental point about liberalism: that Israels real problem is not with 1967, but with the illiberal structure upon which the country was founded in 1948. As an aspiring Jewish state, Israel by nature requires the fewest number of non-Jews; others can live in the state, but on the condition that they do not negate, challenge, threaten, or even question its ethnic identity. This vision, he concludes, can never support a liberal project of any kind.

Palestine refugees initially displaced to Beach Camp in Gaza board boats to Lebanon or Egypt during the first Arab-Israeli war, 1949 (UN Archives Photo/Hrant Nakashian)

Boehm is by no means the only Jewish scholar to have understood this contradiction (and many Palestinian scholars, including citizens of Israel, have long arrived at this conclusion). His writing harkens back to Hannah Arendts reflections on the Atlantic City Conference held by the World Jewish Congress in 1944, which she called a turning point in Zionist history. One of the salient features of that conference, occurring in the midst of the genocide of Jews in Europe, was the unanimity of American Zionists in support of statehood. But Arendt responded, [p]olitics dies when unanimity takes over a unanimity that is intolerant toward dissent. The great danger to politics is a homogenization, a leveling out in which differences are not tolerated where loyal opposition is marginalized, suppressed, or violently repressed.[3]

It was in Atlantic City, Arendt argued, where Israels maximalist project was codified: the whole of Palestine, undivided and undiminished became a central part of the Zionist mandate. The existence of a local Arab population was not even mentioned, as if reflexively adopting Israel Zangwills mythic a people without a land for a land without a people. The conference became the unspoken template of modern Israel: Palestinian Arabs existed only as part of the landscape or as individuals, but not as a viable collective in their own right.

A central question underlying Boehms study is: what happened to liberal Zionism? How did the liberal vision of Zionism as Jewish autonomy (and not necessarily sovereignty, a distinction to which I will return below) in a binational political structure turn into defending an illiberal ethnonational state? His answer is both obvious and ominous: the Holocaust. Boehm argues similarly to what Ian Lustik, in his book Paradigm Lost, calls Holocaustia, whereby the genocide serves as the template that justifies and necessitates the states ethno-nationalist outcome.

Readers will understandably be challenged by Boehms dissonant notion that unless Jews can forget the Holocaust, Israel can never embrace a liberal vision of self-determination. But by forgetting, Boehm does not mean to live as if the Holocaust never happened. Holocaust-centrism in Israeli society, as Boehm notes, was not immediate; during the 1950s, the genocide was hardly cited as a raison detre of Israels superstructure. Quite the opposite was true: Holocaust survivors were often viewed as the antithesis of Zionism, remnants of the powerless Jew that Zionism sought to replace.

Israeli soldiers stand below a monument at a ceremony held at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, as Israel marks annual Holocaust Remembrance Day. April 11, 2018. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Rather, Holocaust-centrism began in earnest with Israels trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Here Boehm revisits, though doesnt mention, one of the under-examined aspects of Arendts critique of the trial in her famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt was not opposed to Eichmann being tried or even executed, but she was opposed to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion creating a show trial as an exercise in collective catharsis to make the Holocaust a cornerstone of Israeli identity. Ben-Gurion was quite explicit about this political goal, even telling the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth that the fate of Eichmann the person has no interest for me at all. What is important is the spectacle. One consequence of this spectacle was to ensure that the Holocaust belonged to all Israelis that is, all Jewish Israelis further communicating to Palestinian citizens that Israel was not their country.

What does it mean to forget the Holocaust? For this, Boehm uses the argument proposed by historian and Holocaust survivor Yehuda Elkana in a 1998 Haaretz essay entitled In Praise of Forgetting. Elkana argued that while memory is crucial to any collective identity, if it loses perspective, it also has the potential to paralyze a societys progress. Democracys very existence, he wrote, is endangered when the memory of past victims takes an active part in the democratic procedure.

When genocide becomes the normative criteria for collective identity, Elkana continued, its constituents see the whole world as the enemy, even those who are their own citizens. At that moment, democracy becomes impossible. This worldview led Israeli politicians as disparate as Abba Eban and Yitzhak Shamir to assert that Israels borders are the borders of Auschwitz. The utter incoherence of such a claim that a sovereign state with a modern military is comparable to disempowered masses rotting in a concentration camp is not only grotesque but a sign of deep collective failure.

Boehm compares Elkanas thesis with the contradictory work of the renowned writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. A masterful and prophetic voice against hate and injustice worldwide, Wiesel simply could not evoke that voice when it came to Israel and its policies toward Palestinians. He could not do so, Boehm argues, because he could not get past Holocaust messianism, the theologization of Holocaust memory. Wiesel, for example, never questioned the long-term implications of policies such as Holocaust education in Israeli kindergartens, which New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman quipped would turn Israel into a Yad Vashem with an air force. For Wiesel, the Jews simply became the exception. The world needs to be just; the Jews need to survive.

Boehm does not single out the Jews for needing historical rethinking. The Palestinian Arabs, he argues, also have soul-searching to do and must similarly learn to acknowledge and remember to forget the Nakba. Their own attachment to victimhood, he writes, disables them from joining a liberal project that would affirm their identity in a land for two peoples. One way of doing this is to acknowledge the Holocaust on its own terms. Here Boehm cites Joint List parliamentarian Ahmad Tibi, the first Arab to give a formal address at Israels official Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration in 2010, who spoke passionately about the depravity and trauma of the genocide without mentioning the catastrophe that befell Palestinians. Israeli Jewish leaders, Boehm suggests, should also passionately affirm the Nakba without needing to mention the Holocaust.

Yad Vashem security guard stands at the empty Hall of Names in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, April 19, 2020. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Presently, this idea is almost a utopian fantasy. For much of Israels history, and particularly under the reign of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has been locked into a Holocaust messianism that can only result in ethnonational chauvinism, making Israelis feel that they are always one step away from another genocide. A truly liberal state could never emerge from such anxiety and paranoia.

Arendt recognized this when she opposed Jewish statehood in 1948, and argued that Palestine should go into international receivership for a decade in order to allow the Jews to begin rebuilding their lives in the aftermath of Nazism.[4] She knew then that the power of statehood in the midst of such trauma could never yield a healthy political collective. If Zionism is about the normalization of the Jews, the Holocaust is its opposite; there is nothing more abnormal than Auschwitz. Thus, if the Holocaust continues to drive Zionism, it undermines the entire project.

So what does Boehm suggest? His binational one state is not a fantasy of fully integrated coexistence between Jews and Arabs from the river to the sea, like what we may find with earlier Zionist binationalists such as the members of Brit Shalom. Rather, it is a one-state confederacy of sorts with autonomous regions and one constitution that binds all its citizens together, equally protecting the rights of Jews and Arabs. In short, Boehm is asking Jewish Israelis to abandon exclusive sovereignty over the land of Israel in favor of equal Jewish and Palestinian autonomy. It is basically an alternative to Oslos two-statism, while accepting its basic premises that both peoples deserve self-determination throughout the land.

The distinction between autonomy and sovereignty is an important point for Boehm, who argues that many Zionists, from Jabotinsky to Ben-Gurion, at certain points envisioned the former and not necessarily the latter. Furthermore, he asserts, the idea of granting all Palestinians citizenship in one state is not only a view of the radical left, but also that of the Likudnik Prime Minister Menachem Begin, whose proposed Autonomy Program offered all Palestinians citizenship.

Likud leader Menachem Begin addresses the Knesset, March 10, 1974. (Moshe Milner/GPO/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

It is true that Begins plan was designed to better manage the occupation and not to end it, but Boehm sees in it the beginnings of a path to unraveling the bind that has led to Israeli apartheid. Through his expansive and revised view of Begins autonomy idea, Boehm argues that it doesnt just downgrade Palestinian sovereignty into self-determination; no, it also transforms the nature of sovereignty in Israel expanding it beyond exclusive Jewish sovereignty. A state in which all Palestinians are offered full citizenship is one that has taken the main step towards becoming a republic for all its citizens. Ironically, by implementing citizenship as a way out of the morass of occupation, Boehm is essentially using Begin against Begins own intentions.

Boehm doesnt talk much about the occupation per se, and for good reason. From his perspective, the occupation is de facto over, calling it instead a form of humane apartheid by which I assume he means that Israel has granted some autonomy to the Palestinians under its control, although autonomy on its own neither shifts the power dynamics nor removes the stigma of apartheid. Either way, for Boehm, this system can never square with any liberal vision of a nation-state. The point of his book is thus to look beyond the occupation toward a vision of a liberal democratic future that would level the power dynamic through shared sovereignty.

Boehm does not get mired in the gritty policy details of how this can be implemented on the ground; that is not his area of expertise, and in too many cases, the policy questions often serve as deflections of the intellectual stakes of Israels political future while defending the so-called status quo. For him, the key is for Israel to be willing to curtail some of its Jewish sovereignty by sharing it with the non-Jewish citizenry, which will enable both sides to maintain the autonomy they each desire in order to exercise their respective rights to self-determination. In other words, they should build a form of liberal democracy.

And why Haifa? Boehm claims that Israel too often is divided between Tel Aviv as the Hebrew city and Jerusalem as the Jewish city. Haifa, not often viewed as central to Israels identity, is for him the truly Arab-Jewish city a symbol of what Israel should be. The Haifa port is where many European Jews disembarked, but also where many Palestinians fled for their lives in 1948. It is a symbol of entering and exiting, a transitory space where in practice, albeit not in principle, Israeliness did not completely erase Arabness.

Many Palestinians would question such a rosy view of coexistence in Haifa, past and present. But Boehm nonetheless sees in it a model for a binational future. As he writes, Arab-Jewish politics is the only model for a democratic future in Israel and the only model that propels a country beyond the two-state solution. Many would call this vision post- or even anti-Zionist. Yet Boehm argues that such an alternative is in fact buried deep in the attic of liberal Zionism and is needed to save the ideology from collapse.

View of the Bahai gardens, located on Mount Carmel, in the northern Israeli city of Haifa. June 11, 2015. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)

While I share Boehms vision, I am not quite convinced we need to call it Zionism at all. First, many of the Zionist figures Boehm cites to support his thesis, from Jabotinsky to Ben-Gurion to Begin, said and did many things that fundamentally undermine his vision. Boehm therefore becomes very open to the accusation of cherry-picking quotes to make a case that his sources never would have made, and in fact actively worked against. Liberal Zionism is a multivalent ideology, but it is not clear to me why the term, in all its complexity, needs to survive.

Second, and more importantly, missing in Boehms analysis is the deep impact of Religious Zionism, or Kookism (named after Rabbi Avraham Kook and his son Zvi Yehuda Kook), on Israeli society. This includes the impact it has had among many secularists who supported the settler movement in the occupied territories, helped to created Israels facts on the ground there, and joined in the pursuit of their maximalist vision. Furthermore, while Jewishness is discussed at some length, the book does not address the question of Judaism itself as an engine that reifies Holocaust messianism and serves as a tool of ideological and theological chauvinism, among religious and secular Israelis alike, that would render a binational solution impossible.

Indeed, in thinking about transforming Israel beyond Holocaust messianism, we also need to determine how to sever it from religious messianism. One problem is that in some circles, religion has devolved into a support of survivalism, which in some ways undermines covenantal theology. There are many scriptural and rabbinic references to support such a chauvinistic reading of the faith, and there are also many references that contest it.

This returns us to the tension between the particular and the universal that has exercised biblical and Jewish thinking for millennia. The Holocaust has in some ways tipped the scales. One response to the genocide, which Israel has clearly pursued, is to give up on Judaisms universal call and to instead support a narrow survivalist need but this has significant hazards. When Jews think they are the sole arbiters of their own fate, covenantal theology is denuded or at least destabilized. In such a scenario, God can easily become irrelevant besides serving as a weapon to procure ones survivalist agenda.

There are certainly many religious sources to counter that narrow philosophy, but the theological dangers are plain to see. Unless the role of religion is addressed and a program is offered to sever religious messianism from the political, the Haifa Republic will remain a dream. But it is still a dream worth considering in a post-two-state era. At the very least, it can provide a life-raft for the followers of a liberal Zionism now floating aimlessly off the coastal city.

[1] Weitz, My Diary and Letters to My Children, Diary Entry Dec. 2, 1940, page 181.

[2] Proceedings of the Board of the Jewish Agency, May 7, 1944.

[3] Cited in Richard Bernstein, Hannah Arendts Zionism, in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, 201.

[4] Arendt, To Save the Jewish Homeland, in Hannah Arendt: The Jewish Writings, 400, 401.

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Liberal Zionism is dying. Will foregoing the Jewish state save it? - +972 Magazine

The ever-increasing blind percentage seems to never be enough for powerful ENGOs and I have heard many speak of protecting 50 per cent by 2050! Where do you think they are going to get all of that land and water from? From rural Canadians, thats where. From your prime hunting or public fishing spots to beloved snowmobiling or hiking areas.

As a result of my role on the Parliamentary Outdoor Caucus, I have been involved in important conversations with our sister organization in Washington, the Congressional Sportsmens Foundation, about the implications of 30 by 30 on hunters and fishers at the North American level and what approaches are necessary to ensure the expert opinions of our outdoor community are heard when making these decisions.

As we know, our nations hunters, anglers, and outdoor enthusiasts are conservationists at heart who support protecting our lands and waters through science-based decisions, not blind, unwarranted shutdowns. They understand that sustainability and respect for the environment does not preclude the enjoyment of nature. I have always believed that we should be working with these experts, learning from their experience and expertise, and using this knowledge when it comes to making decisions about access to our public lands and waters.

Arbitrary closures to meet arbitrary goals wont work. Not only do these closures punish those who care about conservation and who are at the forefront of grassroots conservation projects across the country, they also effectively shut down the livelihoods of many Canadians living in rural, remote and coastal communities.

Unfortunately, as we have seen with caribou recovery plans in our region, Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government continue to disregard the concerns of local leaders, businesses, residents, and local outdoor experts when it comes to access to our public lands and waters. I fear this will continue to have a devastating impact on our important way of life.

We need to find a way to support our outdoor community, while also balancing the sustainable use of natural resources, societal and economic needs, and environmental protections.

It is why I will continue to speak out against the lack of genuine consultation surrounding caribou and other closures, as well as continue to push to ensure that these decisions are made based on science and sound advice from local experts.

My job as a Member of Parliament and as Co-Chair of the Parliamentary Outdoor Caucus is to bring national attention to these issues and the negative impact these arbitrary decisions are having on everyday Canadians like you.

I will continue to work hard and pressure ministers and the bureaucracy to make better decisions based on sound science and local expertise.

Bob Zimmer

Member of Parliament

Prince George-Peace River-Northern Rockies

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Bob Zimmer Weekly Report The Liberal Government Must Stop Blindly Ramming Through Its Closure Agenda - Energeticcity.ca

In 1970, country music legend Ernest Tubbs scored a minor success with "It's America (Love It Or Leave It)." Like Merle Haggard's "The Fightin' Side of Me", released the same year, Tubbs pitted regular Americans against hippies, draft dodgers, and welfare cheats. "If things don't go their way, they could always move away," he sang. "That's what democracy means anyway."

In the midst of the Vietnam War, demands to love it or leave it were associated with the right. As recently as 2019, President Donald Trump deployed them against the so-called "squad" of Democratic congresswomen. For their part, liberals insisted"dissent is the highest form of patriotism." In different versions, thatphrase (often falsely attributed to Thomas Jefferson) became a staple of left-wing rhetoric.

Over the last few weeks, those associations have been reversed. Now it's conservatives wrapping themselves in the mantle of dissent, while progressives contendthey should accept America as it is or pack their bags.

Rather than Vietnam, the dispute now revolves around Hungary, previously best known for goulash but now a symbol of conservative resistance to globalized liberalism. Conservative admiration for Hungary has been mounting since 2015, when Prime Minister Viktor Orbn resisted an EU program to resettle mostly Muslim asylum-seekers. It reached a new peak last week, when Fox News' Tucker Carlson broadcast a whole week of programs from Budapest.

Liberal journalist Matt Yglesias responded by wondering why conservatives don't move to Hungary if they like it so much? He went on to argue that by many measures the United States is a richer and more attractive society. It's not just about comparisons of GDP. According to Yglesias, our food is better, too.Breakfast tacos: love them or leave them!

Yglesias' encouragement for disgruntled conservatives to buy one-way tickets was partly an exercise in trolling. There's something ironic about otherwise flamboyant patriots like Carlson comparing their own country so unfavorably to another. Yet Yglesias isn't the first to suggest that some Americans might be happier elsewhere. Last summer, Rod Dreher reported that "I'm hearing that there are conservative Americans in the DC area who are talking about attempting to emigrate to one of the Visegrd countries (Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland)."

Borrowing a term from George Orwell, writer Jeet Heer argued that conservatives' affinity for Central and Eastern Europe is a case of "transferred nationalism." In this phenomenon, an idealized version of another land replaces the all too familiar and unsatisfying reality of home. Affinity for a foreign paradise is by no means unique to the right. Progressives have their own history of transferring nationalism to the likes of Cuba, Venezuela, and of course the Soviet Union.

There's also a partisan dimension. Supporters of the party that occupies the White House tend to be more satisfied with the status quo than those on the outside. When Barack Obama was elected, Democrats stopped talking about moving to Canada and rediscovered confidence in American institutions that eluded them during the Bush years. Republicans, by contrast, began singing a new tune about the need to "take our country back."

But there's a deeper issue, too. Today's right is defined by alienation from the most influential non-political institutions. Republicanpoliticians can and do win office. But the entertainment industry, academia, prestige media, and much of big business have become an interlocking oligarchy committed to an understanding of diversity and social justice that presents conservative views as not simply wrong but evil. The Vietnam War might have been winding down in 1970, but "The Fightin' Side of Me" was a number one single. More than three decades later, in 2002, Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue" went platinum. That expression of conservative cultural strength seems unimaginable today.

As my colleague Damon Linker writes, this sense of exclusion is the real source of conservative admiration for Hungary. Nearly alone among world leaders, Orbn opposed liberal positions and won. Even more than opposition to immigration or somewhat exaggerated support for natalist policies, conservatives admire his resistance to progressive attitudes on sex and gender.

There's an element of intentional provocation in Hungary chic, then. "You're truly hated by all the right people," Carlson apparently told Orbn. Even without much knowledge of the situation or any intention to move, praisingOrbn is an easy way to challenge conventional wisdom.

More important than trolling, though, is the replacement of the intellectual right's stereotyped All-Americanism with a genuinely ambiguous patriotism. Conservatives don't hate America, as Vox's Zack Beauchamp recently claimed. But they do worry that things they love about it are threatened. Michael Brendan Dougherty arguesin National Review that this mood defines nationalism more than any ideological agenda. To the anxious and irritated, patriotism can't mean simply endorsing the way things are. It requires active measures to defend what's being lost.

Ambiguous patriotism is not to be dismissed as backward-looking or obtuse, moreover. Progressives find encouragement in the possibility of a perfected future. Conservatives, almost by definition, seek inspiration from a heroic past. Since neither condition really exists, though, there's less difference between progressive optimism and conservative nostalgia than meets the eye. Both habits are a way of combining hope for change with the reality of continuity.

The same is true of comparisons to foreign countries. If the past and future elude us, other societies demonstrate the range of possibilities that are available in the present. It's true but also irrelevant that those possibilities can't be transferred directly from one location to another. Their existence proves another way is possible. And possibility is necessary to distinguish politics from the grim contemplation of accomplished facts.

Ambiguous patriotism carries risks, though. Without some anchor in the temporal and political present it tends to degenerate. One consequence is a sort of ideological self-hatredthat judges existing institutions by an impossible moral standard rather than empirical comparison, whether historical or international. Another is romantic utopianism. That's what happened when antiwar activists convinced themselves that North Vietnam wasn't just a minor threat to American interests, but an admirable society in itself.

Hungary is far better than North Vietnam and other totalitarian hells. Conservatives should remember, though, that it's also radically different to America, not only in its politics but also in scale, history, and culture. One of the biggest differences is that while Hungary's recent past has been defined by mass emigration, almost no one leaves the United States including vocal admirers of other countries. Despite the occasional ambiguity of our patriotism, there'ssomething about this place that most of us love.

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The 'love it or leave it' switcheroo - The Week Magazine

The Authoritarian International took a brisk step forward this week, as Tucker Carlson ventured to Budapest to sing the praises of Victor Orbans repressive regime to Fox News junkies. All this week, Carlson is broadcasting from Budapest, and will conclude his stay in Orbanland with a Saturday address to MCC Feszt, a mix of rock performances and idea discussions funded by the Hungarian government.

Orban isnt the first rightwing thug ruler whom Carlson has visited. In March, Tucker ventured south to expose Fox viewers to another budding tin-pot potentate, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele.

Building solidarity within the Tin-pot-ariat has long been the dream of Trump master strategist Steve Bannon, as the more that authoritarian regimes enact the same strategies, the more likely they are to hire the same strategists, which, in this case, means Bannon. Like Bannon, Carlson clearly hopes to build a global, white, Christian, authoritarian movement. In distant lands, to be sure, Carlson shows some flexibility on the white Christian stuff, as his Bukele promotion indicates. Sometimes, what really matters even to racists, if they have some sense of realpolitik, is anti-liberal authoritarianism, as the Nazis made clear when they formally allied themselves with Japans military rulers.

So, where to go next? Poland is an obvious choice, but why limit Carlson just to European thugocracies? How about the Burmese junta? How about Saudi Arabias MBS? After all, Orban merely harasses and eventually bans independent news media, while MBS actually kills journalists he doesnt like.

Which brings us to what some might regard as an anomaly in Carlsons Orban embrace. According to Reporters Without Borders, Orban has steadily and effectively undermined media pluralism and independence since being returned to power in 2010.

Apparently, this kind of record doesnt dim Carlsons support for Orban; he wouldnt be bustling around Budapest if he didnt think the Orban approach to press freedom kill itwas both positive and worthy of emulation. But suppose the Biden administration took that approach to Fox News, or The New York Post, or, heaven forfend, the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal? Would Rupert be okay with that? Would Paul Gigot (who edits the Journals editorial pages)? Wheres the Journal editorial saying that Tuckers Orbanlove is actually dangerousif not to the world at large, at least to its Murdoch interests?

Curious minds want to know (if its still OK to have curious minds).

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Tucker Trundles to Tin-Pot Land - The American Prospect