Will John Wayne Ride to Our Emotional Rescue?

For better or for worse, what drives the world in 2024 are emotions. While we are also guided by our duties, emotions are what help us make our struggle more than just a moral commitment; it is also an emotional commitment. Irving Berlin explained it well when talking about patriotic songs: “a patriotic song is an emotion, and you must not embarrass an audience with it, or they will hate your guts.”

What is patriotic feeling? The question embarrasses us. But we have centuries of writing on this subject by our forebears. Patriotic love is an extrapolation of filial love. We love our countrymen for the same reason we love our brothers. We feel every corner of our nations as ours for the same reason we feel our family home as ours. We love everything that makes us who we are: the heritage, the tradition, the family teachings, the local culture of the generations that preceded us, the religion we profess.

Patriotism is not only a question of affection, though. It is also a personal commitment, a response to moral codes, and obligations proper to those who enjoy rights in the family sphere as well as in the national sphere.

These virtues are losing their place in the postmodern West. Yet ironically, in the emotionally driven system of meaning and communication of postmodernity, the fact that feelings are elevated over reason is a challenge to traditional norms, but it can also be an opportunity. If today’s young people are more accustomed to relying on their feelings as the ultimate grounding for right behavior, then so-called “traditional virtues” can and should be deployed to persuade the young through the language of emotion rather than reason. This means that well-understood patriotism, a well-founded legacy of tradition, and a good moral education, can also be part of their emotional universe. And the case these virtues make for themselves in that realm is in fact surprisingly strong.

Recently I participated in an experiment to test this thesis. With three children from 8 to 12 years old I watched about 10 John Wayne movies. The actor represents the quintessential American hero, but also the hero of the West, with his courage, love of country, justice, the flag, and so on. I thought first that today’s children would not understand John Wayne’s films, that they would be bored by them, and that they would dislike his attitudes and values as contrary to the norms of woke superheroes celebrated by Hollywood.

I was amazed at what I found. First of all, the children watched Wayne’s films in their entirety, in complete silence, and understanding at all times what was going on: They laughed with John Ford’s humor, cried with Wayne’s defeats, and were thrilled by the military exploits led by the Duke. Even though the narrative rhythms are not the same as in contemporary films, even though the references to values or faith are much more present than in today’s cinema, and even though several of the films were in black and white, the children did not take their eyes off the screen for a moment.

The reason why, I came to think, is that they had never seen anything like it. A hero who doesn’t spend the whole time talking about diversity, tolerance, equality, and all the values we already know and adhere to. A hero who, for better or worse, believes in what he believes in and acts accordingly. A tough guy who makes mistakes, corrects himself, strives to be better, battles his own demons. These were emotions that the children recognized and connected to.

At the end of each movie, I would ask the kids: What do you think of John Wayne’s character in this one? “That he’s a good man who sometimes does bad things. But he always seems to do them for some greater reason: like friendship, love, or fulfilling his duties to his country,” the oldest child told me, after watching John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy. “I like his bravery. He doesn’t mind facing enemies alone,” said the youngest, alluding to the lone hero Wayne plays in so many of his movies. “It’s funny to me how he has such a hard time dealing with girls,” notes the 11-year-old, who has paid special attention to the romantic parts of these films, discovering that Wayne’s character struggles when encountering the world of femininity without despairing or hilariously exposing his brusqueness.

However, perhaps the most remarkable thing about John Wayne is the love he shows, paradoxical as it may seem, in the midst of his usual fighting, punching, and snarling. He is like that “good soldier” Chesterton spoke of: not fighting because he hates what is before him, but because he loves what is behind him.

In 1977, in one of his most famous books of aphorisms, the Colombian philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila unknowingly foresaw the key to the 21st-century culture wars: “Violence is not enough to destroy a civilization. Every civilization dies of indifference to the peculiar values on which it is founded.” Many postmodern conservatives tend to think that things preserve themselves. But the so-called culture war, as its name suggests, is a war—not something you do on Twitter to kill time. Instead of actual corpses, it throws up victims and victors in the form of cultures and laws, justice or injustice, freedoms or cancellations. But, as in turf wars, cultural battles always end up shifting borders in one direction or another.

The whole of French author Michel Houellebecq’s work is, above all, an attempt to reflect the decadence of the West. The dangers envisioned by Houellebecq are not so much themselves a lethal threat to Western culture; rather they are a problem for a culture already in retreat, increasingly watered down, dissolved in the multicultural magma, and despised by those who should be defending it as their own. The Islamism that Houellebecq describes, which is seeping through most of Europe with the sponsorship or acquiescence of the political elites of the EU, would not be so threatening to the Old Continent if Europe remained true to its own tradition, its beliefs, its history and its outlook on life. It is the fact that the defenders of the Western heritage are too exhausted and uncertain to safeguard their own traditions that makes the enemies of the West a credible threat.

The heinous terrorist attacks against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, succeeded in putting the risk of Islamic terrorism and the ideologies behind it back on the Western map. The infamous reaction of numerous pro-Palestinian leftist groups in Spain and the United States, demonstrating against the victims of the attack and joined by hundreds of thousands of college students and self-proclaimed members of “oppressed classes,” have once again made evident the decadence of the West that Houellebecq described so extravagantly and Gómez Dávila predicted.

Islamism has never ceased to threaten the West, and there have been numerous terrorist attacks—and thwarted attempts—in France, Belgium, and Spain in recent years. It is difficult for intelligence services to monitor extremism in Western countries with so-called no-go zones where the police can’t enter. Yet not even this disorderly and chaotic commitment to multiculturalism would be a problem if the inhabitants of these no-go zones did not have among their vital objectives the destruction of the West, the killing of Christians and Jews, and wiping Israel off the map, and if European elites did not persist in denial of this reality.

One of the great differences between how Israel is defending itself against Islamic terrorism and how the West defends itself is the former’s integrity. Israel clearly represents a culture of its own, a tradition of its own, which is also at the very root of Western civilization, and, more importantly, a moral code that limits man’s capacity for destruction. The Israelis have no regrets about their past, and attach an enviable importance to their national sovereignty. And to their credit, they refuse to lie about the nature and motives of their attackers.

On the contrary, both Europe and the United States—albeit at different levels—are immersed in a process of renouncing their own values. This process is much more advanced in European nations, largely because of the irregular success of the integration that the EU entailed, which in the end did not form a true pan-European union. Rather, it has only contributed to watering down the sovereignty of its component nations, making them, at least when it comes to identity, weaker.

In principle, there should be no such tension between patriotic and pro-European sentiments; after all, one can love one’s region or city while still loving one’s country. However, Europeanist elites work hard to limit the nationalism of their members. Perhaps the key, as Huddy, Del Ponte and Davies conclude in their article “Nationalism, Patriotism, and Support for the European Union,” is that “nationalism increases, and patriotism decreases, opposition to the EU.”

Patriotism is also going through difficult times in the United States. A Gallup poll in 2022 found that it is at an all-time low: only 38% of citizens were “extremely proud” to be American. Attacks against the American state come regularly now from both the left and the right, united by a common hatred of their own country, and apparently heedless of the corrosive effects of this kind of feeling. When citizens are emptied of their identity, they lose their sense of reality and risk losing their freedom as well.

When there is a Hamas attack in Israel, Israelis know instantly who is the culprit and who is the victim. When there is an Islamist attack in Europe, the disparity of voices in parliaments and in the media is deafening: The media speak of an isolated case of someone with possible mental problems and do their best to hide the nationality of the terrorist; some politicians demand that the attack not lead to anti-Muslim hatred—as if that has anything to do with it. Other politicians deny any connection to the immigration problems in Europe whenever the attacker is an immigrant or a Muslim refugee. If a European country decides to respond militarily or with police action after suffering a jihadist attack, a good part of its own citizens and political parties will demonstrate in the streets against whomever takes such a decision, and will withhold support to their own security forces.

At what point in history did we decide that it is more important to protect the aggressor than the attacked? In January of last year, a Moroccan illegal migrant broke into two churches in southern Spain with a machete shouting “Allahu akbar,” seriously wounded a priest and killed a sacristan, probably because he thought he too was a priest. The horrifying video quickly went viral on social media. Naturally, everyone condemned the attack, but almost no political party dared to consider that it was an attack against Catholics, and not some random attack. And they did not do so for an absurd reason: fear of being labeled as “extreme” or “right wing.”

Israel knows that it is not possible to stop terrorism if you deny the factual evidence, however unpleasant, even as Western politicians and intellectuals demand that Israel follow their lead and ignore the fact that the people who want to kill them do not share their values. In fact, they glory in the opportunity to slaughter them. A West that recognizes its own moral and cultural heritage should feel the attacks against Jews as an attack against the foundations of its own societies. It should also recognize the fierce patriotism of Israelis in the face of such threats as a virtue that we should rightly seek to share.