Oikophobia and the Politics of Civilizational Self-Loathing
The Republic Cannot Survive a Ruling Class That Despises It
The Republic Cannot Survive a Ruling Class That Despises It
(Locke Step) - There is a Greek word for a condition that has become increasingly visible across the Western world: oikophobia.
The philosopher Roger Scruton gave the term its modern political meaning: hostility toward one’s own home, inheritance, and civilization. He meant something more precise than criticism. He meant a settled stance that extends suspicion toward what is one’s own while extending sympathy, curiosity, and moral generosity toward nearly everything else.
Every healthy society contains critics, and America has produced more than its share. The abolitionists, the suffragists, the civil-rights movement, the muckrakers, the constitutional litigators, the ordinary citizens who held the country to its own promises. Each measured the nation against its stated principles and found it wanting. That tradition is not the subject of this essay, and nothing here is a complaint about it.
The distinction is the whole point. Criticism and oikophobia are not points on a single spectrum. They are different acts.
The self-critical patriot says the nation has …
