The Republic Cannot Survive a Ruling Class That Despises It
Oikophobia and the Politics of Civilizational Self-Loathing
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 failed to live up to its principles. The oikophobe says the principles were a fraud from the start. One seeks correction. The other seeks repudiation. The first loves the thing it judges. The second judges in order to be rid of it.
A growing faction of the American governing class has drifted toward the second position, usually without announcing it. Few people say outright that they despise their own civilization. Most would deny the charge sincerely. But the disposition shows up in what gets treated as obvious: in which facts require no proof and which require endless qualification, in which loyalties are assumed healthy and which are assumed suspect.
Watch what happens to patriotism specifically. Affection for the country is the one attachment that, in large stretches of academic and cultural life, now requires a justification before it is permitted. Pride in a national achievement arrives chaperoned by caveats. Gratitude for an inherited institution is acceptable only after the institution’s sins have been recited first. No comparable suspicion attaches to other group loyalties, which are generally presumed authentic and good. The asymmetry is the tell. A stance that audits one form of belonging far more strictly than all the others is not practicing neutral scrutiny. It has a direction.
That direction has a structure, and the structure is most visible where it has hardened into law and policy rather than mere attitude. Consider the clearest case.
For two generations, the central moral claim of the American civil-rights tradition was that a person should be treated as a person: judged by conduct and character, not by the group into which he was born. That principle was not a sentimental afterthought. It was the engine of everything that followed. It let the movement appeal to the Declaration and the Fourteenth Amendment rather than against them, and it made the movement’s victories feel like the country becoming more itself rather than less.
Much of what now travels under the banner of diversity, equity, and inclusion inverts that principle at the root. It returns group classification to the center of how citizens are sorted, counted, and treated, and it does so as a matter of explicit method rather than residual prejudice. The critique here is not the strawman that diversity programs are merely unkind or inefficient. It is precise: they reintroduce exactly the categorical thinking the civil-rights statutes were written to abolish, and they present that reintroduction as moral progress. When the Supreme Court took up race-conscious admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard in 2023, the plaintiffs’ argument was not exotic. It was the original civil-rights argument, that the individual, not the racial category, is the unit the Constitution protects. The case is worth naming because it shows the inversion is not a campus eccentricity. It reached the highest court in the country, and it turned on whether the nation’s foundational commitment to the individual still meant what it once did.
This is what separates oikophobia from ordinary reform. Reform holds the principle fixed and faults the practice for falling short of it. The disposition described here treats the principle itself as the problem to be managed. Individual citizenship is recast not as the unfinished achievement to be extended further, but as a naive cover story that a more sophisticated administration has seen through. That is not the civil-rights tradition maturing. It is the tradition being quietly repudiated by people who still borrow its prestige. The oikophobe mistakes estrangement for enlightenment.
Now the strongest objection, stated as its defenders would state it, because a polemic that ducks the real argument is just applause.
Earlier generations, the objection runs, told themselves a flattering story. The schoolbook history was a pageant of founders and flags that buried slavery, conquest, and exclusion under civic myth. What looks like self-loathing is simply the correction: historians finally admitting the evidence their predecessors suppressed. The recovery of suppressed fact is not contempt for the country. It is honesty about it, and honesty is a form of respect.
This is the serious version, and it is partly right. The older history did sanitize. Confronting what it omitted is the work of any mature nation, and a country that cannot bear the recovery of its own record has a weak claim on anyone’s loyalty.
But examine the move closely, because the strongest counterexample sits inside the objection’s own favorite subject. Take slavery, the fact the older history most wanted softened. Slavery was not a Western peculiarity. It was a near-universal institution across recorded history, practiced on every inhabited continent, defended by nearly every civilization with the power to maintain it. What was historically unusual was not that the West held slaves. It was that a sustained political and moral movement to abolish slavery arose, first, in the late-eighteenth-century Anglo-American world: Quaker and evangelical agitation, the first abolition societies, the British acts of 1807 and 1833, and the bloodiest war in American history fought substantially over the question. An honest history holds both facts at once. The civilization that industrialized the Atlantic trade is the same civilization that generated the arguments and the institutions that destroyed it.
The oikophobic account keeps the first fact and discards the second. It treats slavery as the essence of the civilization and abolition as a footnote, an embarrassment grudgingly corrected, rather than as one of the more remarkable moral achievements in the human record. That is not the recovery of suppressed evidence. It is suppression in the opposite direction. The honest historian’s complaint against the schoolbook pageant was that it told half the story. The oikophobe answers by telling the other half and calling it the whole. The fair-minded objection ends up convicting the very position it was offered to defend: if selective history is the sin, prosecutorial history is not the cure.
There is a real measure here, and it is not balance for its own sake. It is whether the account could survive being applied to anything else. No competent historian writes the history of Rome as nothing but conquest, or the history of the Church as nothing but its inquisitions, or the history of any human life as nothing but its failures. We recognize the method as distortion everywhere except when the subject is one’s own country, where it suddenly passes for rigor.
Why this is dangerous, rather than merely tiresome, takes one more step. A republic is not held together by its parchment. The Constitution does not enforce itself, courts command no armies, and elections confer legitimacy only on a population that already agrees to be bound by them. Underneath the procedures sits something the procedures cannot manufacture: enough citizens who regard the shared political community as theirs and worth keeping. Lincoln understood that the deepest threat was never only secession by arms. It was Americans ceasing to see themselves as one people, after which the arms follow. A republic ultimately rests on affection as much as on procedure.
That is the actual stake. Not that criticism weakens a country. Criticism aimed at bringing the country closer to its principles is how a free society repairs itself, and the oikophobe’s favorite achievements, abolition and civil rights among them, were criticism’s work. The danger is the stance that has stopped believing there is anything underneath worth repairing, and that has concentrated, by no accident, in the universities, newsrooms, foundations, and agencies that train the next governing class and set the terms of respectable opinion.
A republic can absorb a great deal. It survives scandal, corruption, lost wars, and vicious partisan conflict, because all of those are arguments among people who still want the same thing to continue. What it cannot indefinitely survive is a governing class that has come to regard attachment to the republic as a defect of intelligence, a thing one outgrows on the way to sophistication.
The danger is not criticism. The danger is contempt. And contempt, dressed in the borrowed clothes of conscience, has become a governing habit of the very institutions a republic most needs on its side.
US citizens are not one people. We must adjust to that with radical new ideas: National Divorce