"Western values and the world" DK post:
Bruce Wilder:
"Could even the eloquent Obama make a convincing case for liberal hypocrisy? Seeing the flawed movie, Selma, reminded me that I grew up in the era of peak egalitarianism, when people actually expected leaders and law to enact ideals. Enlightenment liberalism was claiming that its truths were self-evident in the 18th century, when Thomas Jefferson, slaveholder, wrote that all men are created equal. It's part of the schtick, not an indicator of some new weakness of character in the 21st century. Your proposed remedy -- a renewal of national solidarity and purpose -- indicates that instinctively you understand that the political problem of our time is not philosophic ideology per se, but authority and authoritarianism.
"The common, shared experience of national service, national purpose, and national identity, which has been a foundational component of liberal nationalism -- the ideal of a people responsibly governing itself through constitutional institutions according to democratic, egalitarian principles of fairness -- is at a low ebb. Americans, in particular, exhibit an extreme of social disaffiliation and atomistic individualism, reflected in libertarian ideological attitudes.
Being frightened by seemingly senseless, random acts of violence, and the expedient use of authority in militarized police state responses, just pushes the society further and further in the direction of authoritarianism. I can scarcely imagine the effect on Boston of effective imposition of martial law following the Boston Marathon bombing, or the more recent national manhunts in France and Belgium. The number of deaths cannot account for how terror and the response to terror is re-shaping attitudes and institutions.
Liberalism has always had a love-hate relationship with the lower classes, with the poor. That historical ambivalence was evident in the dynamics of the French Revolution, in the tension over the demands of the common people for bread over and against the bourgeois demand for laissez-faire. It was evident when capital-L Liberals presided over Irish potato famine that killed a million people. It was evident in the callous indifference and inattention that allowed the worst impulses to drive colonial and foreign policy in far-away places (and still drives so many to overlook the rank incompetence and corruption of the American foreign policy establishment).
At its best, enlightenment liberalism embraced and legitimated conflict, and the check that an educated mass opinion might provide against irresponsible exercise of authority. The concepts of a loyal opposition, of a Country Party, of labor unions and mass movements, of a separation of powers forcing rational deliberation and blocking the formation of fixed and tyrannical factions, within the framework of a shared national identity and loyalty -- this was enlightenment liberalism at its best and most practical.
We have dissent in the purely symbolic sense of rude or noisy caricature -- in the U.S., the right parodies itself in its strident albeit impotent expression of resentments. Rush Limbaugh is Charlie Hebdo every day on the radio."
"What we do not have is either a genuine national solidarity -- the intellectual left largely rejects national identity as a species of racism in the genus of unalloyed evil -- or a check by the masses on authority. Obama prosecutes only whistleblowers, not banksters. No one is held at fault for more than a decade of military and foreign policy failure on an epic scale; we will be training an effective local force real soon now.
In Europe, democratic institutions have ceded their power to unaccountable supra-national authorities, and the consequence is the Euro and an economic catastrophe of a magnitude for some countries comparable with the Great Depression. The violence of Islamists serves as a distraction, justifying the building up of a security state to defend this betrayal of mass interests, while liberals look on uncomprehending.
I'm deeply troubled by the notion that Islam embodies any philosophic ideas that might compete with Western Enlightenment liberalism. I think that simply mistakes the case. The clash of civilizations notion is profoundly silly, not profound. Population and resource pressures are the driving forces, and institutional failures are handicapping the response. The institutions that failed were Western institutions. Saddam Hussein and Bashad al-Assad were friggin' socialists! Islam can hardly explain the upheavals in places as disparate as Ukraine, Thailand, Argentina, Mexico, nor the palsied response to the economic crises created by the Euro in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy and France.
Islam and Terror are convenient distractions for an elite that does not care to be held responsible."
RE his remark about 'The Clash', I would just say that the last time that the West had a real chance, physically, to prevent the USSR, a very large Slavic nation, from winning WWII, against the West, and then threatening Western Europe, and then from obtaining and proliferating weapons of mass destruction, was in roughly 1944, 1945.
One has only to review something like The Haunted Wood to see how urgent this problem had become by then.
Those were good reasons why I have said that the best solution was 'the Patton solution' at that time.
The Baltic States, and even more so, Ukraine are traditional Russian territories in my judgment. Some may quibble....
Of course, going farther back, to USA WWI blunders, we only entered WWI because of the Bolshevik Revolution.....
Don't get me started on this.....
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