A FEW THOUGHTS ON WHERE WE HAVE BEEN AND WHY

A propos DK's current title, but looking back for a moment...

Some of this may seem a little hard to follow.  It is not that difficult really.

I have talked on this blog about failed liberal economic policy, and I make amateur comments and cast aspersions on economics generally. 

I have pointed out how it was important for the US, as a matter of policy and strategy, to connect economic matters with political, diplomatic, and strategic ones, largely regardless of domestic economic consequences. It was not always so in the West.

The relationship between these ever more closely intertwined and related endeavors is one which has a history in itself.  I have cited books, etc.

I have explained the failure of liberal globalism to lead either to one world or to peace, as it had long been supposed in the more liberal faction of the West to do.

What I haven't done yet, it seems to me, is to explain how these separate institutions of government and the private sector, and these discreet disciplines, treated discontinuously as such academically each from every other, but loosely and haphazardly ramified in government policy and in private sector theory and behavior, are evolved from a political and constitutional system, and an ideology, call it, loosely, Enlightenment ideology, which in important ways required them, against their best interests I would argue, to evolve largely in the directions they have in fact taken.

By saying this, I am not trying to exonerate American political religious and intellectual leaders of responsibility for where things now stand, but rather to show that the directions in which events have moved are related to founding principles and institutions which, while not requiring specific outcomes 250 years later now, certainly profoundly influenced the course history has taken to where we now are.

As I have mentioned, political globalization itself, disastrous a notion as it has been,  was written into the Declaration Of Independence itself. Huge adverse consequences...

I wanted to say other things along this line as well but perhaps that is enough for one post on this topic.

Just one other very important point along this line, to show how closely these matters interrelate.

It is no mere coincidence, for how things unfolded after 1776, until now and even into our future, that Adam Smith's The Wealth Of Nations, an economic globalist manifesto, was published in 1776.