FAILED IDEOLOGY FURTHER REFLECTIONS

I usually talk about the self destruction of the West mainly in terms of a failure of liberalism.  The other day, Leonhardt distinguished centrism from liberalism.

I have also adverted to the failure of market capitalism ending in globalism as a related aspect.

The other piece of the puzzle is one I have seldom addressed, what one might call, following a famous book on the subject,  the theme of America (and the West) as God's New Israel. 

It has been a theme running through American foreign policy from the beginning, and includes issues and actions far wider than those touching just the modern state of Israel, central as they have been to many American policy beliefs and initiatives.

See DK post:

Saturday, June 07, 2008

A Presidential speech

EXCERPT:

"...Now the President has history on his side here: that was indeed how those original settlers saw themselves. But in succeeding centuries, as more and more people of different religions (and of no religion at all) settled in the United States, we obviously abandoned such a vision in favor of a nation and a world based upon impartial laws, in which religion became a private, though protected, matter. To link the United States and Israel as two nations acting out God's will on earth strikes me as the perfect mirror image of Osama Bin Laden's call for Jihad against the Zionist-Crusader alliance--as well as the perfect confirmation of Bin Laden's propaganda And the emphasis upon revealed truth as the source of the American experience obviously excludes those many millions of Americans like myself (as well as Thomas Jefferson) who rejected orthodox religion of any kind. Now the issue of the legitimacy of all western nations--and particularly of both Israel and the United States--has been challenged again and again in the past few decades. In fact, few of us on either side of the politically correct divide want to face the historical truth of the matter. No nation or ethnic group, in all probability--and certainly none that has risen to greatness-can claim legitimacy based upon simple justice. All nations have built themselves at the expense of others. Today academia can talk endlessly about the sufferings of the North and South American indigenous populations after white people arrived on the scene--and they were real enough--but they ignore that the Americas before 1492 were not some bucolic, pacifist paradise. Those peoples had fought violently against one another for several millennia. Whole civilizations, such as the mound builders what is now the southern US, had disappeared. Central American empires practiced human sacrifice. The Middle East, too, was the scene of endless conflict both during and after the era of ancient Israel....." DK