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 |
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/hilights/
 |
 |
 |  [Editor: Really, read the http://ideology.lege.net/hilights/
 |  version rather than this -- extensive use of bold text has
 |  been used in the abovementioned version in order to hilight
 |  ideas, that you will miss in the below version. -- Leif
 |  Erlingsson]
 |
 |
 |
 |  Hilights from The Ideology of American Empire by Claes G.
 |  Ryn [ http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/ ]
 |
 |
 |  Claes G. Ryn is professor of politics at the Catholic
 |  University of America and chairman of the National
 |  Humanities Institute. He is editor of Humanitas and author
 |  of numerous books, including Unity Through Diversity: On
 |  Cultivating Humanity's Higher Ground (Beijing University,
 |  2000) and Will, Imagination and Reason: Babbitt, Croce and
 |  the Problem of Reality (2nd ed., Transaction, 1997). This
 |  article [ http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/ ] is
 |  adapted from a chapter in his America the Virtuous: The
 |  Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire (forthcoming,
 |  Transaction 2003).
 |
 |
 |  [ . . . ]
 |             The most conspicuous and salient feature of the
 |  neo-Jacobin approach to international affairs is its
 |  universalistic and monopolistic claims. The University of
 |  Chicago's Allan Bloom (1930-92) argued in his best-selling
 |  The Closing of the American Mind that what he called ``the
 |  American project'' was not just for Americans. ``When we
 |  Americans speak seriously about politics, we mean that our
 |  principles of freedom and equality and the rights based on
 |  them are rational and everywhere applicable.'' World War II
 |  was for Bloom not simply a struggle to defeat a dangerous
 |  enemy. It was ``really an educational project undertaken to
 |  force those who did not accept these principles to do
 |  so.''[4] If America is the instrument of universal right,
 |  the cause of all humanity, it is only proper that it should
 |  be diligent and insistent in imposing its will.  [
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/#closing and
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/#project ]
 |
 |  [ . . . ]
 |
 |  [ . . . ] The purpose here is not to classify particular
 |  persons but to elucidate an ideological pattern, showing how
 |  certain ideas form a coherent, if ethically and
 |  philosophically questionable, ideology. [
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/#elucidate ]
 |
 |  [ . . . ]
 |
 |           Similarly, foreign policy expert Robert Kagan
 |  writes of his fellow Americans: ``As good children of the
 |  Enlightenment, Americans believe in human perfectibility.
 |  But Americans . . . also believe . . . that global security
 |  and a liberal order depend on the United States--that
 |  `indispensable nation'--wielding its power.''[7] [
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/#indispensable ]
 |
 |  [ . . . ]
 |
 |          This view of America's role can hardly be called
 |  patriotic in the old sense of that word. Neo-Jacobinism is
 |  not characterized by devotion to America's concrete
 |  historical identity with its origins in Greek, Roman,
 |  Christian, European, and English civilization. Neo-Jacobins
 |  are attached in the end to ahistorical, supranational
 |  principles that they believe should supplant the traditions
 |  of particular societies. The new Jacobins see themselves as
 |  on the side of right and fighting evil and are not prone to
 |  respecting or looking for common ground with countries that
 |  do not share their democratic preferences. [
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/#hardly and
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/#evil]
 |
 |  [ . . . ]
 |
 |
 |  The New Democratism
 |
 |
 |          Democratism has long had more than a foothold in
 |  American government. A look back in modern history is
 |  appropriate. [
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/#back ]  President
 |  Woodrow Wilson, with his belief in America's special role
 |  and his missionary zeal, gave it a strong push. Harvard
 |  professor Irving Babbitt (1865-1933) [
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/#babbitt ], perhaps
 |  America's most incisive and prescient student of modern
 |  Western and American culture, commented in the early years
 |  of the twentieth century on the imperialistic trend in U.S.
 |  foreign policy. Babbitt, the founder of what has been called
 |  the New Humanism or American Humanism, was formally a
 |  professor of French and comparative literature, but he was
 |  also a highly perceptive as well as prophetic observer of
 |  social and political developments. He noted that the United
 |  States was setting itself up as the great guardian and
 |  beneficiary of mankind. ``We are rapidly becoming a nation
 |  of humanitarian crusaders,'' Babbitt wrote in 1924. [
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/#noted ]  Leaders
 |  like Wilson viewed America as abjuring selfish motives and
 |  as being, therefore, above all other nations. Babbitt
 |  commented:
 |
 |      We are willing to admit that all other nations are
 |  self-seeking, but as for ourselves, we hold that we act only
 |  on the most disinterested motives. We have not as yet set
 |  up, like revolutionary France, as the Christ of Nations, but
 |  during the late war we liked to look on ourselves as at
 |  least the Sir Galahad of Nations. If the American thus
 |  regards himself as an idealist at the same time that the
 |  foreigner looks on him as a dollar-chaser, the explanation
 |  may be due partly to the fact that the American judges
 |  himself by the way he feels, whereas the foreigner judges
 |  him by what he does.[14]
 |
 |           By the time of President Wilson the idea had long
 |  been common in America that in old Europe conceited and
 |  callous elites oppressed the common man. [
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/#old_europe ] 
 |  There and elsewhere things needed to be set right. Thomas
 |  Jefferson had been a pioneer for this outlook. But from the
 |  time of George Washington's warning of the danger of
 |  entangling alliances, a desire for heavy American
 |  involvement abroad had for the most part been held in check.
 |  By the time of Theodore Roosevelt's presidency, it was clear
 |  that the wish for American prominence and activism in
 |  international affairs had thrown off earlier restraints.
 |  Woodrow Wilson reinforced the interventionist impulse[
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/#interventionist ],
 |  not, of course, to advance selfish American national motives
 |  but, as he said, to ``serve mankind.'' Because America has a
 |  special moral status, Wilson proclaimed, it is called to do
 |  good in the world. In 1914, even before the outbreak of the
 |  European war, Wilson stated in a Fourth of July address that
 |  America's role was to serve ``the rights of humanity.'' The
 |  flag of the United States, he declared, is ``the flag, not
 |  only of America, but of humanity.''[15] [
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/#flag ]
 |
 |           Babbitt pointed out that those who would not go
 |  along with Wilson's ``humanitarian crusading'' were warned
 |  that they would ``break the heart of the world.'' Babbitt
 |  retorted: ``If the tough old world had ever had a heart in
 |  the Wilsonian sense, it would have been broken long ago.''
 |  He added that Wilson's rhetoric, which was at the same time
 |  abstract and sentimental, revealed ``a temper at the
 |  opposite pole from that of the genuine statesman.'' Wilson's
 |  humanitarian idealism made him ``inflexible and
 |  uncompromising.''[16] [
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/#inflexible ]
 |
 |
 |  The Post-Cold War Imperative
 |
 |
 |           The notion that America had a mandate to help rid
 |  the world, not least Europe, of the bad old ways of
 |  traditional societies with their undemocratic political
 |  arrangements has remained a strong influence on American
 |  foreign policy. In World War II, FDR's sense of American
 |  mission may have been as strong as Wilson's. [
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/#mandate ]
 |
 |               For a long time during the Cold War, most
 |  policy makers and commentators saw that war as a defensive
 |  struggle to protect freedom or liberty against totalitarian
 |  tyranny. But some of the most dedicated cold warriors were
 |  also democratists. They had a vision for remaking the world
 |  that differed in substance from that of the Soviet Union and
 |  other communist regimes but that was equally universalistic.
 |  With the disintegration and collapse of the Soviet Union,
 |  these cold warriors did not argue for substantially reducing
 |  the American military or the United States' involvement in
 |  international affairs. On the contrary, they believed that
 |  America should continue to play a large and, in some
 |  respects, expanded role in the world [
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/#expanded ]; that,
 |  as the only remaining superpower, America had a historic
 |  opportunity to advance the cause of democracy and human
 |  rights. This language had long been gaining currency in the
 |  centers of public debate and political power, and soon
 |  government officials and politicians in both of the major
 |  parties spoke routinely of the need to promote democracy.
 |  Many did so in just the manner here associated with neo-
 |  Jacobinism. It seemed to them that the American ideology had
 |  not only survived the challenge from the other universalist
 |  ideology, but had prevailed in a contest that validated the
 |  American ideal as applicable in all societies.
 |
 |  [ . . . ]
 |
 |
 |  A New Kind of War
 |
 |
 |          The foreign policy of George W. Bush's immediate two
 |  predecessors, Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton, had a strong
 |  Wilsonian tilt. But neither president followed any
 |  sustained, consistent strategy. By contrast, the Bush
 |  Doctrine as set forth in the National Security Strategy and
 |  other places commits the United States to a bold,
 |  comprehensive, and elaborate foreign policy. The publicly
 |  and formally stated U.S. goal, in sum, is to establish
 |  global supremacy. The United States would set itself up as
 |  the arbiter of good and evil in the world and, if necessary,
 |  enforce its judgments unilaterally.
 |
 |          Reservations expressed in Europe and elsewhere about
 |  American unilateralism and global aspirations have been
 |  scorned and dismissed by proponents of empire as a failure
 |  to recognize the need to combat evil in the world. [
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/#reservations ] 
 |  Kenneth Adelman, a former deputy ambassador to the UN and a
 |  highly placed advisor on defense to the U.S. government,
 |  couched his advocacy of imperial designs in terms of
 |  fighting terrorism. ``I don't think Europeans should
 |  cooperate with the United States as a favor to the United
 |  States. They should be very grateful to the United States
 |  and cooperate because we have a common enemy--terrorism. In
 |  my mind, it's a decisive moment in the conflict between
 |  civilization and barbarism.''[29]
 |
 |          Since America is at war it is, in a way, not
 |  surprising that some of its leaders should be portraying
 |  America as being on the side of good and those not eager to
 |  follow America's lead as aiding and abetting evil. Stark
 |  rhetoric has been used before to get Americans to support or
 |  sustain war, but the war aims spoken of today are derived
 |  from a consciously universalistic and imperialistic
 |  ideology. Therein lies an important difference, and a great
 |  danger.
 |
 |          The belief in American moral superiority knows no
 |  party lines. [
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/#superiority ]  In
 |  an article critical of the George W. Bush administration's
 |  way of preparing for war against Iraq, Richard C. Holbrooke,
 |  ambassador to the UN under President Clinton, expressed a
 |  view ubiquitous in the American foreign policy
 |  establishment: ``Over the past 60 years, the United States
 |  has consistently combined its military superiority with
 |  moral and political leadership.''[30] The word
 |  ``consistently'' is telling. The notion that, unlike other
 |  nations, America is above moral suspicion, provides the best
 |  possible justification for the desire to exercise American
 |  power. [ http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/#above ]
 |
 |  [ . . . ]
 |
 |           The new Jacobins are trying to clear away obstacles
 |  to the triumph of their ideology and of their own will to
 |  power. They exhibit a revolutionary mindset that will
 |  inexorably lead to disaster. [
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/#revolutionary ]
 |  Alongside what President Bush called ``history's unmarked
 |  graves of discarded lies''[32] lie the graves of the
 |  self-righteous, the people whose moralism concealed, even
 |  from themselves, their importunate will to power. [
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/#selfrighteous ] 
 |  As Ronald Reagan preached, the idealistic utopians and the
 |  well meaning are responsible for some of the world's worst
 |  evils. Self-righteousness blinds one to one's own sins.
 |
 |          Even if the opinions examined in this article are
 |  assessed in the most generous and charitable spirit, their
 |  element of political-ideological imperialism is hard to
 |  miss. A philosophically and historically inclined observer
 |  is reminded of the terrible and large-scale suffering that
 |  has been inflicted on mankind by power-seeking sanctioned or
 |  inspired by one or another kind of Jacobin moral and
 |  intellectual conceit. Communism, one of the most radical and
 |  pernicious manifestations of the Jacobin spirit, has
 |  disintegrated, at least as a major political force. But
 |  another panacea for the world is taking its place. The
 |  neo-Jacobin vision for how to redeem humanity may be less
 |  obviously utopian than that of communism. It may strike some
 |  as admirably idealistic, as did communism. But the spirit of
 |  the two movements is similar, and utopian thinking is
 |  utopian thinking, fairly innocuous perhaps if restricted to
 |  isolated dreamers and theoreticians but dangerous to the
 |  extent that it inspires action in the real world. The
 |  concern voiced here is that neo-Jacobinism has come to
 |  permeate American public debate and is finally within reach
 |  of controlling the military might of the United States. [
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/american_empire/#communism ]
 |
 |  [ . . . ]
 |
 |
 |  Additional reading, Resources:
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/resources/
 |
 |
 |  Copyleft © 2003 Leif Erlingsson or author.
 |  [ http://ideology.lege.net/copyleft.html ]
 |______________________________________________________________