Spain, the requirements of democracy, and us

VFR reader Carl Simpson writes:

I have to wonder in light of the utter disaster you have reported on in Spain (you’re about the only one in the blogosphere doing so by the way): What would offer the best chance of survival for the truly Christian remnant left in Spain. The liberal regime in place, which appears to be hell-bent on wiping them out through PC leftism (see Jared Taylor’s latest over at VDARE), or dhimmitude under the Muslims? At this point, it looks like dhimmitude is preferable for the poor Spanish.

Just to connect this with the whole idea of democracy (George W. Bush’s religion), could it not be truthfully argued that the only way for Spain to preserve itself as a nation would be for the rise of another Franco?

John Adams understood the implication of democracy best:

“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

The Spain you’ve described so well is living proof of Adam’s principle. At the end of the day, unless a Franco arises from within, the remnant of the Spanish people may well fare better under a renewed Al-Andalus than under the monstrous Tranzi regime—voted into office (as was Hitler)—of Zapatero.

I replied:

Thanks for the complete Adams quote. The last two sentences are usually quoted by themselves, without the preceding sentences. In fact, the first sentence (“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion”) makes the point much more clearly than the more famous, second-to-last sentence (“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people”), because the first sentence explains why morality and religion are needed.

I live, to my embarrassment, in New York City. The quality of people on the streets of this city—the forest of ambulatory cell phone conversations you have to negotiate on every block, the bare midriffs everywhere, the staggering coarseness that is the taken-for-granted norm—is an image of a modern Sodom, populated with homo sapiens as the New York Times has always wanted them to be, utterly “free,” disordered, and Godless. This ubiquitous degradation of our quotidian culture is never commented on, even by conservatives. Yet we think we can prevail over an opposing civilization that, notwithstanding its primitiveness, at least believes in God? We arrogantly claim a mandate to create “democracy” in other countries, when we have abandoned the morality and religion that are indispensable to the functioning of our own democracy?

Has there ever been such blindness, such hubris?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 03, 2004 01:21 AM | Send