George and Condi and Danton and Emma

While our president is in Europe, warmly praising the transnationalist, bureaucratic-socialist, anti-democratic, unaccountable, politically correct, anti-Christian, anti-white, anti-Israel, dhimmi superstate of the European Union as the ally of America in the global war for “freedom,” here is an article from the New American with devastating comments about our current “conservative” leadership and its embrace of Jacobinism:

Mr. Bush’s unbuttoned embrace of global revolution as a way of healing the “root causes” of terrorism earned sarcastic plaudits from liberal commentator Michael Kinsley of the Los Angeles Times. “[Bush] sounds less like a Republican than a dorm-room Marxist,” commented Kinsley in a February 9 op-ed column. He also drew telling parallels between Mr. Bush’s “conservative” exaltations of democratic revolution and those published nearly a century ago by Marxist agitator Emma Goldman in her essay, “The Psychology of Political Violence.” Goldman wrote that “the despair millions of people are daily made to endure” fuels acts of terrorist violence. “Terrorism … is inevitable as long as tyranny continues, for it is not the terrorists that are to be blamed, but the tyrants who are responsible for it,” she insisted in words that could easily have been uttered by Mr. Bush….

In a February 8 speech in Paris, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice elaborated on the Bush administration’s ideology of global revolution by tracing its roots to the French Revolution. She proudly recalled accompanying the first President Bush to France in 1989 during “the bicentennial celebration of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man,” which took place while we also celebrated the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. That alignment, she insisted, wasn’t coincidental: “The founders of both the French and American republics were inspired by the very same values and by each other. They shared the universal values of freedom and democracy and human dignity that have inspired men and women across the globe for centuries.”

In connection with Bush’s agreement with Emma Goldman, and Rice’s embrace of the French Revolution, let us also remember that the flagship magazine of American conservatism sees that same revolution as a source of inspiring imagery.

The question may be asked, what is the relationship between, on one hand, Bush’s Jacobinist rhetoric of global democratic revolution, and, on the other hand, his approval of the EU, which seems to represent just the opposite tendency? The answer is contained in the fact that Bush, notwithstanding his natural-rights-sounding rhetoric, is not really a “right-liberal,” that type of liberal who believes in universal principles of natural rights that serve as a brake on the human will; he is, as I’ve written previously, a left-liberal who worships the human will, seeing the desires and feelings of all people as equally valid and equally to be included. From the eighteenth century onward, leftism has consisted of two aspects that, while frequently in conflict with each other, have overall worked together to destroy Western civilization: the rationalistic, Condorcet-like, bureaucratic side (represented today by the EU) and the Romantic, Rousseauian, expansionist side (represented today by Bush). In praising the EU, Bush is simply playing his part in this three-century-old drama of leftism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 21, 2005 10:51 AM | Send