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Was the Mexican War an act of democratic hubris?
I agree with the columnist known as “Spengler” that Victor Hanson is split between his classical sense of tragedy and his mindlessly American denial of tragedy. However, I dislike Spengler’s use of the Mexican War to make his point against democracy as cure-all. He argues that, just as the Athenian democracy out of reckless greed launched the invasion of Syracuse that led to Athens’ ruin, the American democracy out of reckless greed launched the war against Mexico that led to America’s ruin some years later in the Civil War. But it’s a real cheap shot to say that the Mexican War was so evil that the U.S. “deserved” the Civil War as punishment. The Athenian invasion of Syracuse, as it comes down to us from Thucydides, was plainly an act of hubris; the Mexican War was not in that class. It’s true that it was a war of nationalistic expansion, it’s true that one of the motives for the war (not the only motive, as Spengler suggests) was to increase the number of slave states, it’s true that there are arguments to be made against the way President Polk started the war, and it’s true that victory in the war, by adding vast new territories to the U.S. that became the object of contention between the free states and the slave states, tragically led to the Civil War. But, whatever its negative consequences, the Mexican War was not an act of hubris. It was part of a conscious, rationally self-interested policy by which a series of U.S. presidents, over generations, secured for the United States the safe possession of this continent, free from foreign influence and interference.
That post-1965 America has been so frivolous as to let the Mexicans enter en masse the lands we won from them in the 1840s, and so launch a revanchist war against us within our own borders, is not the fault of James K. Polk. Email entry |