America’s equalitarian belief system dooms it

Last September, a correspondent wrote that unless America rejects its egalitarian ideology (which, for example, makes the entire pre-1960s America guilty of racism), it is doomed. In a different way, he is saying what I’m always saying, that the West can only survive if it renounces its own liberalism:

Look: I’ve thought this country doomed for years. I have great affection for the real country, but its founding ideals are barking-mad treasonous nonsense that can only be believed in by Jacobin fanatics and people who just don’t really mean it.

People don’t think what it means to say “the American Experiment.” Experiments by definition can be falsified. There’s only been one other experimental nation, whose demise we may not outlive by a generation.

I think our likely future is to sink into a Brazillian stew of incompetence and filth, which will produce mass defections of serious loyalty and a concomitant collapse of social cooperation. Foreign powers will carve us up like Poland and California will be under Chinese military rule within 50 years.

Maybe not, but social reformers like Tom Tancredo won’t get anywhere in the end if they have to operate within the existing ideological consensus. I’d like to believe we can fudge it, but it’s unlikely we can assemble sufficient political muscle without an explicit ideological change. Ideology always wins in the end.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 14, 2006 12:07 AM | Send