What can cure our madness?

Stanley Kurtz writes about our delusion that everyone wants democracy, that all peoples—including Muslims, including African tribal peoples—are capable of democracy, that democracy is spreading, and that democracy is the fix for all ills. But now there is Kenya:

Maybe Kenya will finally break our pattern of dangerously naive infatuation with pretend democracies… [D]eep-breathe, slowly, say it with me now: “My name is the United States of America, and I am addicted to phony democracies.”

But why should the outbreak of tribal mass murder in Kenya cure an addiction that no other disaster and disillusion have cured? Bush and Rice and the neocons and the liberals have literally destroyed the American people’s ability to think about political reality, by prohibiting them from thinking about the most important feature of political reality, which is human differences. Our present social order is founded on the sacred truth that differences don’t matter, that all people are the same, and therefore that democracy, the political expression of the idea that all people are the same, must be valid and practicable for the entire world. If democracy does not work for all peoples everywhere, then human differences matter, and the legitimacy of our own social order is thrown into doubt. Thus our very identity depends on our denying the most basic truth of human existence, which is that human beings are different. How does one regain what one has destroyed? How does one stop believing in an illusion that one believes is the highest and greatest truth? What cured leftists of their belief that Communism was the glorious and destined endpoint of humanity, but the fall of the Soviet Union? What, then, can cure Americans of their fantasy that American-style democracy is the glorious and destined endpoint of humanity, but the destruction of democracy in America?

Do not misunderstand me. I am not wishing for the end of true American order and true American freedom. Rather I am saying about Americans what I’ve said many times about the British, that modern liberalism, with all its illusions, has become so much a part of their essence, that only the destruction of the modern liberal order can end their belief in it.

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Terry Morris writes:

I certainly do not wish to see the end of true American order and true American freedom either. This is my country which I love, and I wish to leave it to my children and grandchildren intact, or, more properly, better than it was when I came along. But we know that liberalism is a destructive ideology and that it is America’s dominant ideology carrying America with it down the road to destruction. Therefore as long as we continue on the path we’re on, the destruction of America is where we’re heading. The only thing that can save (or restore) true American order and true American freedom is the destruction of something less than these, something that is at perpetual war with them, modern liberalism. Or at least its relegation to the far corners. The question seems to be whether modern liberalism will destroy itself before it destroys America, so that its own destruction will not result in the destruction of America.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 24, 2008 08:41 PM | Send