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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (263479)	6/12/2002 8:23:56 PM
From: gao seng	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Are you this type of libertarian <bolded below>? -- And btw, what are you talking about? The question you are responding to has nothing to do with what kind of isms you have. -- The subversive forces that D’Souza describes as in their essence American are in fact the universal subversive forces of modernity. They only look American because America is what Gertrude Stein called "the oldest modern country." Here we come to the crux of the disagreement between conservatism and libertarianism or liberalism, which converge on this point. Conservatives believe that the forces of modernity are by nature so powerful that they do not need anyone’s proactive efforts to egg them on. Rather, they need conservative forces to restrain them from destroying things that are essential to a civilized society. Conversely, liberals and libertarians believe that modernity needs a push from the proactive efforts of human beings to overcome the ossified structures of the past that hold it back from reaching its true potential. I incline to the former view, for a complex of reasons I cannot elaborate here which are ultimately Straussian (article) in nature. Modernity contains a philosophical crisis that requires our active effort not to be consumed by it. America is fundamentally a liberal society and needs a conservative government to balance it, not a liberal government egging it on. Disturbingly, D’Souza’s conception of America is philosophically identical with al-Qaeda’s: the subversive forces of our time are American in essence. But if America is bent on subverting the entire world, its way of life, and its understanding of what it is to be human, is it not logical for foreigners to hate us? How would we respond to someone dedicated to subverting our way of life and understanding of our humanity? This supposition is clearly already the cause of a great deal of anti-Americanism. Almost every nation has complaints about modernity, and they choose to personify these complaints in America because it is easier and more emotionally satisfying to hate a nation than an abstraction. Forced to abandon socialism? American economic power is to blame. Cultural decadence spreading? American movies and music. Not able to throw one’s weight around? American military power. Old religion feeling the strains? American – Zionist conspiracy. Naturally, this equation of America with half the world’s discontents is something that Americans should be fighting with every intellectual resource at our command, not endorsing. We need to be explaining to the world that their problems are not our fault, not gloating at how we are "subverting" them. D’Souza writes insouciantly, "American hegemony is unique in that it extends virtually over the total space of the inhabited earth." For a start, this is a prima facie falsehood that would result in laughter in any International Relations 101 class. I think D’Souza has forgotten what hegemony is; it is not the ability to purchase CD’s of Titanic. The United States does not have the unimpeded ability to impose its will on Russia, on China, on North Korea, on Pakistan, or on the Middle East, to name just a few examples that have caused us concern in the last ten years. D’Souza hedges his point by switching his line of argument in the next sentence from hegemony to cultural influence, but this only makes his error clearer: the Greeks had cultural influence over the Romans, but Rome ruled Greece and not vice-versa. This kind of fuzzy thinking could kill us. It is getting distressingly common, particularly among the sort of (pre-9/11) Wired magazine libertarians who think that if only enough people sell enough microchips to each other, the world’s political problems will melt away. frontpagemag.com