A Harvard political scientist writes that troubles in Ukraine
may draw
the U.S. into war. To the west,
American troops will be deployed
to Poland to rally the spirits of NATO in the face presumed Russian
ambitions.
At the core of Russia’s current crankiness, according
to Reuters, is America’s persistent, bi-partisan campaign to bring
democracy to the world, and Russia’s doorstep in particular. Democracy you say, isn’t that the stuff that
made America great? The short answer is
“no”.
The American enterprise that commenced in 1776 was never an
experiment in democracy. It was an
endeavor in limited governance that sought to syndicate governmental
jurisdiction over thirteen sovereign states and one federal authority of
limited scope. Additionally, in each
state as well at the federal level, authority was parsed out over three
co-equal branches – legislative, executive and judicial.
In no instance were laws to be created by direct
democracy. All legislation was to be
created by elected representatives and in conformity with the supreme law of
the land, a written constitution. On top
of that a Bill of Rights, that many considered to be redundant, was appended to
the Constitution to protect citizens from the government. In all, the Founders designed a finely tuned
mechanism that at once dispersed power so that no one body was preeminent,
protected individuals from overbearing and arbitrary government and protected
government from the momentary passions of mob rule.
The Founding
Fathers cared little for democracy and made no bones about it. A sampling of their sentiments follows:
“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may
take away the rights of the other 49%.” - Thomas Jefferson
“Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention;
have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of
property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been
violent in their death.” - James Madison
“When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will
herald the end of the republic.” - Benjamin Franklin
“Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of
democracy...it has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable
would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is
more false than this.” - Alexander Hamilton
In our own day, activist and author, Brian
Phillips opines:
Under democracy the individual is subservient
to the majority, that is, the collective. Democracy is a form of collectivism….
The Founders were avid students of history. They studied all forms of
government—monarchies, parliamentary systems, democracies, and more. They
sought to erect a system that prevented a tyranny of one—such as monarchy—as
well as a tyranny of many—such as democracy. The Founders recognized the
primacy of the individual and sought to protect his rights.
The Founders established a constitutional
republic for this purpose. They limited and enumerated the powers of the
federal government, securing for the individual the freedom to act as he judges
best. This is precisely what democracy prevents.”
Economist, Hans Hermann Hoppe concurs, “Democracy
has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and
rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.” In the
introduction to his book, Democracy, The God That Failed,
Hoppe traces the rise of the democratic ideal in America at the expense of
republicanism and individual liberty.
Hoppe points out how the First World War was an ordinary
territorial squabble until the U.S. decided to enter. Our progressivist president, Wilson, turned
it into an ideological struggle to overturn European monarchies and “make the
world safe for democracy”. Being that
the war became a philosophical battle as well as a military one, total victory
was necessary to purge the world of the ancien
regime and to inaugurate a new dawn of democratic bliss.
Things didn't work out so well. The power voids created by the destruction of
prevailing governments as well as the harsh terms imposed on the vanquished
opened the door to Nazism, Fascism and Marxist Communism. The world would be plunged into an even more gruesome
war within two decades. As the principle
proponent and exporter of democracy, America would remain at war, be it hot,
cold, covert or proxy from the 1940s until today. There is no end in sight. We wage wars to assure that every man, woman
and child might enjoy the benefits of Western style democracy.
But has democracy even been beneficial to the west? Hoppe argues “no” and his Failed God, written in 2001 he offers a
litany of evidence. Things have only
gotten worse since then.
“…the American system is itself in a deep crisis. Since the late 1960s
or early 1970s, real wage incomes in the United States and in Western Europe
have stagnated or even fallen. In Western Europe in particular, unemployment
rates have been steadily edging upward and are currently exceeding 10 percent.
The public debt has risen everywhere to astronomical heights, in many cases
exceeding a country's annual Gross Domestic Product. Similarly, the social
security systems everywhere are on or near the verge of bankruptcy. Further,
the collapse of the Soviet Empire represented not so much a triumph of
democracy as the bankruptcy of the idea of socialism, and it also contained an
indictment against the American (Western) system of democratic - rather than
dictatorial - socialism. Moreover, throughout the Western hemisphere national,
ethnic and cultural divisiveness, separatism and secessionism are on the rise.
Wilson's multicultural democratic creations, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia,
have broken apart. In the U.S., less than a century of full-blown democracy has
resulted in steadily increasing moral degeneration, family and social
disintegration, and cultural decay in the form of continually rising rates of
divorce, illegitimacy, abortion, and crime. As a result of an ever expanding
list of non-discrimination - "affirmative action" - laws and
non-discriminatory - mutlicultural-egalitarian - immigration policies, every
nook and cranny of American society is affected by forced integration, and
accordingly, social strife and racial, ethnic, and moral-cultural tension and
hostility have increased dramatically.
The aggressive expansion of NATO, including the courtship
Ukraine, in the service of universal democracy, has pushed the Russian Bear
into a corner and he is lashing out. The
pursuit of democracy once again brings us to the brink of global conflict and
the extermination of civilization or the species in its entirety. God forbid.
The solution lies in a radical change of heart and
restoration of Founding principles. America
needs to relinquish the illusion that big, centralized government will solve
all of our problems and to restore respect for state and local autonomy as well
as for private property and individual freedom.
Likewise we need to
respect the autonomy of foreign nations to choose their ways of life and their
own form of government. We need to let
go of our progressive era instinct that we can forcibly impose a “better” way
of life upon Earth’s masses. This is the genuine American vision, the true conservative
vision of George Washington, of Edmund Burke, of Russell Kirk and Robert Taft. The only way that war will bring “peace in
our time” is by killing all beings that are capable of war.
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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon
