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The New American, by Selwyn Duke — January 1, 2019
Excerpt:
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Just as WWI was billed as “The War to End All Wars,” our democracy-über-alles foreign policy endeavors have been attended by a certain naiveté on the part of true believers. Consider: Why did we hellp create the monster that is modern China (it got rich on our backs) and embark upon nation-building, assuming that Western-style republics would flower in Muslim lands?
Among those sincere about the Westernization program, these follies were predicated on the notion that not only is our political system universally applicable, but that our “values,” to use that favored term of those who’ve forgotten virtues, would be universally accepted. Of course China would become like us. Why wouldn’t she? But the men who founded Western civilization and, specifically, those forging the United States, were under no such illusions.
For example, President John Adams noted in 1798 that our “Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Did he have in mind when thus warning, tribalistic Afghanistan where the moral foundation is not the Ten Commandments but Sharia? Can China, if it remains the world’s most atheistic country, make work a system based on the principle of God-given rights?
“Democracy” is not a cure (and our system is a republic, actually), but a system fit for those who have been cured. As to this, if we’d long ago sent missionaries to such nations and could have evangelized them successfully, they might have the foundation of which Adams spoke. Of course, such endeavors are now considered old-fashioned, intolerant, impositional, and paternalistic. No, we’d never seek to impose Christianity.
Just democracy.
We try imposing a system of beliefs — “democratism,” if you will — without even realizing it’s merely the newest evangelization. This isn’t to say evangelization is bad or that our conception of government is ideal or flawed, only that our idealists’ blindness to what they’re actually doing is matched by their blindness to why it’s actually failing.
Evident here is a kind of ideological chauvinism and what leftist moderns once called “ethnocentrism.” Why would everyone else accept our “values”? Because they’re so obviously true? Even if so, man’s history isn’t one of hungry receptiveness to Truth, but moral-corruption-driven resistance to it.
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