Posted on 05/01/2006 3:07:32 PM PDT by astoundedlib
"U.S. war against liberals goes global" Electronic Media by Abbott Gleason
The Watson Institute thanks the Providence Journal Bulletin for permission to reprint this article on our website.
THE UNITED STATES is almost certainly at a turning point in its history. The momentous nature of the changes in our political and economic life make the present moment superficially comparable to 1946-48, when the Cold War was launched. But the changes seem deeper and more far-reaching than that, if only because American global power dominates in a way quite different from the way it did at the end of World War II—when it was pledged to be defensive, rather than the opposite, as now.
It is not just that the United States is now the only superpower and can more or less do as it pleases. The United States has achieved this power at the same time as—and in close connection with—a revolt against liberalism. The revolt may be as deep as the one that began in the 1880s and reached its climax with the totalitarian regimes of the 1920s and ’30s in Europe. It may even be that the present moment will ultimately be compared to the period when the Roman Republic was giving way to empire, as a number of critics have suggested.
But let’s stay in the context of the last hundred years or so. One of the characteristics of the rightist intellectuals who supported the post-World War I national revolutions in Germany and Italy was their contempt for the welfare state—which they linked with the necessity for imperial expansion. Such extreme theoreticians as Carl Schmitt believed that the European states had to choose between defending their national communities—even by force—and a debilitating commitment to popular welfare. They saw the latter as increasingly absorbing the energies of a weak-kneed liberalism, such as that of Italy’s pre-Mussolini regime or the Weimar Republic, in Germany.
The right-wing Schmitt believed that the state existed only to oppose the enemies of the national community and to ensure order at home. To use a formulation he made famous, the state is only an institutional expression of the friend-enemy polarity. Liberals had embarked, he said, on a fruitless crusade to escape political conflict within their societies by expanding the state’s welfare function, to appease the masses—thereby weakening the state’s “executive function.”
So for him and others, there was a necessary connection between an overdue revival of militarism and imperialism and the curtailing of social welfare.
Mutatis mutandis. There seems to be a similar connection between the Bush administration’s imperial foreign policy and its proposed tax cuts—which would not only benefit the richest Americans but also strangle the welfare state. There are crises at the state level all over the United States. Educational institutions are being starved, benefits to the poor are being cut; the proportion of Americans living in poverty is up, as is inequality; a crisis in Medicare and Social Security looms. And these results are actually being promoted, in conjunction with the tax cuts that, if enacted, will erode the capacity of the state—for generations -- to undertake any but the most minimal welfare functions.
There are other parallels with the past. In the late 19th Century’s anti-liberal revolt, there was also an attack on cultural “decadence” and a demand for a return to religion and order. In Italy and Germany, and, in a different way, the Soviet Union, totalitarian government came to prevail. In other nations, too, constitutional guarantees were weakened or abolished: Authoritarian and traditionalist governments in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary and Austria came to power, as did a quasi-Fascist government in Rumania. Liberals were seen as wimps; local patriotism prevailed.
There were, of course, variations. In the Soviet Union, private business was demonized and expropriated; in Germany and Italy, it was at least thoroughly dominated by the political elite. By contrast, in the present anti-liberal revolt, as led by the United States, business is an intimate partner of—almost indistinguishable from—government. When Iraq is rebuilt, most of the contracts will probably go to companies with ties to Vice President Cheney and others in the Bush administration. Non-American firms appear not to be earmarked for participation.
The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us against almost half a century ago is attaining its maturity. Its aim seems to be to tear down all that remains of the New Deal.
Too little noticed has been the about-face the Bush administration has made since 9/11. From an indecisive tendency toward isolationism, and reliance for security on such Rube Goldberg devices as the anti-missile system, the imperial drive for world dominance has within months become the administration’s doctrine (though it has been more than a decade in the planning). In that drive, constitutional protections are being eroded—as when the attorney general refers to “enemy combatants” to deny prisoners the right to legal counsel or even communication with their families.
Historically, people often don’t notice the most significant changes in their society. Living in everyday reality, they tend not to see the big picture. But we should make no mistake: Nothing like this has happened since the period following World War I.
Abbott Gleason, an occasional contributor, is a professor of history at Brown University and the author of Totalitarianism (Oxford University Press, 1995).
"IBTZ!"
Why are you trying to ban me? People have responded to this thread and everything is going fine...Also i don't have much time to answer these days, so please, if you don't like that thread don't try to ban me...ther is no point...
Best regards.
My comment was directed to the ridiculous position of American liberals, who spend too much time worrying about whether Jacques Chirac approves of what they are doing and not enough time worrying about the security of our nation. It really shouldn't matter what Jacques thinks if an action enhances our national security.
Close enough. First of all, no need for a war: political change in the United States comes about through the ballot box, not armed revolutions. American conservatives hold the institution of choosing leaders through the political process to be sacred, and we would never short-circuit it.
As for "liberalim" dying on its own, umm... I think we need to get straight what we mean by "liberalism" here. I was referring to liberalism in the American sense of the word, which is vastly different from the European. In the European sense of the word, Free Republic is chock-full of liberals. I guess you could say that it's socialist welfare states that we don't like.
Enough semantics, back to your question. Socialism doesn't "die on its own." Neither does any other system. Like any economic system, socialism is nothing more than a whole bunch of people producing and moving goods around in a certain way. Socialism goes away when the powers that make it exist stop making it exist. In the case of socialism, that would be government, because socialism relies on coerced transfers of wealth, which only a government with a monopoly on force can do.
The way that I described it happening was the worst case scenario: with more and more people qualifying for entitlement programs, those programs will require the redistribution of greater and greater amounts of wealth. Eventually, the amount of wealth that must be redistributed is great enough to make the program not worth maintaining, and the government implementing the program decides, because of popular political pressure or simple necessity, to shut down the program.
Something to think about: when was the last time you heard about an entitlement program getting smaller?
Dissatisfaction with liberalism or radicalism or modernism or progressivism has been recurrent in modern history, and it's had some justification at times. Such a turn from "progressivism" happened after the French Revolution in Europe. Something similar happened in the Western World after the Second World War.
Gleason ignores those developments to focus on what supposedly happened in Europe from 1880 to 1945. That's probably what he knows -- or thinks he knows. But it's significant that he chooses a supposed course that leads to fascism not one that, like the Cold War conservatism of the Christian Democratic parties, had other results.
And what happened from 1880 to 1945 was so complicated and multifaceted that you leave a lot out if you construe it as a "revolt against liberalism." For one thing, such a six decade long "revolt" didn't happen in the US. For another, "revolt" doesn't characterize what was going on in England, and it only imperfectly relates to France and other established democracies.
The "revolt" paradigm singles out some actors -- rebels on the European right -- as important and ignores others -- determined socialists and bewildered or staunch, persistent liberals. A paradigm like that may nevertheless work in describing one historical epoch, but it doesn't travel well to other times and places, because the factors involved are never quite the same.
Alright! good enough! Why i started this thread, is not that i want a war or the liberal party to disapear, but i feared of a bit too much agressivity from a party to another! Anyways, a fragile soul i am!
Best regards.
When one party is trying to make its own nation lose a war (the democrats or in American political lingo, the liberals), it is necessary to be very aggressive toward them to prevent them from surrendering in a war we are winning.
Were the democrats (aka liberals) acting as a LOYAL opposition, then aggressiveness would not be justified. But they are not. Many of them are behaving as traitors. As to them, we are not being nearly aggressive enough.
Thanks again!
I understand more and more the position of conservatives, that i never considered before...What actually triggered my interest in conservatism is our curernt PM, mister harper who is actually running the country pretty well, and keeps his cool against other propositions from the other party...anyways!
Best regards.
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