Apologies if this has already been posted; I searched on "ideological" and didn't find it.
Cheers,
Richard F.
"there already is an alternative ideology to liberal democracy within the West "Yes. It is popularly known as "Liberalism". In the U.S., its base is the Democrat Party. It has nothing to do with the word "liberal" in the sense of freedom-loving, open-minded, or free-thinking. It has nothing to do with liberty and justice. It is contrary to the liberalism and dedication to universal liberty and justice inherent in Western Civilization.
"Louis Henkin, one of the most prominent scholars of international law, calls for largely eliminating 'the difference between a citizen and a non-citizen permanent resident.'"They can rejoice. Their desires have already been realized."Columbia University international law professor Stephen Legomsky argues that dual nationals holding influential positions in the U.S. should not be required to give "greater weight to U.S. interests, in the event of a conflict" between the U.S. and the other country in which the American citizen is also a dual national. "
"My suggested fourth dimension is the conflict within the democratic world between the forces of liberal democracy and the forces of transnational progressivism, between democrats and post- democrats. "This is the "culture war". And on its outcome hangs the fate of the world.
The conflict is within the Western Democracies ("the democratic world") between "Liberalism" ("the forces of transnational progressivism") and the American Heartland (the great bastion of florishing "liberal democracy").
"Liberalism" represents decadence within the West. If it prevails, the West will fall--because of decay and destruction from within--and Western Civilization will come to an end.
The fundamental question is whether or not the people of the West have the wit and the will to survive. If they don't, nothing will save them.
If the American Heartland prevails, it will bring the American Dream to the entire world and Western Civilization, the greatest accumulation of wisdom, liberty, justice, and liberalism the world has ever known, will survive.
The fate of the world rests on the answer to this fundamental question.
The American people had better repudiate "Liberalism" and remain powerful in every way, especially economically and politically. The fate of the world depends on it.
Nothing would prove so dangerous to freedom, as the passion for equality.
The weight of the global market and giant corporations has been thrown behind transnationalism and globalism. Political and legal multiculturalism and postnationalism complete and extend the work that the economy is already doing. Transnational may be oppressive and unworkable, but it isn't unprecedented and doesn't come from nowhere.
There's also an ambiguity in "liberal democracy." Fonte's is the 19th century version of these ideas: a self-governing, sovereign state for every people. The "liberal democrats" or "Liberal Democrats" of the 20th and 21st century have left such ideas behind them already.
Certainly since the founding of the European Union and the United Nations, if not the League of Nations, liberal democrats have been on the transnational path. Proclaiming the benefits of liberal democracy today probably means promoting post-sovereignty. Today's advocates of 19th century liberal democracy or republicanism, like Paul Gottfried, are radically at odds with promoters of the modern version.
This article and William Hawkins National Review article on Kantian Europe have some overlap. Hawkins is wrong about Europe representing some Kantian universalism against American particularism. Years ago one might have taken exactly the opposite line. We were the freetraders, the universalists, the ones who wanted to get Europe out of its particularistic ruts. But he does point out the universalizing drive of the modern world.
Finally, it's not clear how far Israeli "post-Zionism" fits into the pattern. There's a surface similarity between phenomena here and there. But one could argue that things are actually quite different.
First, the kind of transformation urged on Israel may be of the sort that we went through a century ago, when we ceased to be an overwhelmingly WASP nation. Or a century before that when we separated church and state.
Second, post-Zionism looks like a continuation of the transformation away from the original Eastern European settlement to take in Jews from other parts of the world. There's a similarity here to our own history which used previous waves of immigration to justify later ones, but it makes "post-Zionism" less unprecedented or apocalyptic. Such a "continuation" or further development may derail the orginal project, but it ought not be taken as something wholly alien to it.
Third, The vision of some early Zionists was already multicultural. It was far more problematic to plant a state for one people in a region largely populated by others than to advocate one for a population living in the area where the state would be, so compromises with sovereigntism were necessary. For some early Zionists, a national home did not mean a nation state. For others, the assumption was that Arabs would gratefully live in and embrace a modern industrialized Jewish-run state. These may be naive assumptions, but the question of what the original Zionist project of a "national home," a "Jewish state" or "normalization" involves means that Fonte opens up a complicated can of worms that he probably should have left alone.
Fourth, it's not the desire to integrate Palestinians that makes "post-Zionism" but the arrival of non-Arab and non-Jewish workers for economic reasons. As with other countries, the economic and demographical transformation precedes the political one. Even fervid Zionists are going to find it difficult to cope with transformations in Israeli society, and it's by no means clear to outsiders that those changes are for the worst.
Peres's vision of multinational organizations for the Middle East is almost certainly naive and unworkable, but should be seen in the positive light of the original Franco-German moves to overcome centuries of conflict, rather than as a pernicious move in the direction of a superstate.
Leaping to mind now is the memory of a group of protesters in DC shouting at me and my American flag about the "unelected president." Interesting, really, that leftists are only concerned about accountability when the public figure involved is Republican.
Also available at FrontPageMag.