Beyond Our Shores

Here is the fourth in the series on American Conservatism.

If you would like on or off this bump list, let me know.

Here are links to the first three pieces:

A Question of Temperament [What makes one a conservative?] First of a Series

To Preserve What We Have- American Conservatism - WSJ article by Bill Buckley

Shelby Steele: Of Race and Imagination

Here is the fourth in the series on American Conservatism.

If you would like on or off this bump list, let me know.

Here are links to the first three pieces:

A Question of Temperament [What makes one a conservative?] First of a Series

To Preserve What We Have- American Conservatism - WSJ article by Bill Buckley
Shelby Steele: Of Race and Imagination

FF is the same guy who, following the collapse of the USSR ten years ago, announced "the end of history".

As we now know, he wasn't very accurate in that pronouncement, and I think he's overstretching again in this article ....

I liked the "end of history," piece he wrote in the 1980's. A lot of unintended karom shots since then...

Its closest counterpart in Germany is the Free Democratic Party, which won just a bit over 7% of the vote in Germany's election last September.

This may be generally true as far as the establishment, economically-oriented wing of the GOP is concerned, and perhaps also with what we are now calling "neoconservatives". But the FDP does not correspond very closely at all with the Religious Right social conservative wing of the party. The Christian Democrats may correspond a little closer, but there are also significant differences between European Christian Democracy and the Religious Right in the US. While not exactly socialists, in general Christian Democrats tend to be considerably more open to government intervention in the economy to promote social goals than is the Religious Right.

The liberal internationalist tradition is represented not just by historical figures like Woodrow Wilson, founder of the League of Nations, but by more recent administrations, Republican and Democratic, that have helped found international institutions like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization.

Interestign article, but I see a some flaws here, like the passage above. NAFTA and the WTO are founded in free trade, something that conservatives are for and that liberals are against. The strange and hypocritical thing is that the leftists oppose these capitalist ideas not because of humanitarian reasons, such as human rights abuses in communist China, but because of its free market nature.

I find that liberalism once may have thought cooperation with other nations was they way for foreign policy to work, but increasingly liberal foreign policy has almost become anti-American in nature - designed to put the USA at a disadvantage.

There was another direction that I think he could have pointed to that would have made his area of concern more interesting to debate.

Russell Kirk used to refer to that direction by saying that the U. S. Constitution was not for export.

Now what he meant by that was simple enough. He felt that good political and social systems were developed, in context, and around a culture and history very particular to the product--the political system. Ours, he felt, was very much due to the Anglo-American tradition of Whiggish or classical liberal tradition in promenance at the time of the colonies. Hayek felt much the same, deciededly coming down as opposed to French metaphysical theories.

Now, if our constitution is not for export, doesn't that mean that other areas of the world may have their best and most correct systems with perhaps, different principles based on their histories?

Is the rest of the world supposed to be at just the same stage in the development of participation in government as we are? Is the Franchise we had in 1870 right for some nation as advanced in tiddlywinks now, as we were then?

Should we take a nation with resonable freedom and justice and de-stablilize it if its franchise isn't as universal as ours today and perhaps put in place a broad democratic government that does not have freedom and justice?

Like many, I find the article's author someone who is speaking way off the beaten path. Not useless, but almost like he is in a different world.

The first has to do with the scope of the current idealist project, which will require a consistent, long-term willingness to do what it takes to build legitimate and stable political institutions in foreign lands. The United States is not good at either implementing or sticking to such projects over the long run.

I think that I would point to our one outstanding success in this century and that would be NATO.
Is the USSR still in business? And that took HOW long.
Just what kind of time frame are we talking about here?

As far as governments go - I'd say we're 1 for 2 at the moment. South Korea is still around and pretty stable. (Other than the fact that I almost think we should get out and leave them alone the way they seem to want us to)
South Vietnam, on the other hand, was a disaster from the start. We weren't prepared to go into that long term and should never have interfered if we weren't.

Now comes the middle east. Afganistan and Iraq.
If we are NOT prepared to stay and contribute we would have been better off to do something clandestine and disavow any knowledge.

The correct link for the third piece is:

Shelby Steele: Of Race and Imagination

After the labels game, here's serious thinking against Fukuyama's optimism:

The crisis was diagnosed at the time of World War I by Spengler as the going down (or decline) of the West. Spengler understood by the West one culture among a small number of high cultures. But the West was for him more than one high culture among a number of them. It was for him the comprehensive culture. It is the only culture which has conquered earth. Above all, it is the only culture which is open to all cultures and which does not reject the other cultures as forms of barbarism or which tolerates them condescendingly as "underdeveloped"; it is the only culture which has acquired full consciousness of culture as such. Whereas "culture" originally and naively meant the culture of the mind, the derivative and reflective notion of "culture" necessarily implies that there is a variety of equally high cultures. But precisely since the West is the culture in which culture reaches full self-consciousness, it is the final culture: the owl of Minerva begins its flight inthe dusk; the decline of the West is identical with the exhaustion of the very possibility of high culture; the highest possibilities of man are exhausted. But man's highest possibilities cannot be exhausted as long as there are still high human tasks--as long as the fundamental riddles which confront man, have not been solved to the extent to which they can be solved. We may therefore say that Spengler's analysis and prediction is wrong; our highest authority, natural science, considers itself susceptible of infinite progress, there cannot be a meaningful end or completion of history; there can only be brutal stopping of man's onward march through natural forces acting themselves or directed by human brains and hands. . .
However much the power of the West may have declined, however great the dangers to the West may be, that decline, that danger, nay, the defeat, even the destruction of the West could go down in honor, certain of its purpose. The crisis of the West consists in the West's having become uncertain of its purpose. The West was once certain of its purpose--of a purpose in which all men could be united, and hence it had a clear vision of its future as the future of mankind. We do no longer havethat certainty and that clarity. Some among us even despair of the future, and this despair explains many forms of contemporary Western degradation. The foregoing statements are not meant to imply that no society can be healthy unless it is dedicated to a universal prupose, to a purpose in which all men can be united: a society can be tribal and yet healthy. But a society which was acustomed to understand itself in terms of a universal purpose, cannot lose faith in that purpose without becoming completely bewildered. We find such a universal purpose expressly stated in our immediate past, for instance in famous official declarations made during the two World Wars . .
Philosophy or science should make possible progress toward ever greater prosperity; it thus should enable everyone to share in all the advantages of society or life and therewith give full effect to everyone's natural right to comfrotable self-preservation and all that that right entails or to everyone's natural right to develop all his faculties fully in concert with eveyrone else's doing the same. The progress toward ever greater prosperity would thus become, or render possible, the prgress toward ever greater freedom and justice. This progress would necessarily be the progress toward a society embracing equally all human beings: a universal league of free and equal nations, each nation consisting of free and equal men and women. For it had come to be believed that the prosperous, free, and just society in a single country or in only a few countries is not possible in the long run: to make the world safe for the Western democracies, one must make the whole globe democratic, each country in itself as well as the society of nations. Good order in one country presupposes good order in all countries among countries.
[After the lesson of communism] . . . The situation resembles the one which existed during the centuries in which Christianity and Islam each raised its universal claim but had to be satisfied with uneasily coexisting with its antagonist. All this amounts to saying that for the foreseeable future, political society remains what it always has been: a partial or particular society whose most urgent and primary task is its self-preservation and whose highest task is its self-improvement. As for the meaning of self-improvement, we may observe that the same experience which has made the West doubtful of the viability of a world-society has made it doubtful of the belief that affluence is the sufficient and even necessary condition of happiness and justice: affluene does not cure the deepest evils.
--Leo Straus in The City and Man