In the new Cold War, the U.S. is the revolutionary force.
September 22, 2008 Issue
Copyright © 2008 The American Conservative
Free World Colossus
By Lee Congdon
The Bush administration’s angry reaction to Russia’s intervention in South Ossetia was of a piece with its harsh criticism of Vladimir Putin, the popular leader who has brought a measure of order and stability to a country that endured 74 years of communist misrule. The president and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, are clearly offended by Putin’s scarcely disguised view that democracy in Russia cannot mean what it has come to mean in the United States and Europe. It disturbs them that he exercises a personal authority greater than that which is his by virtue of his offices-that he bears, as a political figure, some resemblance to Charles de Gaulle, never a hero to democrats.
One should note that it was precisely the semi-authoritarianism of the Putin government that enlisted the support of the late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. “It is not authoritarianism itself that is intolerable,” the courageous Russian wrote in his 1973 Letter to the Soviet Leaders, “but the ideological lies that are daily foisted upon us.” Not authoritarianism, then, but ideological tyranny was the enemy.
Americans, of course, also spurned communist ideology and feared that it might succeed in dominating the world, including the United States. They seemed not to notice that they themselves were in thrall to a political religion; recently, in fact, Yale professor David Gelernter described “Americanism”-that is, American democracy-as the fourth great Western religion. No doubt he cheered when President Bush, in his second inaugural address, declared it to be “the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” In practice, this imperial ambition, for that is what it is, has meant constant meddling in the affairs of governments the U.S. considers to be insufficiently democratic.
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Copyright © 2008 The American Conservative
Free World Colossus
By Lee Congdon
The Bush administration’s angry reaction to Russia’s intervention in South Ossetia was of a piece with its harsh criticism of Vladimir Putin, the popular leader who has brought a measure of order and stability to a country that endured 74 years of communist misrule. The president and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, are clearly offended by Putin’s scarcely disguised view that democracy in Russia cannot mean what it has come to mean in the United States and Europe. It disturbs them that he exercises a personal authority greater than that which is his by virtue of his offices-that he bears, as a political figure, some resemblance to Charles de Gaulle, never a hero to democrats.
One should note that it was precisely the semi-authoritarianism of the Putin government that enlisted the support of the late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. “It is not authoritarianism itself that is intolerable,” the courageous Russian wrote in his 1973 Letter to the Soviet Leaders, “but the ideological lies that are daily foisted upon us.” Not authoritarianism, then, but ideological tyranny was the enemy.
Americans, of course, also spurned communist ideology and feared that it might succeed in dominating the world, including the United States. They seemed not to notice that they themselves were in thrall to a political religion; recently, in fact, Yale professor David Gelernter described “Americanism”-that is, American democracy-as the fourth great Western religion. No doubt he cheered when President Bush, in his second inaugural address, declared it to be “the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” In practice, this imperial ambition, for that is what it is, has meant constant meddling in the affairs of governments the U.S. considers to be insufficiently democratic.
--MORE--