WEBVTT NOTE Modern Democracy and War 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:08.000 The view of democracy as producing a peace-loving and stable regime has become a settled opinion of our time. 2 00:00:08.000 --> 00:00:13.000 The Olin Fellow, I suppose, of global democracy or something like that, Walter Burns, 3 00:00:13.000 --> 00:00:19.000 has insisted that democracies have never engaged in war with each other. 4 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:25.000 This assertion has recently been changed to, I think, an equally suspect one, 5 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:31.440 that democracies have not engaged in war with each other for about 150 years. 6 00:00:31.440 --> 00:00:39.600 A problematic statement at best, unfortunately by now this has acquired the status of a truism. 7 00:00:39.600 --> 00:00:46.340 Just about every day one reads in the newspaper admonitions that the United States is holding 8 00:00:46.340 --> 00:00:52.720 back the process of peace by not making the rest of the world democratic. 9 00:00:52.720 --> 00:01:15.720 A January 19th column in the Philadelphia Inquirer, which I had the misfortune of reading by columnist Trudy Rubin, explained that America's choice at this point is either in creating a peaceful Russia or passively assisting in the triumph of neo-fascism throughout the world. 10 00:01:15.720 --> 00:01:23.720 Peace, Ms. Rubin explains, requires a vigorous interventionist foreign policy on the part of our government. 11 00:01:23.720 --> 00:01:27.720 There are a number of problems with such a statement. 12 00:01:27.720 --> 00:01:32.720 In fact, it would probably take me several hours to go into all of them. 13 00:01:32.720 --> 00:01:40.720 One of them, of course, is the idea that a self-described democracy is by definition peaceful. 14 00:01:40.720 --> 00:01:44.720 This is because self-described democracies declare themselves to be peaceful. 15 00:01:44.720 --> 00:01:51.080 and insist that any measure that they take is either peaceful or intended to 16 00:01:51.080 --> 00:01:56.680 produce world peace. If one engages in circular definitions and democracies 17 00:01:56.680 --> 00:02:00.600 obviously can never fight wars against each other and any measure that they 18 00:02:00.600 --> 00:02:06.400 take is intended to be peaceful in the long run. The same kind of argument of 19 00:02:06.400 --> 00:02:13.760 course was used I think in some cases to with success in the case of the Soviet 20 00:02:13.760 --> 00:02:22.960 Union, which for many years argued that socialism or Marxist socialism was by definition peaceful 21 00:02:22.960 --> 00:02:28.720 and that whenever the Soviet Union engaged in war with Baltic states or wherever else 22 00:02:28.720 --> 00:02:33.520 that, you know, cared to send its armies, that was done as a way of ensuring peace within 23 00:02:33.520 --> 00:02:38.160 the Soviet Union and spreading the penumber of peace beyond the Soviet Union to other 24 00:02:38.160 --> 00:02:41.360 countries that it would choose to liberate. 25 00:02:41.360 --> 00:02:48.200 In any case, the insistence by militant Democrats, and in Germany there are, I discovered, people 26 00:02:48.200 --> 00:02:55.120 who, like Jürgen Habermas, describe themselves as einsatzbereite Demokraten, militant Democrats, 27 00:02:55.120 --> 00:03:01.320 that the entire world be made to flatter their political conceits, is not exactly a passive 28 00:03:01.320 --> 00:03:03.280 stance. 29 00:03:03.280 --> 00:03:08.800 Last year, for example, self-proclaimed defenders of human rights and democracy in France formed 30 00:03:08.800 --> 00:03:13.700 The Appeal to Vigilance Committee to Marginalize Their Opposition 31 00:03:13.700 --> 00:03:17.200 This committee, which includes such progressive celebrities as 32 00:03:17.200 --> 00:03:21.400 Bernard-André Lévy, Jacques Guérida and Umberto Eco, 33 00:03:21.400 --> 00:03:26.600 complains that on the anniversary of the Jacobin ascendancy in revolutionary France, 34 00:03:26.600 --> 00:03:31.600 the extreme right was being allowed to make fun of the left's support 35 00:03:31.600 --> 00:03:36.900 of increased immigration into France from Africa and elsewhere in the Third World. 36 00:03:36.900 --> 00:03:41.540 According to the 40 intellectuals who signed on to this appeal to vigilance published in 37 00:03:41.540 --> 00:03:49.140 Le Monde on July 13th, 1993, quote, writers, publishers and those responsible for the written 38 00:03:49.140 --> 00:03:55.300 and audiovisual press are not sufficiently suspicious of these maneuvers to re-legitimate 39 00:03:55.300 --> 00:04:01.620 the right. The media, we are told, now provide a forum, at least in France or in the United 40 00:04:01.620 --> 00:04:08.580 States for the Critics of Human Rights and of Anti-Racist Public Education, and by, quote, 41 00:04:08.580 --> 00:04:15.140 this involuntary complicity threatened democracy, peace and human lives everywhere, unquote. 42 00:04:15.860 --> 00:04:23.060 On July 13th, 1993, Le Monde published its own editorial support for this appeal, noting the 43 00:04:23.060 --> 00:04:30.980 danger created, quote, by a world of ideas still under the sway of laissez-faire, by which they 44 00:04:30.980 --> 00:04:50.980 The Alliance between militant communists and neo-fascists throughout Europe benefits the chaos that reigns in Russia, the racist murders that are proliferating everywhere and the unforeseeable consequences of the war in the former Yugoslavia. 45 00:04:50.980 --> 00:04:58.980 In reading these calls to democratic vigilance, one should keep in mind that there is nothing undemocratic about them. 46 00:04:58.980 --> 00:05:12.980 The Jacobins of the French Revolution muzzled and threatened French citizens while asserting the iron necessity for emergency measures against the enemies at their gates, as well as against traitors within. 47 00:05:12.980 --> 00:05:20.980 The doctrine of human rights to which concerned French intellectuals are appealing has never been viewed as a purely national patrimony. 48 00:05:20.980 --> 00:05:27.980 Its exponents since 1789 have affirmed their universal proselytizing mission. 49 00:05:27.980 --> 00:05:33.660 Edmund Burke was correct to perceive a vast gulf between the historical chartered liberties 50 00:05:33.660 --> 00:05:39.380 of Englishmen and, quote, the armed doctrines of the French Revolution. 51 00:05:39.380 --> 00:05:44.580 Note well that the terror in revolutionary France killed far more than the 30,000 or 52 00:05:44.580 --> 00:05:47.820 so who died on the scaffold. 53 00:05:47.820 --> 00:05:55.880 Between March 1793 and July 1795, over 100,000 peasants from the Vendée and Brittany were 54 00:05:55.880 --> 00:06:02.240 were massacred by revolutionary armies for counterrevolutionary activities, ranging from 55 00:06:02.240 --> 00:06:07.920 reluctance to be conscripted into the Republican army to alleged support for priests who refused 56 00:06:07.920 --> 00:06:11.940 to swear unqualified allegiance to the revolutionary state. 57 00:06:11.940 --> 00:06:17.320 The French historians P. L. Chenoux and P. L. Seche have documented these massacres, 58 00:06:17.320 --> 00:06:21.980 which involved the wholesale drowning in the Loire River of women and children. 59 00:06:21.980 --> 00:06:27.340 While these acts of ideological intolerance were not unprecedented in Western history, 60 00:06:27.340 --> 00:06:33.060 certainly one can point back to the sad examples of the Inquisition, the Albigensian Crusade, 61 00:06:33.060 --> 00:06:37.860 and the sacking of Jewish and Byzantine settlements in the other Crusades, what stands out in 62 00:06:37.860 --> 00:06:43.040 the revolution is the killing of people on a truly mass scale in the name of democratic 63 00:06:43.040 --> 00:06:45.040 ideals. 64 00:06:45.040 --> 00:06:49.540 This democratic potential for destruction was already known in the eighteenth century. 65 00:06:49.540 --> 00:06:55.260 The Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume cited it in making a case against democracy 66 00:06:55.260 --> 00:07:00.780 as the most sanguinary of all forms of government and in favor of the British constitutional 67 00:07:00.780 --> 00:07:08.100 monarchy. Hume alleged all the bloody adventures of ancient self-described democracies, and 68 00:07:08.100 --> 00:07:14.140 in this argument might have been following another anti-democratic skeptic, Thomas Hobbes, 69 00:07:14.140 --> 00:07:18.740 for neither Hume nor Hobbes was impressed by the Greek democratic experience. Obviously 70 00:07:18.740 --> 00:07:25.460 and not a read Edith Hamilton on Athenian democracy, and Hobbes who translated Thucydides' 71 00:07:25.460 --> 00:07:30.340 histories of the Peloponnesian War attributed the defeat of Athens in that struggle to its 72 00:07:30.340 --> 00:07:36.900 democratic defect, combining instability with relentless imperialism. Certainly the Federalist 73 00:07:36.900 --> 00:07:43.300 founders of the American Republic were deeply suspicious of a highly centralized state bottomed 74 00:07:43.300 --> 00:07:46.100 depended upon the majority will. 75 00:07:46.100 --> 00:07:51.180 Distributed national power, entrusting the franchise to property state legislators, dual 76 00:07:51.180 --> 00:07:55.980 federalism, and the making of the defense of life and property the justification for 77 00:07:55.980 --> 00:08:02.900 the Constitution, all pointed not to a democratic, but to a conservative liberal worldview. 78 00:08:02.900 --> 00:08:06.900 Popular government would be allowed, but with suitable checks on its expression. 79 00:08:06.900 --> 00:08:12.500 None of the conditions that offended 18th century Democrats like Rousseau and Robsbierre occasioned 80 00:08:12.500 --> 00:08:20.400 and concern for the American Founding Fathers. Social inequality, rather social leveling, 81 00:08:20.400 --> 00:08:25.940 forceful administrative centralization, a politically enforced civic religion, all of 82 00:08:25.940 --> 00:08:33.020 these features, one might say, of Jacobin democracy did not belong to the American dispensation 83 00:08:33.020 --> 00:08:38.500 set up in the 1780s. For the radical elements among the founding generation, grouped around 84 00:08:38.500 --> 00:08:44.500 by Thomas Jefferson, the term democracy did in fact have a positive connotation, but one 85 00:08:44.500 --> 00:08:50.820 suggesting liberty and localism. No matter how much Jefferson celebrated the French Revolution, 86 00:08:50.820 --> 00:08:59.220 no matter how foolishly he eulogized the so-called reforms of the Revolution, it was not the 87 00:08:59.220 --> 00:09:04.780 centralized government of the Jacobins appealing to the general will, but communities of craftsmen 88 00:09:04.780 --> 00:09:10.180 in Yeoman Farmers, on which the Virginia planter based his democratic hopes. 89 00:09:10.180 --> 00:09:15.900 As late as the 1830s, the French visitor to America, Alexis de Tocqueville, drew a critical 90 00:09:15.900 --> 00:09:21.440 distinction between American and European notions of democracy. 91 00:09:21.440 --> 00:09:29.080 It was in small towns run by local gentry and intrusive pecsnefs that one saw government 92 00:09:29.080 --> 00:09:40.520 In Europe, by contrast, it was the centralizing militaristic vision of Jacob and France that 93 00:09:40.520 --> 00:09:46.560 held sway among self-identified democratic enthusiasts and revolutionaries, particularly 94 00:09:46.560 --> 00:09:48.840 in Tuckville's own country. 95 00:09:48.840 --> 00:09:56.760 If democracy would triumph as the inevitable wave that Tuckville took it to be in the mid-1830s, 96 00:09:56.760 --> 00:10:05.120 The unanswered question became which form would prove stronger, American localism or French Jacobinism? 97 00:10:05.120 --> 00:10:11.080 By now, there is no question that the second form of democracy has prevailed, as a globalist 98 00:10:11.080 --> 00:10:17.600 bellicose ideology representing the ambitions of a well-organized political class and its 99 00:10:17.600 --> 00:10:19.880 journalistic adjuncts. 100 00:10:19.880 --> 00:10:24.880 There are many reasons for this development, and this conference features scholars who 101 00:10:24.880 --> 00:10:29.120 who have laid out, and will lay out, most of the reasons. 102 00:10:29.120 --> 00:10:35.960 Economic, administrative, and geopolitical causes have all played a role in turning Tocqueville's 103 00:10:35.960 --> 00:10:42.920 America as a hothouse of local self-government into the aggressive behemoth, spouting therapeutic 104 00:10:42.920 --> 00:10:49.840 bromides that all of us have come to recognize as the perfected version of American democracy. 105 00:10:49.840 --> 00:10:56.320 In this PV, perfected version, real self-government has been supplanted by electoral inclusiveness, 106 00:10:56.320 --> 00:11:02.160 so that every deadbeat is urged to vote as a testimony to the expansiveness of our system. 107 00:11:02.160 --> 00:11:07.520 Democracy is equated with the extension of special rights, like holding days of rage, 108 00:11:07.520 --> 00:11:15.480 as evidence of a public commitment to egalitarianism. A class of public administrators, judges and 109 00:11:15.480 --> 00:11:23.480 We as career officers decide how we live and die in a society that tax-paying citizens can do less and less to influence. 110 00:11:23.480 --> 00:11:28.480 We no longer even determine who should be allowed to enter the country and become a citizen, 111 00:11:28.480 --> 00:11:32.480 since the demand for such control is itself seen as undemocratic. 112 00:11:32.480 --> 00:11:40.480 Only neo-fascists, as our journalists now tell us, would try to restrict immigration or oppose open borders with third-world countries. 113 00:11:40.480 --> 00:11:48.480 A self-restricted political community, the class thus Paul Venn makes clear, is the mark of ancient and medieval democracies and republics. 114 00:11:48.480 --> 00:12:00.480 A government's denial to its citizens of their right to limit citizenship on any grounds they see fit indicates, according to Venn, not a democratic but an imperial order. 115 00:12:00.480 --> 00:12:06.280 Order, a supranational sovereignty in which the ruler or ruling class allows anyone born 116 00:12:06.280 --> 00:12:11.760 or found in that territory to become a subject, not a citizen, but a subject. 117 00:12:11.760 --> 00:12:16.800 These remarks are not intended as an endorsement of a return to a racially homogeneous ancient 118 00:12:16.800 --> 00:12:17.800 politics. 119 00:12:17.800 --> 00:12:20.600 I shall leave it to Sam Francis to make that case. 120 00:12:20.600 --> 00:12:27.240 Rather, I'm trying to determine in what sense contemporary America is or is not democratic. 121 00:12:27.240 --> 00:12:32.120 The typical neoconservative response to my unseemly questioning would be to say that 122 00:12:32.120 --> 00:12:38.620 we are democratic because we place neither gender nor racial nor ethnic restrictions 123 00:12:38.620 --> 00:12:43.800 on voting, because we redistribute earnings, and finally because in our truly inspired 124 00:12:43.800 --> 00:12:48.480 moments we work to make the entire world safe for democracy. 125 00:12:48.480 --> 00:12:52.480 In any case, the response would continue, America is a liberal democracy, and as such 126 00:12:52.480 --> 00:13:02.480 are such committed to parliamentary government, human rights and open citizenship, political features that were unknown in ancient, bigoted, collectivist democracies. 127 00:13:02.480 --> 00:13:10.480 This particular argument is basic to an 1100 page study dealing with ancient and modern republics by the Straussian Paul Reye. 128 00:13:10.480 --> 00:13:14.480 I generally agree with the distinction that Reye draws up to a point. 129 00:13:14.480 --> 00:13:21.480 That is, too much has been made of the fascination of 18th century republicans with Greek and Roman popular government. 130 00:13:21.480 --> 00:13:31.480 Obviously there were liberal individualist concerns in Thomas Jefferson and James Madison that were lacking in ancient republic rhetoric and practice. 131 00:13:31.480 --> 00:13:39.480 Madison's idea of an extended republic balanced by material interests suggests the application of a new science of politics. 132 00:13:39.480 --> 00:13:50.480 From recent studies of Misesian social thought, it seems to me that no word for Mises or no words for Mises were so disagreeable except for socialists as organic and communal. 133 00:13:50.480 --> 00:14:00.980 As a liberal, asserts Mises in Gemeinschaft, one must be committed to a scientific approach to life that maximizes the prosperity of the individual. 134 00:14:00.980 --> 00:14:08.980 Societies that have focused on preserving the past or maintaining a cultural heritage, Mises argued, have been unable to achieve that goal. 135 00:14:08.980 --> 00:14:10.980 This is a modernist liberal view. 136 00:14:10.980 --> 00:14:14.980 The defense of democracy made by Mises is typically liberal. 137 00:14:14.980 --> 00:14:20.980 And by liberal, by the way, I do not mean, you know, in accord with the views of the New York Times. 138 00:14:20.980 --> 00:14:23.980 I mean 19th century liberal. I mean classical liberal. 139 00:14:23.980 --> 00:14:30.980 Democratic regimes can minimize internal tensions because we are led to believe, according to Mises, 140 00:14:30.980 --> 00:14:35.980 that the majority is allowed to vote and elect political leaders. 141 00:14:35.980 --> 00:14:42.980 Once this electoral process occurs, Mises hoped, liberal norms and parliamentary procedures can be counted on 142 00:14:42.980 --> 00:14:46.660 to keep society tranquil and economically productive. 143 00:14:46.660 --> 00:14:49.460 Though Mises knew, quote, that socialist demagogues 144 00:14:49.460 --> 00:14:52.780 draw instant crowds in today's democracies, unquote, 145 00:14:52.780 --> 00:14:54.900 you found nothing in the democratic principle 146 00:14:54.900 --> 00:14:57.060 that requires this situation. 147 00:14:57.060 --> 00:15:01.300 Democracy for Mises and for Hayek means popular elections, 148 00:15:01.300 --> 00:15:05.220 but not the automatic right to change liberal rules. 149 00:15:05.220 --> 00:15:07.940 Clearly, Mises did not understand the operation 150 00:15:07.940 --> 00:15:09.740 of modern liberal democracy, 151 00:15:09.740 --> 00:15:12.420 particularly as practiced in the US. 152 00:15:12.420 --> 00:15:20.040 The democratic principle has indeed led towards social democracy with the fully bureaucratized society that Mises feared. 153 00:15:20.040 --> 00:15:27.820 Democracy has not meant mere electoral procedures combined with 19th century liberal safeguards of life and property, 154 00:15:27.820 --> 00:15:35.520 but a perpetual administrative intrusion into the lives of progressively disempowered citizens. 155 00:15:35.520 --> 00:15:45.560 One reason for this problem, I would submit, is that liberal democracy is a dangerous mixed regime, 156 00:15:45.560 --> 00:15:50.400 which upholds neither liberal freedom nor democratic self-rule. 157 00:15:50.400 --> 00:15:54.600 It is, if you will, the hegemonic ideology of the American political class, 158 00:15:54.600 --> 00:16:01.320 and as such invoked to justify the seizure of power by public administrators, privileged corporate interests, 159 00:16:01.320 --> 00:16:07.760 Social Therapists and Mediocrats, the dissociation of liberalism from property rights in a limited 160 00:16:07.760 --> 00:16:14.680 franchise and the divorce between American democracy in any meaningful exercise of self-rule 161 00:16:14.680 --> 00:16:16.880 are not accidental. 162 00:16:16.880 --> 00:16:21.800 They belong to the strategy of manipulation practiced by those who have benefited from 163 00:16:21.800 --> 00:16:25.600 the reconstruction of liberalism and democracy. 164 00:16:25.600 --> 00:16:30.480 And essential to the liberal democratic regime that has enveloped America since the progressive 165 00:16:30.480 --> 00:16:37.480 in the present of era is an expansionist imperative fueled by what Edmund Burke called our doctrine. 166 00:16:37.480 --> 00:16:45.480 By this pan-interventionist doctrine, it is seen as insensitive or relativist for the U.S. government and its subjects, 167 00:16:45.480 --> 00:16:50.480 not citizens but subjects, to concern themselves with everyone else's human rights. 168 00:16:50.480 --> 00:16:55.480 By now, human rights have become the rhetorical pretext for governmental inroads at home and abroad. 169 00:16:55.480 --> 00:17:00.480 Not everyone is equally authorized to distill or apply these rights. 170 00:17:00.480 --> 00:17:08.480 Journalists, administrators, experts, and the sensitizing spokespersons for designated victims 171 00:17:08.480 --> 00:17:12.480 are presumed to have a privileged understanding of this arcane wisdom. 172 00:17:12.480 --> 00:17:19.480 Thus, American intervention in Somalia took place after the media and black civil rights leaders stressed the urgent need 173 00:17:19.480 --> 00:17:22.480 for sending American forces into that troubled area. 174 00:17:22.480 --> 00:17:32.480 The president consulted, or at least I learned this from CBS News, with an undersecretary for human rights before dispatching to Somalia American lives and treasured. 175 00:17:32.480 --> 00:17:48.480 Even now, the mediocrats and journalists are belaboring the president with demands to expand NATO, to micromanage the internal politics of Russia, and to do something decisive, in the words of Peter Jennings, something decisive, in Bosnia and Haiti. 176 00:17:48.480 --> 00:17:59.480 Human rights require all these entanglements and more, including the punishment of the Chinese government for not conforming to the democratic values of American journalists. 177 00:17:59.480 --> 00:18:12.480 Though many of the same journalists had gushed ecstatically over the murderous Chinese regime of Mao Zedong, they have now become newly sensitized to the restraints on intellectual freedom imposed by Mao's successors. 178 00:18:12.480 --> 00:18:17.480 These successors, bear in mind, are far less socialistic than Mao. 179 00:18:17.480 --> 00:18:28.480 And this may in fact be the problems we're now learning that the Chinese are suffering from the perils of an uncontrolled or increasingly uncontrolled economy. 180 00:18:28.480 --> 00:18:34.480 And journalists expect this to do something about this. They want the American government to show the same displeasure that they feel. 181 00:18:34.480 --> 00:18:41.480 The Chinese government must be fundamentally reformed. In the words of A.M. Rosenthal and George Will, 182 00:18:41.480 --> 00:18:47.480 The Chinese government must be made civilized, presumably like the denizens of New York City. 183 00:18:47.480 --> 00:18:56.480 Allow me, however, to introduce one limiting situation to the pan-interventionist impulse that I have discussed in my paper. 184 00:18:56.480 --> 00:19:02.480 It is one that is clearly present, I think, in the conduct and perhaps thinking of the present administration. 185 00:19:02.480 --> 00:19:06.480 Despite the unremitting campaign by many of our syndicated journalists 186 00:19:06.480 --> 00:19:16.480 to push the United States into military and financial commitments abroad, and yet even despite the Jacobin transformation of American democracy, 187 00:19:16.480 --> 00:19:23.480 it may be argued that American foreign entanglements have become fewer and less dramatic since the end of the Cold War. 188 00:19:23.480 --> 00:19:30.480 Despite journalistic and media pressures, Clinton has gone slow in committing American forces to the Bosnian conflict. 189 00:19:30.480 --> 00:19:33.480 He has also withdrawn armies from Somalia. 190 00:19:33.480 --> 00:19:40.720 of Somalia, and except for enforcing an embargo, he has done little so far to meddle in Haiti. 191 00:19:40.720 --> 00:19:44.960 It may even be suggested that the present administration bears the New Left isolationist 192 00:19:44.960 --> 00:19:50.760 legacy, though Warren Christopher lectures the Chinese on democracy, our government takes 193 00:19:50.760 --> 00:19:54.800 no action, or I should say our government, his government takes no action against the 194 00:19:54.800 --> 00:20:00.840 regime that Rosenthal and Will and other human rights mavens have condemned as inhuman. 195 00:20:00.840 --> 00:20:04.740 Proposals are made against North Korea for developing atomic weapons, but again the Clinton 196 00:20:04.740 --> 00:20:10.320 administration does not deploy military forces or express its displeasure in an alarmist 197 00:20:10.320 --> 00:20:11.800 fashion. 198 00:20:11.800 --> 00:20:17.920 While moralizing and appeals to global democracy come natural to this administration, as he 199 00:20:17.920 --> 00:20:21.960 did of course to the Republican administrations that preceded it, such gestures are usually 200 00:20:21.960 --> 00:20:24.840 not preludes to more interventionist efforts. 201 00:20:24.840 --> 00:20:30.640 Nonetheless, all of this may change if a Republican administration gets back into power and chooses 202 00:20:30.640 --> 00:20:46.640 The major difference, I would submit, between left and right, if there is any major difference at all, and Tom Fleming and I were debating, we were discussing this a lot last night, and working feverishly to come up with some difference between left and between the respectable left and the respectable right, 203 00:20:46.640 --> 00:21:03.640 There is one difference. Within the political class, I would argue that it is this, that the left wishes to extend Jacobin democracy at home, while the right, in quotation, hopes to spread it everywhere else. 204 00:21:03.640 --> 00:21:11.640 Thus the left accelerates the managerial, therapeutic domination of American society through anti-discrimination, 205 00:21:11.640 --> 00:21:18.640 dictumological, redistributionist programs. The right, by contrast, considers domestic reform to have been already accomplished 206 00:21:18.640 --> 00:21:23.640 and seeks to export the PV, the perfected version of American democracy, everywhere else. 207 00:21:23.640 --> 00:21:30.640 Now, there is no reason to believe that this present division of interest will spare us permanently 208 00:21:30.640 --> 00:21:37.040 from New Jacket and Crusades for Democracy, but at least in the near term, the national 209 00:21:37.040 --> 00:21:44.280 government does seem to be resisting foreign adventure, and though it may eventually be 210 00:21:44.280 --> 00:21:50.800 pressured into overrunning Haiti, I believe that Clinton does not want to be seen any 211 00:21:50.800 --> 00:21:54.560 longer or even avoided as a commander in chief. 212 00:21:54.560 --> 00:21:59.760 There are too many problems about his own past that will begin to surface. 213 00:21:59.760 --> 00:22:04.800 For all of the reasons I have therefore given, I think that the end of the Cold War has brought 214 00:22:04.800 --> 00:22:11.640 a lull, if not permanent end, to the military march of American global democracy. 215 00:22:12.640 --> 00:22:24.640 I shall go on to answer any questions, yes? 216 00:22:24.640 --> 00:22:30.640 Your last comments, I think all disagreement with, have gotten me up to this century at least. 217 00:22:30.640 --> 00:22:34.640 The Democrats have always been the ones who get us to do major entanglement. 218 00:22:34.640 --> 00:22:40.640 To a degree you thought the parties are very little different, but at least if we're going to have a country that's run this way, 219 00:22:40.640 --> 00:22:47.640 I believe the Republicans seem to be able to manage this pool better, to not get us into a weak position where we've gone into student wars. 220 00:23:10.640 --> 00:23:15.920 Indeed, in the 50s and 60s, the Republican Party becomes the more militantly anti-communist 221 00:23:15.920 --> 00:23:20.080 and the more activist anti-communist party. 222 00:23:20.080 --> 00:23:25.840 The Democrats still bear, if you will, the legacy of the new left, which was isolationist, 223 00:23:25.840 --> 00:23:30.480 anti-war, and I think that this is having an effect on the present administration. 224 00:23:30.480 --> 00:23:35.880 Now, you may in fact be right, you know, and I don't claim to be a futurologist. 225 00:23:35.880 --> 00:23:41.560 It could be that the Democratic Party will be pushed by its own left wing, if one wishes 226 00:23:41.560 --> 00:23:46.000 to include people like Anthony Lewis, into taking a very interventionist stand as long 227 00:23:46.000 --> 00:23:48.600 as it doesn't have to confront Communists anymore. 228 00:23:48.600 --> 00:23:52.160 But at least for the time being, I mean, the Republican Party remains the Republican Party 229 00:23:52.160 --> 00:23:54.640 of Ronald Reagan and Elliott Abrams. 230 00:23:54.640 --> 00:24:00.120 The Democratic Party, I think, to some extent, still carries the anti-war legacy of the 1970s. 231 00:24:00.120 --> 00:24:01.120 Yes? 232 00:24:01.120 --> 00:24:17.120 What about what happened in the combat? We certainly helped push them into a final setting in the name of democracy. 233 00:24:17.120 --> 00:24:23.120 I do not approve, obviously, what happened in South Africa, but there were no military forces committed, 234 00:24:23.120 --> 00:24:30.120 and although the United States did observe a stupid embargo, it was also being carried up by other countries. 235 00:24:30.120 --> 00:24:37.120 I think that American entanglement in South Africa was limited. 236 00:24:37.120 --> 00:24:43.120 I also think, by the way, that the South African government could have held on a lot longer than it did. 237 00:24:43.120 --> 00:24:49.120 I think it was the clerk and the elements of the national party around him 238 00:24:49.120 --> 00:25:00.620 that decided to give in, to concede everything to the other side for various, I suppose, for various political and even theological reasons. 239 00:25:00.620 --> 00:25:09.620 But I don't think the United States took very much of an interventionist role there. I mean, we basically did what other countries were doing. 240 00:25:09.620 --> 00:25:12.620 Mr. Singleton. 241 00:25:12.620 --> 00:25:18.620 The real legacy of the new left, God, is not in isolation, at least in those of us in the social world. 242 00:25:18.620 --> 00:25:25.620 The opposite of what you've heard, by the one world is where the United States shouldn't go through the world, 243 00:25:25.620 --> 00:25:28.620 which is doing it in the direction of the United Nations. 244 00:25:28.620 --> 00:25:35.620 And we have to intervene, the United States, by the UN, for any of us to go ahead and conclude this discussion. 245 00:25:35.620 --> 00:25:38.620 We've got a real commander in chief. 246 00:25:42.620 --> 00:25:47.820 to give power over to the United Nations because the new left was at least globalist in the 247 00:25:47.820 --> 00:25:53.020 sense that it did not believe in American national identity or American national sovereignty. 248 00:25:53.020 --> 00:25:56.980 But I think, in addition, that there's a certain allergy against military things. I mean, a 249 00:25:56.980 --> 00:26:03.440 hatred of armies, a hatred of uniforms. I mean, all the things with which Clinton has 250 00:26:03.440 --> 00:26:10.140 now had to make some sort of peace. But I think that it is this repugnance for the military, 251 00:26:10.140 --> 00:26:15.140 Repugnance for the Military Tradition, which has remained part of that legacy. 252 00:26:15.140 --> 00:26:22.140 On the other hand, I think, as I said, it may be possible that, you know, the desire to remake the rest of the world, 253 00:26:22.140 --> 00:26:29.140 now that we've remade the United States, may prove irresistible, you know, in the case of the Democratic Party in the end. 254 00:26:29.140 --> 00:26:40.140 For the time being, I do see this new leftist legacy and the allergy to things military remaining operative. 255 00:26:40.140 --> 00:26:45.140 Yes, Joe? 256 00:26:45.140 --> 00:26:54.140 You know, it strikes me, Paul, that Franklin Roosevelt has defined liberal conservative in the popular sense for our time. 257 00:26:54.140 --> 00:27:02.140 If you are a liberal, you favor the federal government discerning unprecedented power domestically. 258 00:27:02.140 --> 00:27:08.140 If you're a conservative, you want federal power asserted abroad. 259 00:27:08.140 --> 00:27:11.140 If you're a liberal, you want it asserted domestically. 260 00:27:11.140 --> 00:27:16.140 If you want both, you're a moderate. 261 00:27:16.140 --> 00:27:41.140 I agree entirely with your observation, but I can only respond rhetorically. Are there any other questions? 262 00:27:41.140 --> 00:28:09.140 Do you think that Trenton's attitude towards the military and so forth, turning command over the UN and so forth, may simply be his propensity to always wanting to be able to blind somebody else? 263 00:28:11.140 --> 00:28:18.140 I think it's also a function of his personality, and he wants to go to blame somebody else, but I think in addition to that, he feels extremely unhappy having to pose as a military leader, given his past, and if his power can be vested in the UN, then the military action will be less associated with his own past actions as a draft dodger. 264 00:28:41.140 --> 00:28:43.140 Thank you very much.