Even the comments to James Pinkerton's TCS article "Is America Conservative?" seem forbidingly learned, but it's a trick question. It's definitely provocative to ask whether American "conservatives" are really conservative, but of course we know that the United States is the archetypal liberal society, in just about every sense. Indeed, it virtually defined liberalism institutionally. In other words it's both liberal in the classical sense, and "liberal" in the sense that drove Frederich Engels and Louis Hartz nuts: more "socialistic" than socialism. At its founding the very notion of a representative government was not merely liberal, but radical. The conservatives were the royalists, many of whom fled to counter-revolutionary Canada. And those very noblesse oblige conservative traditions created, both directly and indirectly, the socialist movement in Europe as well as the later "third way" compromise.
So the notion that it's radical to expand the American franchise on representative government, even to societies that have as little democratic tradition as, say, 1940s Japan and Germany, or 2003 Iraq, is perfectly true--and perfectly in keeping with American values.
The dilemma of American Exceptionalism is that if we really are outliers then democracy really wouldn't have been possible for any other polity, so in that sense only Frenchman believe in strict American Exceptionalism (typically ignoring their own experience). But the franchise was even expanded to France (more or less) and this was in large part because the American Ideology is fundamentally charismatic in nature. It is not simply a set of dry formulas, nor is it even the words of the Constitution, which have been repeated unsuccessfully by many illiberal regimes throughout history. The "magic" lies in the institutions that were originally infused with the charisma of the founders who, rather than ascending an emperor's throne, transmuted the quality of transcending limits into the very foundations and population of the Republic itself... by leaving power, in their wake. And every success the United States has ever had in "nation building," whether directly or indirectly, has followed the same formula. It is a repeatable phenomenon.
Is it not passing strange that even the most popular anti-Americans are American? Indeed the only competition in the contest for charismatic authority is that paltry skinny sickly ranting fellow hiding in a cave somewhere in the Northwest Provinces... and his days are truly numbered.
The United States represents, through its institutions and its sprit, that elemental quality that has escaped all individual leaders, no matter how blessed they seem: the self regenerating and perpetually young charismatic society and culture. And it is this that primarily fuels George W. Bush's faith.
Radical? Of course. America was never conservative, only pragmatically cautious when our lack of power required it. And we lost that luxury of caution on 9/11. So what you see is as inevitable, and as natural, as a Spring rain.
Posted by Demosophist at December 3, 2003 02:36 AM | TrackBack