The Ongoing Clash of Visions

A very good article in Front Page Magazine by William Hawkins about the continuing challenges facing America.

Battle for Democracy Far from Won: The idea that freedom and democracy are universally accepted ideals whose triumph is inevitable is being challenged by counter-ideologies backed increasingly with armed force and a measure of popular support.

Hawkins covers the alternative visions of government from Chinese Socialism, to Islamic Theocracy and the good old fashion Communism increasingly taking hold in South America. The common factor in all these designs is the concept that a knowledgeable leadership should care for the needs of the populace. The article quotes French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau:

"We always want what is advantageous to us but we do not always discern it" wrote Rousseau in The Social Contract, published in 1762. The individual members of society thus may not know what is the "General Will." He believed that an outside body is needed to ensure that the General Will is carried out. This body must be impartial– above or outside politics, because democracy would not necessarily result in a government that was in line with the common good.

The pleasures of superiority are enticing and when merged with the pleasures of power it is not surprising that individuals and organizations achieving power are easily persuaded their understanding of the greater good justifies their control. In response to American pressure, the Communist Party of China (CPC) published a White Paper in October 2005 ostensibly making the case they are forwarding democracy within China. In reality it presents a Orwellian justification of the CPC being the sole source of government power due to their historic understanding of the right course for the people of China.

Building of Political Democracy in China: (link to Conclusion) Upholding the unity of the leadership of the CPC, the people being the masters of the country and ruling the country by law. This is the most important and fundamental principle for developing socialist political democracy in China. Leadership by the CPC is the fundamental guarantee for the people to be the masters of the country and the country to be ruled by law.

In the twisted logic of this lengthy paper, democracy means the people are the masters of the country and making the people of China the masters of China requires the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. It is the same style of reasoning being used by Iranian Mullahs, Venezuelan Chavistas and Western Academic Socialists and it starts with the belief in the weakness of the individual. I like the way author Gwydion William writing for The Bevin Society articulates the idea.

Why China Won' SubAmericanise: The current US view is built around The Individual, a Standardised Individualist who ideally would operate autonomously on a global level playing field where no state intervention was needed. They make concessions to reality from time to time. They can be realistic when they would get a serious pain in the wallet from acting as if they believed their own propaganda (unless of course the propaganda should be true, but deep down they are not sure). Despite which, most US citizens genuinely believe that inside every foreigner, there is a Unit of the Standardised Individualist struggling to get out.

This isn’t propaganda; what they did in the former Soviet Union and now in Iraq makes no sense unless the people running the show really believed that they were liberating something natural and pre-existing, rather than trying to create it in a very alien cultural context. In China, they had their chance and blew it. If they had rehabilitated Eastern Europe and Russia in the way that they rehabilitated Western Europe, West Germany and Japan in the 1950s, then they might indeed have secured global domination.

But back then, they were Keynesians, dominated by an East Coast elite with some idea of how to be a ruling class. From the 1980s, the USA has been dominated by characters who should be called the New Backwoodsmen, cunning at working the levers of power within their own society, full of self-confident ignorance about the wider world.

I guess I’m one of those Americans that believes that inside every foreigner there is an individual struggling to get out, only I would term it, yearning to be free. It is also classic elitism to confuse state intervention with state guidelines. Individuals need rules of interaction but what we don’t need is a permanent ruling class defining our needs and intervening when our individual desires don’t match the master plan.