AMERICAN CONSTITUTION

American Constitution



American Constitution

Uniqueness Of The Creation Of The American Polity

In recent years a heated debate has erupted about American foreign policy and about what moral purpose should inform our conduct of international relations. While analysts Robert Kagan, Michael Mandelbaum, and Stephen Schwartz insist the United States should use its power, where possible, on behalf of "democracy," other commentators have rejected this approach. James Kurth, Andrew Bacevich, Walter McDougall, and now Professor Claes Ryn all deplore an approach to international affairs that views the world as little more than a laboratory for American social engineers. Although none of these critics believes that the American polity can be brought back to where it was a century ago, they insist that the empire which has come into our hands must not be treated as some sort of modernist theocracy. It is foolish to imagine that those political forms we happen to prefer for ourselves should become the basis for international crusades.

These critics presumably winced when President Bush, in an address to the National Endowment for Democracy, insisted that America remain active in the Middle East until women in that region achieve full political and social equality. After all, until the second decade of the twentieth century, most constitutional governments, including our own, did not grant women the vote. Should America then have been forcibly occupied by a more enlightened power until we conformed to a later model of "democracy"? Or should Europeans have invaded America in the early nineteenth century so as to abolish slavery? And once America introduces gay unions, will it become incumbent upon us to impose that policy on other countries as integral to "universal" justice? (Ryn, 2003)

In America the Virtuous Ryn never indulges the illusion that our "neo-Jacobin" moralists are defying the popular will. (Ryn, 2003) He is admirably free of the populist optimism that affects other conservatives. Like his mentor Irving Babbitt, Ryn values educated social elites that can prevent mass democracy from rearing its ugly head; and he rightly perceives the close connection between the utopian egalitarianism that now characterizes our foreign and domestic politics and the collapse of a leadership class practicing restraint and moderation. Ryn tries to prove that a temptation toward revolutionary politics, which wise teachers from Aristotle to Burke solemnly disavowed, was inherent in our political culture from the beginning. Such tropes can be discerned in the statements of Jefferson expressing admiration for the French Revolution, and similar phrases crop up in Woodrow Wilson's speeches about our flag "being the ensign of humanity." Wilson's boast that America stands as the representative polity doing business for the entire human race seems almost contemporary. (Ryn, 2003)

But such rhetorical extravagances, which Ryn cites on every page, were once tempered by the persistence of a particular social type. Can one imagine the kind of verbiage about saving the world that Ryn so fulsomely mocks coming from that alleged Cold War liberal Dean Acheson? Having once read Acheson's memoirs, I was struck by his measured language and ...