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Sunday, August 17, 2003
A light paddling about the face and neck
In a wasted attempt to seem fair & balanced, George Will takes on the neo-cons today:
Blair seems to think: Boston, Baghdad, Manchester, Monrovia -- what's the difference? Such thinking is dangerous. Blair's argument is true only if it is trivial: ``Ordinary" people choose freedom, democracy and the rule of law because those who do not so choose prove thereby that they are not ordinary.
But there are a lot of them in the world. Some of them are waging guerrilla war against American forces in Iraq.
Blair's thinking is Bush's, too. ``There is a value system that cannot be compromised, and that is the values we praise," says President Bush. ``And if the values are good enough for our people, they ought to be good enough for others."
But one must compromise in the face of facts, those stubborn things. It is a fact that not everyone is inclined to praise ``the values we praise." And not every society has the prerequisites -- of institutions (political parties, media) and manners (civility, acceptance of pluralism) -- of a free society.
Bush and Blair and many people called neoconservatives believe that moral objectives in politics are universally applicable imperatives. If so, then either national cultures do not significantly differ; or they do not matter; or they are infinitely malleable under the touch of enlightened reformers. But all three propositions are false, and antithetical to all that conservatism teaches about the importance of cultural inertia and historical circumstances.
and George doesn't disappoint me as he wraps it up:
The premise that terrorism thrives where democracy doesn't may seem to generate a duty to universalize democracy. But it is axiomatic that one cannot have a duty to do something that cannot be done.
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