Jan 26, 2008

Democracy Is Not a Problem to Be Solved


The National Journal is a political junkie's fix. And the Journal has broken much new ground the last few years in exposing the Bush administration's corruption.

But its cover story this week, State Of Disorder, by James Kitfield, reveals again the imperialistic mindset of the establishment American political culture on foreign policy as it relates to the desired social arrangement citizens of other countries have about their own societies.

Kitfield is imbued with a staggering inability to conceive that democratic results that create administrations in South America dedicated to directing their natural resources to their own people is not our problem. It is not our problem when the Sandinistas did it in Nicaragua in the 1980s; and it not our problem that President Hugo Chavez in now doing it in Venezuela.

But Kitfield frets that "new crises erupt with frightening regularity" around the world, and notes "a wave of leftist populism sweeping Latin America."

To Kitfield, it is axiomatic that this state of affairs, this state of disorder, must be dealt with, though he bemoans the fact that Bush is leaving the problem to the next American president to solve.

"Anti-Americanism everywhere you look," notes Kitfield, equating the mild redistribution of South American wealth to South American human beings with "devastating attacks by Islamic terrorists," "violence and threatened implosion in Pakistan," among other American challenges.

Kitfield (and Bush and Condi Rice) and the American foreign policy establishment apparently do not contemplate that the establishment of social arrangement through democratic processes that increase the material wealth of a given country's citizens is not destabilizing.

This dynamic is the achievement of "certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ..."

And that's a good thing.
See also PARAG KHANNA's Waving Goodbye to Hegemony.

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