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An End to Ideology?
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18418 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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9 / 1990 |
1,475 Words |
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Lee Congdon
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The Cold War is over, but we have still to see the end of ideology. To be sure, one would have to look long and hard to uncover a single person in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union who believes a word that Lenin uttered. But a slightly modified version of Leninism lives on in the Third World as anticolonialism or anti-Americanism. More to the point, Lenin was not the only exponent of ideological politics to appear on the world's stage during World War I. His contemporary, President of the United States Thomas Woodrow Wilson, evangelized for a rival creed: democracy and the self-determination of all peoples. That creed has proved to be more lasting than Leninism; indeed, it exercises greater influence today, in the United States and around the globe, than it did in Wilson's time. Even in China, where a homegrown variety of Marxism-Leninism has enjoyed unchallenged ideological hegemony for over forty years, millions worship the “goddess” of democracy.
The history
It is the same deity that the cerebral American president served before, during, and after he went to Paris to make peace and to create a League of Nations. “President Wilson was an idealist,” Harold Nicolson later remembered. During the long months of the Peace Conference, the English diplomat and historian became convinced that Wilson regarded himself “not as a world statesman, but as a prophet designated to bring light to a dark world. It may have been for this reason that he forgot all about the American constitution and Senator [Henry Cabot] Lodge.” Thanks to Lodge and other sworn enemies of Wilson's messianic internationalism, the United States remained outside the League.
But America did join the post-World War II United Nations, not least because Franklin D. Roosevelt, one of its architects, was every inch a Wilsonian. “According to his ideological conviction,” Charles de Gaulle remarked of the president, “international democracy was a kind of universal remedy.” Ronald Regan, who much admired Roosevelt, may have been more skeptical of the United Nations, but in a speech before the joint Houses of Parliament in June 1982, he called upon the West to spearhead an international “campaign for democracy,” an idea that quickly became the basis for the interventionist “Reagan Doctrine.” No wonder, then, that the president chose Jeane J. Kirkpatrick as his ambassador to the United Nations. Kirkpatrick confided to one interviewer “that there is only one kind of government I approve of and should like all people to have the opportunity to live under - democratic government.”
President Bush would no doubt agree, for he too finds it impossible to imagine that a people might, in its wisdom, wish to construct a political order unlike that which Americans have fashioned for themselves. He and like-minded global democrats have all but persuaded themselves that democracy is mankind's natural condition, and not a relatively rare variety of government that evolved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in northwestern Europe, from whence it spread to North America. As a consequence, the administration regards the democratization of the communist and formerly communist nations as historically inevitable, even where they have had an unbroken tradition of authoritarian rule.
Democracy for all
Not every American, of course, has promoted global democracy. During World
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