TROY SENIK AND ASHTON ELLIS
Staff Writers
Fears are rising, birthrates are falling, and the greatest gift one man can give to another, free trade, is in retreat. Europe is in a well-deserved panic over the population’s decreasing number and increasing cost. In fact, the only segment of European society that appears willing to procreate and prop up the welfare system is the steadily growing number of underemployed Muslim immigrants. Ignoring economic reality, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are paving the way for the reemergence of mercantilism, a system that consistently bows to privilege and thwarts hope. Agriculture subsidies, textile tariffs, and cradle-to-grave benefits packages are strangling the global ambition to succeed. The strategy seems assured to further retard economic growth in the developing world while at the same time expanding welfare roles in developed countries. From the Ugandan farmer to the Italian haberdasher, the world is crying out for leadership. The question on everyone’s lips is, “from whence shall it come?”
The answer lies in the tripartite gifts of the American system: liberalism, capitalism and republican democracy. Each of these branches allows the flower of individualism and personal liberty to perpetually bloom. Its petals protect the rare formulation that thinks government is best when it allows humans to pursue the natural ambition inherent in their species: the right to choose one’s own way of life. Over the years, those who have advocated the international expansion of these institutions have often been criticized for seeking to “Americanize” the world, but these soporific objections fail to understand the United States’ institutions and its history in the proper context.
The hue and cry of modern opponents of benevolent American hegemony is steeped heavily in the tenets of multiculturalism. This belief system (or more accurately, lack thereof) holds as its sine qua non that judgment should be withheld on all cultures; that being different is, in itself, a thing of intrinsic value.
But the American ethos has perpetually recognized that the state’s prerogative to order its own affairs free from interference is always inferior to the individual’s right to the same. Whether it was the romanticism of John Winthrop’s “city on a hill” speech, Patrick Henry’s call for liberty or death, or Abraham Lincoln’s notion that America was a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” humanity did not rightly conceive the United States nearly so much as the United States rightly conceived humanity.
The reality that we must all face, then, is that the stakes of leadership stand exponentially multiplied in our day as opposed to that of our forebears. Neither Europe nor North America can continue to labor beneath the hallucinatory optimism that sees Islamo-Fascism as isolated to the Islamic world.
The breakneck pace at which the world has integrated over the past century can leave little doubt that illiberal ideologies will no longer be content with obeisance to national borders. Whether it be the riots of agitated mobs of Islamic youth in France, the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh or the recent furor over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, radical Islamism has not operated underneath any pretense of deference to the West’s perceived virtue of free expression. Indeed, these may soon go down as the years the United States government slept.
If the world is quickly becoming one, then the idea that it will not be governed by one of those sets of ideas that have rallied men throughout history is the hibernation of the quickly defeated.
We fundamentally reject the intellectual plague that deems the worthiness of American power to be measured by how lightly our footsteps echo across the world.
The United States, a nation fortunate enough to be constructed upon ideals as powerful as those of Rome and Britain at their apex, will impoverish humanity more than itself if it fails to retrieve both the sword and the olive branch of these great nations of the past. There are those who will receive such rallying calls as “imperial” or “warmongering.”
To the latter, we proudly submit insofar as we join the ranks of Sir Winston Churchill and President Ronald Reagan, the two great statesmen of the 20th century, whose lofty heights were attained by a clear-eyed recognition of which enemies were implacable and which could be pacified.
To the former, we only respond that Thomas Jefferson’s reference to an “empire of liberty” did not constitute an oxymoron in his day, nor does it now.
Mankind has not yet known bigotry as insidious as the belief that citizens around the world should play the marionette to ruthless autocrats as object lessons in the purity of American tolerance of “diverse cultures.”
03-16-2006