Paul Krugman writes (in last Friday's NYT): >... America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used >to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes >done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our >leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. “This government >does not torture people,” declared former President Bush, but it did, and all >the world knows it.<
The U.S. "nation" stands for "moral ideals"? This is the standard liberal mode of argument: everything bad goes against "what our nation stands for" or "the American way" or "what the founders said" or whatever. It's all part of an unofficial civic religion that prevails in official rhetoric.[*] It's bogus, because those founders and other notables after that didn't live up to what we now see as the "American way" or "what out nation stands for." At the start of this thread, Carrol Cox wrote: > It is absurd to attach special blame to the Bush Administration.< Maybe you're right, Carrol, but at least Krugman motivates people to do something about the torturers. After all, if Clinton, Bush 41, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Eisenhower, etc., etc. are just as much in the torturing boat as Bush 43, so that there's no special blame to be attached to his administration, what can one say? It's fun to rage rage against capitalism, imperialism, and their inherently evil nature, but it's much easier for most people to say "we can't fight city hall" and give into cynicism, fatalism, and eventually apathy. By the way, I'd bet that torturing is not a _constant_ component of US foreign policy. The Vietnam war produced mass revulsion. Some of the resulting pressure on the US government went to curb the extremes of its policy, as when many saw the CIA as a bad organization and then Congress imposed some restrictions on its operations. I'd bet that there was some ebbing of the US-government-sponsored torturing and terrorist tide. As part of the mass anti-war movement, there were a lot of people who thought that JFK stood for the "nation's ideals" and believed that the war went against "what our nation stands for" or "the American way" or "what the founders said." Any new movement will have to welcome those people, while developing an alternative, socialist, system of ideals. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. [*] By they way, it's interesting and revealing that even though US liberalism (including what's known as conservatism) is very critical of Rousseau (accused of advocating "totalitarian democracy") and the French Revolution (the original case of "state terror"), both liberals and conservatives in the US claim to live by a concept made famous by both Rousseau and the Jacobins, i.e., a civic religion. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
