Democracy's Trojan horse

National Interest, The, Summer, 2004 by John Fonte

There is nothing particularly "universal" about the agenda of much of what passes for the "international community." On the contrary, their agenda (on group rights, new definitions of "human rights", limiting democratic sovereignty, abolishing the death penalty, and so on) is, for the most part, simply the views of "progressive" transnational elites. These are very rarely the views of democratic majorities in democratic nations. Opinion polls suggest that the elites would have considerable difficulty in winning majority support for their position on the death penalty in countries such as Britain, Italy, France and Sweden.

This is not to imply that raw majoritarianism within a nation-state is the ultimate moral position. But it is to suggest that the interpretation of what constitutes universal values should not be decided solely by international elites. It is also to suggest that the definition of "human rights" is too important to be left to human rights activists, just as the interpretation of "international law" is too important to be left to international lawyers. Finally, democratic procedures within democratic nation-states are a more effective, more comprehensive, and above all, more just way of deciding what are universal human values.

The next great ideological struggle for democracy will be against post-democracy. But democrats must recognize that they will be engaged in a two-front war. For even as they struggle violently against the anti-democrats of militant Islam, they will, at the same time, also have to fight peacefully, but fight nonetheless (through intellectual arguments and politics at home and abroad) against the post-democrats of the West. This situation of a "two-front ideological conflict" is similar to the Cold War, in which serious anti-communists not only fought against the communists, but, at the same time, had to engage in an ideological struggle with powerful anti-anticommunist elements among Western progressives, who considered their main adversaries Western anti-communist democrats, not the communists them selves, whom the progressive Left chose mostly to ignore.

For better or worse, the conflict between democracy and post-democracy will be, in large part, decided by Americans. In Clausewitzian terms, American opinion (elite and popular), is the "center of gravity", the crucial point on which all hinges, in the battle between democrats and post-democrats. American foreign policy should stand forthrightly for the principle of democratic sovereignty within the liberal democratic nation-state. As Abraham Lincoln knew, democracy's destiny and America's destiny are intimately inter-twined. And we have been there before. As George Washington reminded us,

   the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and
   the destiny of the republican model of government
   are justly considered, perhaps, as deeply,
   as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to
   the hands of the American people.

(1) For an examination of transnational progressivism see Fonte, "Liberal Democracy vs. Transnational Progressivism: The Ideological War Within the West", Orbis (Summer 2002), pp. 449-67.