It appears as if reality may slowly be impinging upon the consciousness of David Brooks. In today’s column, he laments that the abstract world order he had hoped for seems to be slipping away, yielding to older and more organic forces.
We read:
“The ”˜category error’ of our experts is to tell us that our system is doing just fine and proceeding on its eternal course toward ever-greater progress and global goodness. This is whistling past the graveyard.
“The lesson-category within grand strategic history is that when an established international system enters its phase of deterioration, many leaders nonetheless respond with insouciance, obliviousness, and self-congratulation.
…The weakness with any democratic foreign policy is the problem of motivation. How do you get the electorate to support the constant burden of defending the liberal system?
It was barely possible when we were facing an obviously menacing foe like the Soviet Union. But it’s harder when the system is being gouged by a hundred sub-threshold threats. The Republicans seem to have given up global agreements that form the fabric of that system, while Democrats are slashing the defense budget that undergirds it.
Moreover, people will die for Mother Russia or Allah. But it is harder to get people to die for a set of pluralistic procedures to protect faraway places. It’s been pulling teeth to get people to accept commercial pain and impose sanctions.
All true. (And the weakness of democracy that Mr. Brooks notes above applies equally to domestic policy as well.) But you knew that already, readers.
Most significant of all is this:
The liberal pluralistic system is not a spontaneous natural thing.
Exactly right. This is why it can only be imposed externally, by an increasingly malevolent concentration of power, rather than arising organically at all levels of a harmonious and self-organizing hierarchy. This is why it is the natural enemy of genuine and meaningful liberty. And this is why we must resist it.