V.J. Chalupa

On Post-Modern Politics

 PART D.

PRACTICAL CONCLUSIONS FROM POLITICAL THEORY

CASE STUDY: U.S.A.

CHAPTER 26

NASCENT GLOBAL CIVILIZATION 

The most important result of World War II might have been the decomposition of colonialism rather than the destruction of European dictatorships and of Nazi totalitarianism. At the price of protecting traditional social and political structures with their iniquities and inequalities and of preserving primitive economies at the price of abysmal poverty, colonialism prevented bloody national, civil and tribal wars (with its millions of killed and maimed and even more millions of refugees) and the disruption of the poor, but functional economic systems, with catastrophic results (bare survival replaced by mass famine). Its demise created an open field for the competition of the two ramifications of European culture: democracy and totalitarianism.

During this competition, European culture of the one or the other orientation destroyed native original or aboriginal cultures and civilizations of the freed colonial peoples and ended in that sense with a complete victory of European civilization whose Eastern type (communism) finally imploded and the Western stream, that of political democracy and economic free market system, prevailed. This left the United States as the only superpower (with Communist China the only power outside its orbit) capable of creating a new world order by way of international institutions.

Attitudes and ideas of rationalism and scientism which were at the roots of communism were influential also in the West and especially among professors and students of prestigious universities; from their midst came in the United States the opponents of anti-communism and proponents of moral equivalency, unilateral disarmament, nuclear freeze, friendly competition and peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union. They logically rejected also American patriotism and the important role of Christianity in the American political system. By using the principles of rationalism and scientism, brilliant thinkers among them adopted from Europe and/or created a consistent ideological movement which, by reasoning, trial and error discovered methods how to circumvent the democratic system favoring the less educated masses and how to construct the skeleton of a better, because decentralized, totalitarian system. They have step by step gained the upper hand in American politics, although not full control;  having come to a practical alliance with the managers of industry and finance, they gained sufficient leverage to dominate the formulation of world politics (see Chapter 24) and through a kind of feedback reinforced their hold over domestic policies in all Western countries.

As the power of the movement grows and the various facets of its plans of a new world order become more articulated and explicit, it also becomes more evident that the plans must fail:

-  The imposition of a universal culture including an artificial new morality is anti-evolutionary because it increasingly narrows the scope of variability, differentiation and selection; it is regressive. 

-  It entails the dissolution of natural biologically grounded entities, especially nations and families; thus it eliminates factors of integration, isolates individuals and causes general alienation.

-  It goes against the basic nature of life -- life's nature to grow; therefore it is more than unnatural, it is hostile to nature.

-  It must be imposed from above, therefore, by force, economic or military; its basis - Western nations - is already too small to fulfill such a role and it is shrinking faster than the shrinkage of the rest of the world.

While the progressing implementation of the elitist ideology cannot succeed, it can wreck (and already is wrecking) the existing civilization in the same way in which communist totalitarianism failed to impose its values, but left behind anomie, anarchy, criminality; the attempt to implement economic and biological materialism as basis of an international legal system must have even farther reaching consequences. Communism tried to implement a program within the limits of European culture; elitism attempts to implement a project outside of European culture. Communism caused its own collapse; elitism could create the collapse of the entire (and at present the only) civilization and everything a collapse of civilization involves: wars, famine, epidemics, technical and scientific retrogression. (The collapse of the civilization of antiquity gives an appropriate example.)

The movement derives its strength from tapping into the strength of the United States (which, at the same time, it undermines through its domestic policies); therefore, it is by interrupting or severing this flow of power that the descent towards the collapse of the western civilization can be blocked. (Some attempts were made under the presidency of Ronald Reagan. They were reversed under President Clinton, but are an indication that such policies are possible and attainable.)

The conditions of public debate and political decision making in the United States have changed under elitist influence so that its progress is assured; these changes would have to be removed or replaced if power is to be restored to democratic processes; from such rectification can originate an alternative program for domestic and international policies, democratic and civilized.