Kos, False Even to Form

Not only is this "Interview with the Devil" from Daily Kos a shameless ripoff of Jeff Goldstein in both style and substance, but it's an incompetent copy. With Saddam Hussein awaiting trial, Bin Laden hiding out, the Oil for Food scam and child pornography rings at the UN, the Myanmarr Junta, Kim Jung Il, and the headletting of Zarqawi and the Baathist thugs, this idiot (Markos Zuniga) can think of no one more evil than the man who conceived of and carried out the liberation of Iraq? That's not imagination, it's the shape of the Marxisant left as it circles the toilet bowl for one last time, heading for the septic tank of history.

And speaking of the Marxisant left, Bill Kristol's mommy just published a masterwork that clarifies how and why the radical heirs of the French Revolution have gone so consistently and spectacularly wrong, while the American Revolution's legacy has been so consistently and pragmatically right. Here's an excellent review.of The Roads to Modernity: "Which Enlightenment?", by Keith Windschuttle . My favorite three paragraphs:

In the American colonies, the first Great Awakening, the religious revival of the 1730s and early 1740s, paralleled the Methodist revival in Britain. The contrast with France was dramatic. In seeking respite from the religious passions of the Old World, Himmelfarb writes, the Americans did not, like the French, turn against religion itself. Instead, they incorporated religion into the mores of society. They "moralized" and "socialized" religion, turning its energies into movements for voluntary association, local organization and, ultimately, the politics of liberty.

In Britain and America, those who wrote about social reform and those in government who could do something about it were either the same people or else people cooperating closely with one another. In France, however, the philosophes were unconstrained by practical considerations about how their ideas might be translated into reality. They were all the more free to theorize and generalize precisely because they were less free to consult and advise.

This profoundly affected the political consequences of their ideas. The philosophes initially decided that enlightened despotism would be their political instrument of choice. "Enlightened despotism," Himmelfarb argues, "was an attempt to realize-to enthrone as it were-reason as embodied in the person of an enlightened monarch, a Frederick enlightened by Voltaire, a Catherine by Diderot." The failure of these attempts subsequently produced the theory of the "general will" that legitimized the terror of the French Revolution. The people, in whose name the revolution purportedly acted, was a singular abstraction, represented by an appropriately singular and abstract general will. "In effect, the theory of the general will was a surrogate for the enlightened despot. It had the same moral and political authority as the despot because it, too, was grounded in reason, a reason that was the source of all legitimate authority."

(Cross-posted by Demosophist to Demosophia and The Jawa Report)